In my Religious Communication course last semester, we had a discussion of economics. I won’t get into the details, but what matters now is my very basic definition of “capitalism”, which the class ended up adopting for most of our discussion:
a system that abstracts value into currency to simplify exchange of goods and services
While I had an inexpressible amount of fun in that discussion shattering the worldviews of middle-class Texans by persuading them that billionaires don’t actually deserve their wealth, that’s not what I want to focus on today.
I want to focus on how I defined currency: as an abstraction of value.
Currency represents the level at which people value their time and belongings. In theory. In reality, it’s merely an abstraction of that value, meaning a simplified representation to serve the purposes of the overall capitalist mechanism.
Abstractions don’t always accurately represent their origins. Currency, in particular, does not always reward the true rigor of labor, and it values efficiency over people.
I’ve been thinking about this again in the context of the way contemporary LLMs have commoditized writing and words. As someone who considers the agglomeration of words my craft, this is understandably a concern of mine.
I’ve read before that in a post-scarcity world, one where a particular craft has been automated, artisanship—intentional, human labor practicing a craft as an art—becomes immensely valuable.
That used to comfort me.
Of course, it’s true; human-crafted objects are far more valuable than mass produced ones, and it’s the same with, say, information-based artifacts like stories (now automated via “AI”). But currency is only an abstraction of value.
In terms of that abstraction, the vast majority of people can’t afford to pay people the amount they value their work at. Even worse, the few who can afford that level of value are the 1%, the billionaires—and they don’t value human labor.
The capitalist system we live in does not allow us to fully express the value we hold for things, as any currency we dedicate to that task is currency we can’t spend on the essentials we need to live.
Our world values thrift and a willingness to make decisions for purely currency-driven reasons, rewarding whatever is the cheapest and with the least overhead. In practical terms, that works out to rewarding companies that pay the least to the people who work for them.
People have been trained to think of currency this way because we see currency exchange as primarily taking place between us and faceless corporations. No one cares if a faceless corporation makes less money because we decided to purchase from a competitor. Which is good; we shouldn’t be caring about corporations.
But we should be caring about people. They deserve our expressions of value. Or, if necessary, they deserve the abstraction of value that we label “currency”.
I don’t have a call to action today, because I don’t really know what action to take to “solve” this issue. But I do strongly believe in the power of shifting the mindset of a people, as collective action is the medium of change for systemic issues. So, start thinking about the currency you spend in these terms. Talk about it in these terms.
Your money is an abstraction of the value you have for your time and belongings. How are you spending that finite amount of value you can express?
