Alex Kovacs: The Currency of Paper

The consequence of a society that places money at its centre is that forms of mental and physical slavery come to dominate human life.

The vast majority of ways in which money circulates have enormously destructive consequences. Human relationships inevitably suffer as a result, becoming insipid, superficial, mechanical reductions of what is possible. Tenderness is rarely achieved on the scale it could be because individuals are trapped within the structures of employment. In the current system most human beings have little knoledge of the full spectrum of the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that the species is capable of achieving.

Any free thinking individual must do everything within their power to escape the obscene working conditions that prevail in the free-market system. This is equivalent to, and no less imperative than, for example, fleeing your country because it has descended into war.

When money is the sole objective of an action, a certain degree of idiocy is inevitable.

The horror of menial work as currently practised should not be underestimated. To spend forty hours a week or more engaged in unceasing cycles of senseless repetition, as do most human beings, is a destructive form of existence for anyone to have to endure.


... bitter flavours gathered in the back of the mouth... the constricting and malevolent influence of a society that is in essence corrupt... the ever-present likelihood of wodespread annihilation... the talk of the town that amounts to so very little... falling into a permanent state of degradation... the fashioning of a fastidious brutality... the achievement of efficiency at any price...