The dollar bill is the most successful piece of propaganda ever printed. It says In God We Trust across the top and the trust is not in God. The trust is in the system that prints the bill and the army that enforces the system and the banks that circulate the bill and the debt that makes you need the bill in the first place. The dollar is a piece of paper that means something because enough people with enough guns agree that it means something. Take away the agreement and you are holding a piece of paper with a dead president on it.

Richard Nixon killed the gold standard on August fifteenth nineteen seventy-one. Before that day every dollar was backed by gold sitting in a vault in Fort Knox. After that day the dollar was backed by nothing but the full faith and credit of the United States government. Full faith and credit. That is a fancy way of saying trust us. The entire global economy runs on a promise made by a man who would resign in disgrace three years later. The money is not real. The money was never real. The money is a story we all agreed to believe and the people who write the story get to decide who is rich and who is poor.

In Germany in nineteen twenty-three a loaf of bread cost two hundred billion marks. People wallpapered their houses with banknotes because the paper was worth more as wallpaper than as money. In Zimbabwe in two thousand eight the government printed a one hundred trillion dollar bill and it could not buy a bus ticket. The currency is a fiction. When the fiction breaks the people who trusted the fiction lose everything and the people who wrote the fiction move to Switzerland.

In Detroit when the city went bankrupt in two thousand thirteen the official currency stopped working for forty thousand families. The water department shut off their water. The electricity company shut off their lights. The currency they did not have determined whether their children could drink water or sit in the dark. So the neighbors ran hoses to each other's houses. The community gardens grew food that did not require currency. The churches opened their doors and the mosques opened their doors and the currency became kindness and the exchange rate was one to one. When the money fails the people build a new economy out of whatever they have.

The real currency has always been something other than money. In prison the currency was cigarettes and stamps and phone calls. I spent two and a half years in Jackson State Prison and the economy inside those walls was more honest than the economy outside them. A man knew exactly what a cigarette was worth. A man knew exactly what a favor cost. There was no abstraction. There was no derivatives market. There was no credit default swap. There was a cigarette and there was a debt and the debt was paid or it was not.

Music is a currency. A song on a street corner is worth whatever the crowd decides it is worth. A mixtape passed hand to hand is an economy. A concert in a basement is a transaction between the performer and the audience and no bank takes a percentage. The underground economy of music has always been more honest than the official economy of music because the underground economy is based on value and the official economy is based on ownership. The record label does not make music. The record label owns music. There is a difference and the difference is the entire history of exploitation in the music industry.

The most dangerous thing you can do to the powerful is build an economy they do not control. Every commune every cooperative every mutual aid network every community garden every time-bank every skill-share is a threat to the currency because it proves the currency is not necessary. The powerful need you to believe that you cannot survive without their money. The neighbors in Detroit proved that you can.