On Charity

I've written a few posts on charity over the years. Here in 2013. Once more in 2013. Here in 2009. Since I began burning money I've always felt - and I think 'felt' is the best word to use here - that burning money is the ultimate 'moral' action that can be undertaken with money.

My view on charity could be summarized by saying that I think we're guilty of seeing charity as an end, rather than a means. For individuals, it can too easily become a neurotic ritual of giving which acts as a sticking plaster on an unjust world. And, in the act of giving, with the £3 direct debits leaving our bank accounts each month, our own role in the creation of those injustices is repressed in our minds. Charity provides its giver with temporary 'bought' absolution that makes the world a little blurry, softer and fuzzy round the edges.

I'm not well versed in the ethics and philosophy of charity. Theories of money are my thing intellectually, so while charity certainly sits on the border of that subject, I've not studied it in any real depth. I have noticed a few new books broaching the subjects of charity and philanthropy, though.

Against Charity by Julie Wark and Daniel Raventos, 2018
Linsey McGoey No Such Thing as a Free Gift, 2016
Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich, 2018
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, 2018
and also this Jacobin piece by Mathew Snow
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People often use 'charity' in a weaponized form to criticize money burning; WHY DIDN'T YOU GIVE IT TO CHARITY? is a very common response. So when I hear the word 'charity' or friends tell me they're doing this or that 'for charity', I get a bit knotted inside. The abundance of charity ads on the television this xmas has, more than once, resulted in me shouting abuse at the screen. One that's had more than its fair share is the Salvation Army advert. To be fair though, I've had 'problems' with charity for a much longer time than I've been burning money.

The first time I discussed my feelings about charity with a stranger was in the heart of the neo-liberal beast - The Institute of Economic Affairs. This was way back in 1999? Somewhere around there. The IEA is very cult-like and they lure students in from the LSE with offers of free biscuits and ideology. The  libertarian view on charity is really that it is a 'less moral' way of exchanging than the Holy Free Market - this goes beyond ideas of efficient outcomes and into the idea that free markets allow a kind of equality in exchange that charity doesn't. There's something to that argument that'll I'll come back to in a minute. [At the same conference, though, an argument was put forward that Racial Discrimination should be allowed under law - gated communities should be able to specify residents by race - because the market would sort it. To be fair, I wasn't the only one that found this idea horrific.]
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There is an obvious complaint against charities themselves - especially the larger ones - that they are basically corrupt and tend primarily to serve the interests of those who work for them. Such a complaint though, can of course be leveled against any institution. But with charities the degree of hypocrisy - the distance between aim and action - is greater. When a corporation or bank claims that it exists to serve the needs of it customers - when in fact we all know that it actually exists to create profits for its shareholders - that's one thing. But when a Charity claims it exists to help the poor or do some social good - and its behavior proves otherwise - it causes us to lose some of the hope we have for humanity, itself.

There is also the problem of 'method'. Some charities practice marketing, public relations, and sales techniques which would put the most aggressive MLM/Ponzi scheme to shame. This is justified of course by reference to 'goals'. It's not an easy thing to pin-point, but there does seem to be a tipping point between drawing attention to someone's plight, and using their misery as a marketing tool. The crossing of that line is often the cause of my TV-directed outbursts.

But there are deeper problems with Charity - and, when I've thought about charity in relation to my studies on money, this is generally where I focus my attention.

The most important thing to point out is that there is a symbiotic relationship between charity and capitalism, itself. This is not really as simple as saying that capitalism creates the need for charity. The relationship between the two inheres deeply within our individual and collective psyches and goes way back to the ancient debt jubilees which institutionalized charity grew from and replaced.

The relation to the debt-jubilees of ancient kings gives us some clues as to our own thoughts and feelings around charity. If the ancient-you saw debt forgiveness as a divine gift from a God-like ruler then ancient-you would be likely to see that debt-forgiveness as an unequivocal moral good.

Charity operates with a similar set of dynamics. We regard the charitable act as the action by which we cure an ill. A charitable donation is imbued with a specificity of purpose to do good - but good can be defined in many ways and so cover a multitude of sins!

But this is where our modern experience and understanding of 'debt forgiveness' can help reveal something important. The 'debt-forgiveness' gifted after the last financial crash (another one will come sooner or later and the response will be the same) was of course offered to the banks themselves and it was 'us' - through our governments - who assumed the role of God-like ruler. So as the God-like ruler we all know why this 'debt-forgiveness' was really offered. Not because we felt the banks deserved it but rather to ensure that the whole system - and the value of currency itself - didn't collapse. The ancient kings were perhaps not offering divine gifts but rather pragmatic solutions in line with their best interests - debt jubilees were a very good way of fending off revolutions from the populous (debtors), and the threat of them were a good way of keeping local chieftains (creditors) in check.

Modern day 'debt-forgiveness' is a rebirth of capitalism through collective sacrifice. As such, depending on your perspective (whether you have libertarian or socialist leanings) that maybe perceived as a moral good, or it maybe perceived as a moral bad. It is important then that we take a lesson from debt-jubilees as the mother of charity. We must question the morally-laden idea that charity is a cure for ills or an action for the good. If we don't, then we risk just blindly reproducing the same cycles of ill-cure, bad-good, poor-rich.

I fear that such arguments might fail to persuade anyone who feels that their charitable giving represents a moral form of spending. The notion that 'charity' exists in a separate 'sphere' to 'the market' inheres deeply within us. It's unlikely that rationality will change that.

However, when one is on the receiving end of charitable giving a whole new world of experience is available. Who can't empathize or understand the emotions involved in and evoked by the simple phrase 'I DON'T WANT YOUR CHARITY'. As givers we may regard this statement as an expression of ingratitude. But equally, as takers we might declare it as a heartfelt statement of sovereignty. It is a way of rejecting not only the gift of charity but the entire system which placed the taker in need in the first place, and it also rejects and highlights pity as affective response that has no place in relations between human beings who are of fundamentally equal value. It is here where those arguments of the free-marketeers about free-agency in exchange that I mentioned earlier, carry most weight [well, if you ignore the power imbalances inherent to systems of currency and government.]

Charity then is not a simple moral good. It's a method of redistribution and a way of organizing material relations which is morally-complex and can have contradictory outcomes. When we say 'It's all for charity' we deny the deep ambivalence that inheres within charitable acts.

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So, then. Let's cut to the Ritual Mass Burn on the 3rd November 2018. In my pre-ritual talk I burned an artwork by one of the world's leading currency-collage artists Mark Wagner. It was a limited edition 'Lucky' dollar bill which Mark sells for $100. These weren't the only pieces Mark contributed. The others I offered up for a 'charity' auction (of sorts) - I said that if someone wanted to buy them, then I would find an appropriate 'cause' and donate any funds raised to it.

Given my thoughts on Charity, why did I do this?

The honest answer is, I'm not sure. The only thing I can say with certainty is that within the Ritual environment my actions and the events that take place are not governed by rationality. Like the Burning Ritual itself, I've found the best thing to do, is to try and get out of the way and let it evolve according to its own needs.

To be precise, here (because this really matters to me) the burning of the 'Lucky' dollar and the offering up of the other pieces for 'charity' was done in my pre-ritual talk - so on the cusp of Ritual itself. My talk is spontaneous - at least, this is what I try to achieve. I find myself involved in mental games in the weeks preceding the Ritual Mass Burn trying to stop myself thinking about what I'm going to say and do. I fail, of course. But I do try. What really helps, when thoughts arise, is not to allow them to form into words. So, I'm strict on not allowing myself to imagine speaking to the Ritual participants. Don't expect this to make any sense rationally. It does however make perfect sense magically. And I think Georges Bataille would approve. The moment of the Ritual is sovereign therefore subordinating it to 'planning' diminishes it.

My idea to introduce a charitable element quite near to the heart of the Ritual was not something I considered very deeply beforehand, then. Thoughts about it had tried to push through to my consciousness and I had mentioned it to Bob Osborne as something that might happen. Bob (a.k.a Rebel Not Taken) was interested in the pieces Mark Wagner had kindly donated for his Cash is King project. But nothing certain was arranged or worked out.

However, when I stood in the middle of the Ritual Space I had a vision of concentric circles. I alluded to the 'spheres' of 'charity' and 'market' earlier in this piece. This is actually an idea from economic anthropology where they talk about 'spheres of exchange'. But from my vantage point on the night I saw it differently. And despite all that I've said about the moral complexity of charitable giving above, I had the sense that in my experience, as well as everyone else's, there is something morally distinct and - well to put it bluntly - better in a moral sense about the giving of a charitable gift, above and beyond the selling of a product or service. The key thing though, is to understand that charity IS NOT the ultimate moral action in our economic lives and material relations.

Standing in the ritual space with my Altar central to proceedings the moral order was clear. Out in the foyer capitalism was king. The bar was taking the money that helped pay the theatre staff, and the profits from the merchandise (a very fine selection I must say!) were contributing to the event itself. But the purpose of those external activities - the exchanges made - were governed by immediate self-interest and needs were being met through market exchange. Within the theatre space itself, but outside the actual Ritual, was charity - something had been gifted to us which I would sell to the highest bidder not for my immediate self-interest but in order to gift to someone else in need. And then AT THE VERY CENTRE was the apotheosis of the moral order, the ubersphere of exchange, the molten middle where destruction and creation coalesce. Burning money in ritual manifests an experience of the moral extremes of exchange simultaneously. The money burned is our loss and our gain, and the loss of others and their gain - and so pain and pleasure coexist in the moment of immolation.

"At the centre of creation is not purity, but purification."

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This then, is how a charitable element arose within the Ritual Mass Burn - or at least at some point between the Service and the Ritual, itself.

I feel good about it. I think it'd be easy for me to become defensive - that whole 'YOU SHOULDA GIVEN IT TO CHARITY' thing is a just constant refrain whenever I step outside into the general populous of 'utility-slaves'. It's part of the reason for the radical approach I take with Burning Issue. There has to come a point where you disregard that sort of criticism and make your own case in a positive way. I think if the magazine had tried to address those issues of charity - rather than just venerate the act of burning - it would have been weaker both as an invocation and as an artwork in its own right.

But the Ritual Mass Burn is an inclusive event and so it seems right that not only is capitalism represented in the merchandise and other activity that surrounds it (and without which it could not function) but also charity is represented, too. But - and this is key - is it clearly subordinated to act of burning money in ritual.

I wrote the following tagline for the Church of the Cosmic Burn's new online store:

Online Store Rule #1: Never spend that which you would otherwise Burn; to sacrifice is the supreme action.

I guess the addition here should be:
Never give to charity that which you would otherwise burn.

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The end result is then that I sold the remaining art pieces for £100 (thank you Bob!). On the night of the burn we also gave away as a promotion some Mark Wagner's 'Fund Education' posters that I'd had printed up. Mark has these available on his site as a free download. I still have a few left - if you want one let me know.

Also the Cockpit Theatre is part of Westminster College. I had no real idea of what charitable cause I should donate the money too. I really didn't want to give it to big one. So I hunted around and I found this - https://www.gofundme.com/ihelpedstopthegreatschoolsrobbery. It seems very appropriate. By the time you read this post they'll have the £100 that was raised at the Ritual Mass Burn for charity.

If you want to know other important figure: £675 was recorded as being burned by 46 burners. It was probably more than that as some people don't record their sacrifice.

Now go buy something from https://churchofthecosmicburn.org/

Money Wisdom #435

Sade has the distinction of being the first modern thinker to recognize the intimate relationship between the phantasm and commercial exchange, and thus the role of currency as a sign of the incalculable value of the phantasm. Indeed, money is an integral part of the representative mode of perversion. Because the perverse phantasm is fundamentally unintelligible and non-exchangeable, only currency is sufficiently abstract to constitute its universally intelligible equivalent. But here we must distinguish in Sade between, on the one hand, the phantasmal function of money, namely the act of buying or of being sold oneself, insofar as it is only the external expression of perversity, or a means of bringing different partners together; and, on the other, its function in mediating between the closed world of abnormalities and the world of institutional norms.

Pierre Klossowski Sade and Fourier

in Living Currency (2017) p.89 

Money Wisdom #434

What does not exist... ...is expressed positively by money not spent and thus not given to what exists.

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p.69

Money Wisdom #433

Such is the economy of the soul elaborated through Klossowski's work: first, there are impulses, with their rises and falls in intensity, their elations and depressions, which have no meaning or goal in themselves; second, these impulses give rise to phantasms, which constitute the incommunicable depth and singularity of the individual soul; third, under the obsessive constraint of the phantasm, simulacra are produced, which are the reproduction or repetition of the phantasm through the exaggeration of stereotypes. Impulses, phantasms, simulacra-stereotypes: a threefold circuit.

Daniel W Smith Introduction to

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p. 10

Money Wisdom #432

But a phantasm, for its part, needs to use something: its elaboration is bound up with the use of pleasure or suffering. The fact that the phantasm uses up the individual is a sign of the constraint that comes from the phantasm's own unity. The elaboration of the phantasm gives way to a state of continuous compensation and hence to exchanges. But for an exchange to take place, there must be an equivalent, that is, the fabricated object must be worth something else, both in the sphere of the phantasm, elaborated at the expense of individual unity and in the external sphere, at the level of the individual itself.

Pierre Klossowski Living Currency (1970 trans 2017) p.61

Money Wisdom #431

"The very term 'religion' is often said to be derived form the Latin religare meaning 'to bind, to tie', that is, the god is bound to his or her function, and the celebrant is bound to the god and its cult..."

Daniel W Smith Introduction 

to Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski (1970 trans 2017) p.15

Money Wisdom #430

"Yet what replaced the idols were still a simulacra: rather than statues with eyes and ears, the gods became concepts or 'idealities' marked by lists of various attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, goodness). The 'problem of evil' became a problem of predication: how can the attributes 'all-powerful' and 'all-good' be simultaneously ascribed to the creator of an evil world? Yet sculpting a material statue and creating an ideal concept are both acts of fabrication. Even the notion that the gods were not created is itself a simulacrum that has been created by us, just as Plato created the concept of the Idea as a form anterior to all creation. The object that one fabricates and the idea that one believes are both simulacra, produced from obsessive phantasms. Yet there is obviously a difference between a material statue and an ideal concept: it was in one and the same movement that the gods were made transcendent to the world and the proposition (or concept) was separated from the world in order to denote or 'correspond' to everything in it (the relation of 'truth'), to the point where 'God' and 'Truth' were made into identical idealities."

Daniel W Smith Introduction 

to Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski (1970 trans 2017) p.12

Speculate to Invocate

THE TOP-UP CROWDFUND IS LIVE!

Since running the world’s most successful crowdfund for a money burning magazine, Burning Issue has undergone a period of self-reflection. The Editorial board was challenged by a radical faction of money burners, the self-styled Burner’s Revolutionary Congress (BRC). They demanded that the magazine reaffirm its commitment to the theology of Total Burn. Burning Issue unequivocally declares Total Burn to be the founding principle of its mission statement. The BRC also sought assurances that Burning Issue would continue to focus exclusively on its core audience and ensure that money burning propaganda protocols around public discourse are enforced at all times. Burning Issue confirms that we talk only to money burners (and other destroyers of currency) and that public engagement is limited to ‘approved’ propaganda only. Furthermore, Burning Issue wishes to make it clear that we respect and recognize the feelings of the money burning community we serve. Henceforth we will represent money burning and speak to our community with a new, more strident voice.

All of this happened, of course, entirely in my imagination. This might tempt you to believe its not ‘real’. I would caution against that. Like money itself, money burning connects our minds to material reality in a mysterious way. Back in 2016, I imagined there was a ‘community’ of money burners in need of a magazine. There wasn’t. For eight of my eleven years burning money, I knew of only three other money burners - and two of them were in the KLF. But I produced the first edition of Burning Issue, anyway. Now, eighteen months later, we’re creating the SUPER DELUXE version of the first edition and we have about fifty people contributing to the magazine. Counting those who’ve attended the Ritual Mass Burns aswell, the community of money burners now stands at around 230 people. Or, ten times 23 people as the BRC would prefer us to say.

But remarkable and welcome as this growth is to me, in hard-nosed commercial logic even 230 people is far too small an audience to warrant producing a glossy 128-page print magazine. That sort of audience justifies a social media page at best, not what we’re creating.

So why create it, then? Why spend two years of my life working on it?

The answer lies within the imaginary mission statement. Burning Issue is a ‘real’ magical action. It is an invocation to Total Burn; the Eschaton awaiting immanentization. Total Burn is that end-of-time state when the ritual sacrifice of currency destruction is to humankind, as water to a fish.

[The urge to make sacrifice pervades humankind. Making ritualized sacrifice of what is most intimately ours, and of greatest value to us, fulfills this silent desire. Money burning is a ‘no harm’ sacrifice. It mitigates both violent expressions of the sacrificial urge and violence itself. We dismiss ritual sacrifice as pertaining to only ‘primitive’ cultures at our peril. Money burning allows the power and mystery of ritual sacrifice to inform our C21st lives.]

At times I forget all this. There are artistic and commercial aspects to the project and it’s easy to allow oneself to get wrapped up in them. But underneath it all, prior to it even being a ‘project’, the magazine was something I created for magical purposes. This magic must always be the guiding principle.

THE TOP-UP CROWDFUND IS LIVE!

The SUPER DELUXE edition is both the final iteration of the first edition and its culmination in terms of the magazine’s aesthetic. I hope it will be the magazine that’s been in my head for two years. The idea has always been to make it to look like the product of a commercial world, like Condé Nast created it as a means to extract profit from money burning. With the talent of the fifty contributors, we’re finally in a position to make a magazine that is a perfect imitation of those produced by major publishers. But it will be antimatter disguised as matter.

According to reason the magazine should not exist. It does not compute within logic of capital. It is an impossibility. And yet here we stand on the cusp of it. Burning Issue’s digital presence and the two earlier editions are merely incursions. The SUPER DELUXE edition is an invasion. A total assault on reality. It appears as an object born of the commercial world and yet it’s devoted to the destruction of what is held most sacred by that world. Assimilating the impossible requires us to open our third eye. The reader must leave the cocoon of capitalism, of ‘economic’ thinking, of cause and effect, of IF/THEN rationality and enter the world of sacrifice and ritual. In short, like money burning itself, Burning Issue reimagines and re-configures our understanding of and relationship to money; the central totem upon which the world turns.

What I’d like you to do is help me bring two thousand copies of the SUPER DELUXE edition from imagination to reality.

In the first crowdfund we did things the ‘correct’ way. We sorted out some cool perks. We did professional videos. We did a preview showcasing a few of the brilliant articles. We wanted to raise £5K. We made £400. So even though it was the world’s most successful crowdfund for a money burning magazine, there was still a bit of a shortfall.

We’re now running a ‘top up’ crowdfund for that £4600. But we’re not going to do it the ‘correct’ way. Instead, we’re going full magic. And we want you to be a participant in this magical action. We want you to ‘speculate to invocate’.

THE TOP-UP CROWDFUND IS LIVE!

Here’s the idea.

‘Magically speaking’ the first crowdfund took the wrong approach. We appealed to your good side. We tried to convince you that what we were doing was worthy of your support. The takeover by the BRC reminded us that Burning Issue shouldn’t worry about any of that. It should just offer money burners (and other destroyers of currency) a cracking good deal. The top-up crowdfund should appeal to the darkness in you - the self-interested, greedy and acquisitive aspect of your being. By tapping into that side of ourselves we expand the illogic of the magazine and so make the invocation more powerful. The light it brings will be brighter because it comes from darkness.

Our ‘top up’ crowdfund then is offering five copies of the magazine for £23 plus a small contribution to postage. We’ll need to pre-sell 200 of these lots of five (i.e. one thousand magazines) in order to fund production.

Five mags for £23.

Each magazine will contain an artwork that will identify it as being from the original production run of 2000. So, in the unlikely event we do produce more, your magazines will have ‘first edition’ status. ‘Speculate to invocate’ and your five magazines will cost you less than a fiver each. The cover price of the magazine will be £12. So you can immediately rejoice. On purchasing just one lot of five, you will instantly book a profit of £37. And that’s before the price skyrockets. How much will the original SUPER DELUXE edition of world’s first magazine for money burners be worth in five years? Or in 23 years? The last five of the initial 28-page iteration from July 2016 sold on Ebay for £20 each.

The ‘speculate to invocate’ offer is strictly limited to the first 1000 magazines. Once the 200 lots are sold this offer will end. And of course, YOU MUST BE A MONEY BURNER* (OR OTHER DESTROYER OF CURRENCY) to take advantage of this offer. If we fail sell the entire 200 lots, all contributions will be returned.

PLEASE NOTE: BY PRE-ORDERING THE MAGAZINE YOU AUTOMATICALLY DECLARE YOURSELF TO BE A MONEY BURNER* (OR OTHER DESTROYER OF CURRENCY)

THE TOP-UP CROWDFUND IS LIVE!

* in an atemporal sense.