Dollars, or pounds sterling, or other units of money follow the same
rules: the strength and in fact the source of power of modern capitalism,
is found in just this difference in dimensions—in the difference between
what is given and what is taken, in the difference between what is earned
and what is “made.” The problem of dimensions is, therefore, a key which
unlocks the secrets of the power of capitalism and opens the door to a new
civilization where the understanding of dimensions will establish order
out of the chaos.
We have seen that kinetic and potential use-values, produced mainly by the
dead, are bound up in wealth, which is measured and symbolized by money.
This being true, it is obvious that money is a measure and symbol of
power, of work done, of bound-up time.
The _space_-binding _animal_ standard of miscivilization has brought us to
an impasse—a blind alley—for the simple physical reason that there is no
more space to “bind.” Practically all the habitable lands, and practically
all the natural resources, are already divided among private legalistic
owners. What hope is there for the ever increasing population?
But we have these 1,600,000,000 living men; 10,000,000,000 living
man-powers of the dead; and 1,600,000,000 sun man-powers: that is indeed a
tremendous power to PRODUCE WEALTH FOR ALL, IF WISELY DIRECTED, but to-day
it is ignorantly and shamefully misdirected, because human beings are not
treated in accordance with their nature as the time-binding class of life.
Much more is to be gained in exploiting nature aimfully, all the time,
with a full mobilization of our living, dead, and sun-powers, than by
exploiting man all the time and nature occasionally. Selfishness and
ignorance—is it these that prevent full mobilization of the producing
powers of the world?
Such as contribute most to human progress and human enlightenment—men like
Gutenberg, Copernicus, Newton, Leibnitz, Watts, Franklin, Mendeleieff,
Pasteur, Sklodowska-Curie, Edison, Steinmetz, Loeb, Dewey, Keyser,
Whitehead, Russell, Poincaré, William Benjamin Smith, Gibbs, Einstein, and
many others—consume no more bread than the simplest of their fellow
mortals. Indeed such men are often in want. How many a genius has perished
inarticulate because unable to stand the strain of social conditions where
animal standards prevail and “survival of the fittest” means, not survival
of the “fittest in time-binding capacity,” but survival of the strongest
in ruthlessness and guile—in space-binding competition!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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