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I’ve said for a long time that we have these figments of our imaginations particularly countries, borders, time and money. Humans have made all of these up and it is our world order today. Go out to tribes in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea who are untouched by such modern life, and these things don’t exist. Travel across China and it is all one timezone, even though neighbouring Russia has eleven! Walk across the border of China and Afghanistan and set your clock back four hours but, then, you have to ask yourself why those borders exist? If you look at the history of Europe, most of our countries have existed or disintegrated every century.
Countries, borders and time only exist because we made them up. The same is true with money. If the Polish joined the Eurozone tomorrow, what would a zloty be worth, and vice versa. And yet we are pledged to the monetary system as humans, because threat separates the weak from the strong, the powerful from the powerless and the leaders from the 99%.
Money is at the heart of progress, but also at the heart of subjugation. This is something that a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, generally known as Lenin, could see during the build-up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
In a paper unearthed by Michael White and Kurt Schuler for a 2009 paper in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, they found this quote from the revolutionary leader:
Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. There is no justification for the existence of money in the Bolshevik state, where the necessities of life shall be paid for by work alone.
Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation, for however ruthlessly such measures may be applied, astute speculators and obstinate survivors of the capitalist classes will always manage to evade them and continue to corrupt the life of the community. The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort.
Already even a hundred-rouble note is almost valueless in Russia. Soon even the simplest peasant will realize that it is only a scrap of paper, not worth more than the rags from which it is manufactured. Men will cease to covet and hoard it so soon as they discover it will not buy anything, and the great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.
This is the real reason why our presses are printing rouble bills day and night, without rest.
This is what Lenin called the Great Illusion of Money and yes, it is an illusion. Vladimir Lenin's idea of “the great illusion of the value and power of money” was a way to justify the Bolsheviks’ printing of large amounts of money to establish a socialist state. He believed that the capitalist state was based on the idea that money had value and power, and that the best way to destroy it was to debauch the currency. He thought that people would stop coveting money if they realised it couldn't buy anything.
Then add to this government, which he calls a “constitutional illusion”. Lenin’s work of July 1917 clearly believes that a government, a country and a border, along with everything that goes with it (money), is just a “constitutional illusion”.
Constitutional illusions are what we call a political error when people believe in the existence of a normal, juridical, orderly and legalised—in short, “constitutional”—system, although it does not really exist.
No wonder America ended up in a Cold War with Russia in the 1960s.