Zeitgeist: a moneyless society with alienation
Marx’s insight in Capital, Volume 1, remains startling in its simplicity. He writes about how spiders spin webs out of instinct, and bees also create architecture in their hives from instinct. He writes about how humans must first imagine what they are to do before making something a reality: the worst architect surpasses the most industrious bee because humans first construct in imagination what they later build in reality. This capacity for conscious, creative design – the ability to envision and reshape our world – defines our species-being. Yet under capitalism, this distinctively human power becomes alien to most humans. Workers execute plans conceived by others, their labour becomes separate from their creativity.
The resulting tragedy is the systematic suppression of human creative potential. Under capitalist production, the worker ‘does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). The creative architecture of society – what we produce, how we organise our collective life, toward what ends we direct our energies – becomes the exclusive province of capital accumulation. Profit, not human flourishing, determines the shape of our world.
Marx, of course, wrote about the need for the working class to emancipate itself from the capitalist mode of production by creating a borderless world where money and governments have been abolished. He was very clear about socialism being a moneyless and stateless society: ‘In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated’ (Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 18, Section II), and ‘But the whole programme, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather, it is a compromise between these two kinds of beliefs in miracles, both equally remote from socialism’ (Critique of the Gotha Program, Section IV). There is also the famous building block for socialist society, ‘From each according to ability; to each according to need.’ This highlights that humans are individuals with unique gifts and talents.
One might expect movements explicitly rejecting capitalism to restore this creative capacity to humanity at large. Yet the Zeitgeist Movement, despite its anti-capitalist rhetoric and vision of a moneyless society, proposed to reproduce the same alienation under different management.
The Zeitgeist Movement proposed a ‘Resource-Based Economy’ where scientific experts and technocrats manage society through rational calculation and technological optimisation. Computers would track resources, engineers would design production systems, scientists would determine social organisation according to ‘the scientific method.’ Money would disappear, but so would democratic participation in the creative decisions that shape collective life.
The structure of alienation remains intact, merely changing personnel.
Under capitalism, creative control flows to those who own capital, justified by property rights. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of profit maximisation. Workers execute designs conceived by others in corporate boardrooms and management consultancies.
Under Zeitgeist’s technocracy, creative control flows to those who possess technical expertise, justified by scientific knowledge. Decisions about production, distribution, and social organisation follow the logic of efficiency and resource optimisation. The majority execute designs conceived by others in technical committees and research centres.
In both systems, ordinary people remain alienated from their natural creative capacity. The creative/conceptual moment – that distinctively human capacity to imagine before building – stays concentrated in an elite class. Whether that elite derives authority from property ownership or technical credentials changes the justification, not the fundamental separation of mental from manual labour, of conception from execution.
Marx himself advocated something fundamentally different: democratic planning, not technocratic planning. In his vision, the associated producers would ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ (Capital, Volume 3, Ch 48). Note the emphasis: ‘collective control’ by the producers themselves, not management by experts on their behalf.
This requires, as Marx understood, abolishing the division between mental and manual labour itself. Not placing mental labour in charge of manual labour, but reuniting conception with execution in the lives of actual people. Education, rotation of tasks, democratic control over technology, genuine participation in social decision-making – these begin to restore human creative capacity.
The Zeitgeist Movement’s failure lay not in its rejection of money, but in its preservation of hierarchy. It promised liberation while maintaining the structure that produces alienation. A moneyless society where technocrats design your life remains a society where you are separated from your creative essence, where the distinctively human capacity to imagine and build your world belongs to someone else.
So the choice between the two moneyless systems lies in what kind of humans we want to be: do we each want to engage in the creative architecture of building our society, or do we just want passively to allow our mental and physical energies to be directed by others?
DAN MULLEN