On wealth: towards a manifesto

Following Bataille in The Accursed Share, wealth is excess energy. We use this energy towards the projects of our lives, in self-serving ways if we are able, in service of another when we are not (as is often the case). At times we may simply squander our energies - occasionally retaining their effects as good memories for our later enjoyment. As individuals especially we love to do so when we are young - it is then easy to thrive on the sense of security provided by the relative privileges of our upbringing and familial environments, and the raw excitement that youth pumps through our veins (obviously, I can't speak for everyone). Creating good memories is often the wisdom given to the young these days, and not without reason (interestingly project Good Memories is often more successful when slightly unplanned or at least unexpected, because the laws of memory can only relegate them outside the confines of routine when they do not entirely follow from the designs of routine, which is easiest in youth because we are not so set in our ways then).

My proposition speaks differently to those of different means and connection and ability - and I speak of those and for those within the capitalist framework - but the end goal (but more so because it is an end means) is the same: wealth. If the imagination is able to see in wealth an emergent energy that continues and propagates without fail, the ideal has been glimpsed. Finance is but one of its possible currencies.

The ideal does not lie, it seduces. For those already within its framework the question up to now has been whether to follow it and burn in its fire, or resist it by starting a political movement or living a bohemian lifestyle in search of a separate secular meaning. Even the artist must make this choice, but it is exactly the artist who is the most vulnerable as he feebly resists its domination to isolate himself without means and without recourse. Sooner or later he perishes - occasionally his works outlive him beyond its purely market value. Then its currency will have become more than a monetary currency, which is our true aim.

Wealth within the capitalist framework is necessarily financial, at least inasmuch as we can understand it on paper without speculating on the complex workings of market forces. Power facilitates its distribution, either through direct means or indirectly as attraction for consumption. Even the most powerful presidents are like puppets in its might, legislation and democracy has seen to that. Money, in the capitalist reality, rules as God, and to blaspheme against Him or His administrators has its penalties. There are other powers - often in some form of alliance with Him, although it seldom turns out to be just a temporary coalition - political powers, heads of corporations, heads of institutions, movie stars and pop stars, we even have the artist near the bottom of the scale, poor sod.

Or is he really so poor, so poor in power? In every age it is the artists and intellectuals that have outlined the next set of ideas that the new majority rule have taken as their own. Clever creative folk whose ideas were almost without fail more sophisticated than that of their executors, among them the new set of political power rangers. Not that the executors were not self-serving in the end - but perhaps that is simply to be expected. Certainly it is better that we do not count on anything more.

At this stage, lest I overshoot my aim, it is possible to state the possibility that capitalism within a developed democratic and consumerist society allows the aspiring individual or human aggregate: the power to achieve their role.

Here the invention of wilfully opposed arguments are easy to level at me: what if the very mechanisms that make that achievement possible are at stake, are what is to be resisted? Thankfully that merely serves to make my point even clearer: like the Tai Chi practitioner, who uses the energy of his opponent to defeat him, the conscientious struggler soon realises that his own powers will not be enough to attain his goal. ("Take on the system by myself? Bah!") I have but to remind the reader of all the Bohemian back-to-nature failures, who ended up spending more time tending to their basic needs than to their thinking and communication of ideas. That won't do. What an affluent society provides to the aspiring individual or human aggregate is precisely the means to fulfill their ideals without risking some form of development through hardship without end, and sometimes without purpose.

It is not the integrity of a bohemian ideal that is being questioned, but the means to attain it. An idea is not a stagnant entity - it grows , it must grow, it must be fed. It lives like any organism and for that it needs energy - the very energy that is the stuff of wealth in general, and which in the capitalist network stands directly or indirectly (if the passage can be blocked) connected to Money. To each his or her due - but especially to the self, for the self must create change and be strong to bring it about creatively. The bohemian who lives in nature and succeeds is a beautiful creature, the most beautiful. But for the rest of us let's realise that a strong foundation is required before we are likely to go anywhere. Finding independent means to make ourselves self-sufficient and healthy, to acquire the nourishment to feed our intellects, this is statistically a stronger bet for the future than a deprivation (even if it is in honour of our best ideas), however endearing such lived sentiments may seem.