Burn the money and dance!

a text by the Madrid Surrealist Group and their friends
translated by Bruno Jacobs & Eric Bragg

A group of about 40 people joined the gathering in Madrid against the G-20 summit in Washington on Saturday, the 15 of November, with the intention of telling capitalism to fuck off, criticizing through action the cornerstone of its filthy artifice: money, that bloody trash which won’t survive the fall of the system and of which it is its totem and taboo. Therefore we burn it in advance of future bonfires that will sooner or later purify the old world, and we distribute the following leaflet in order to contribute as best we can to starting that fire.

Burn the money and dance!

Now they tell us that there is a crisis and they lie to us, just like when they announced prosperity from mutant cows fattened with transgenics, chemicals and plastic. Because economic recession and expansion are a farce, these two movements of growth and contraction of the same wave of servility, exploitation and fear which knocks you over and strangles you, me, us, wage-slaves, who live a crisis that is eternal, as to live means to pay for every realized act and for every nurtured dream, and from this we must dare to desire and act outside and against the market.

Now they will tell us that the crisis has a concrete and reasonable cause, that only one part of the system failed, that greed broke the bank and that to err is human, but it doesn’t matter because the biblical wiseman Balthazar has arrived with his bag full of promises in order to reforge capitalism and repaint the bricks that lead to the Emerald City; and then Oz and its spectacle must continue, and this is entertainment. And they will continue to lie to us because there is no cure for capitalism: it is the crisis that reproduces itself, destroying men, women, cultures and continents until the ultimate consumption of the planet.

Thus it is necessary to destroy once and for all this recession, the prosperity and the economy that preoccupy certain people to such an extent. Therefore we burn money, totem and taboo, heart and blood, capitalism’s ultimate abstraction and reality: so as to accelerate the crisis that destroys the wealth of their nations, so that the recession recedes until it suffocates in its own financial vomit, so that the economy dissolves and that life reappears. Because the currency that is so highly worshipped is just as false as everything else – a pestilential cloud that we will have to dispel until the daylight returns.

Maybe it will be said that this money doesn’t belong to us, that it is part of the gross interior product of the national income and of the state treasury, those cursed monstrosities that overshadow what were once human relationships of collective production, of exchange and of gifts. But haven’t we perhaps earned it from the sweat on our brow? Isn’t it ours in exchange for the work and the time that we have sold for cheap? Therefore we would like to grant ourselves the happy luxury of destroying it, a luxury, however, that is within reach of any pocket because it is only a matter of getting fed up and of daring. And if we grant ourselves the free caprice of destroying it, it is simply because we haven’t found a better use for it or that it is worth the trouble, and everything that could be done with that money, saving or investing it in order to make it grow and multiply as if it were a virus, or spending it in order to buy state of the art trash, consuming insipid distractions, earning laughable pensions, paying blood-sucking mortgages or financing campaigns in order to demand lamentable reforms are just so many other excuses that tie us to the economy and strengthen it at the same time. The time has come to cut such an umbilical cord: we deny capitalism and therefore we reject its money.

Thus we burn it, casually incinerating the economic train together with the pieces of paper that form its freightcars, and all its commerce. And we take leave remembering, as if there were any remaining doubt, that there will be dancing but not money in the world that we always keep within our hearts.

Crisis! More crisis!

1929… 1973… 2008… the third time’s a charm!

Burn the money and dance!

The Chronic Critics

Click here to read the original Spanish version of this text.