Capitalist Empires

The Age of Exploration, 1450, a return to gold and silver as currency, and along with it professional armies, massive predatory warefare, usury and debt peonage, and materialism, science, and arts.

Also the time of the black death.

Most of the gold went to temples in India, and the silver to China. The Chinese demand for European silver made it all possible. In the early 17th century, China was importing 116 tons of silver per year. They paid for it in silk and porcelin.

Yet in this Tudor England, coin was in very short supply. Yet taxes HAD to be paid in metal.

The mines in the Americas were pits of hell, with dead bodies for miles around. The savage, insatiable hunger of the conquistidors for treasure -- was it because no matter how much they got, they could not pay off their debts? Cortez conquered a continent, yet could not pay his bills.

This was reminiscent of the 4th crusade, during which indebted knights would strip whole cities of their wealth, only to find themselves one small step ahead of their creditors. And the creditors were the same, the bankers of Northern Italy.

Debt leading to a psychology of cold, calculating greed, complicated by shame and righteous indignation, frantic urgency of debts which only grow, and outrage that they should be held to owe anything at all.

But this age saw the logic of money gain autonomy from the state, until political and military power were reorganized around it. Now the state became involved in debt enforcement.

nature of money

A market requires/enables us to compare two fundamentally different objects, with few if any common quantities or qualities. How much steak is there in a shirt?

How do you do this? By using a third thing, which in itself has no qualities at all nor any purpose other than to mediate exchange.

The implication is that lending money at interest is a perversion, since one is using money as an end in itself. "Money is not created to earn money." The argument is raised again by Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent.

We, today, might disagree with that sentiment. But compare it to what came before. Money at interest leads quickly to debt, which leads to the people being enslaved as debt peons, or worse.

Middle ages arabia -- credit based capitalism

During the Middle Ages, Arabia was the core and expansive edge of Western civilization. They viewed law as divine, coming from the Prophet, but government as an unfortunate necessity.

The king once summoned Nasruddin to court.
"Tell me," said the king, "You are a mystic, a philosopher, a man of great understanding. I have become interested in the issue of value. It is an interesting philosophical question. How does one establish the true value of an object, or a person? Take me, for example. If I were to ask you to estimate my value, what would you say?"
"Oh", Nasruddin replied, "I'd say around 200 dollars."
The King was stunned. "What! But this belt I am wearing is worth 200 dollars!"
"I know." replied Nasruddin. "Actually, I was taking the value of the belt into consideration."

In previous ages, Middle Eastern civilizations had been dominated by an alliance between the government (administrators) and merchants, both of whom kept the rest of the people either in debt peonage or in constant peril of falling into it. During the middle ages, the merchants changed sides, and became leaders of the society against the evils of the state.

The merchant was a venerated man, a hero. We also see the world's first popular free-market ideology. Adam Smith seems to have borrowed heavily from it.

But we must be mindful of the huge cultural gap betweeen this region and time, and Adam Smith's. Smith saw the market as pursuit of individual advantage. The Islamics saw it as extending mutual aid.

When men render aid to each other, each one performing one of these important tasks that are beyond the measure of his own capacity, and observing the law of justice in transactions by giving greatly and receiving in exchange of the labor of others, then the means of livelihood are realized, and the succession of the individual and the survival of the species are assured.
-- quoting Tusi's Nasirean Ethics

If all men were equal, all would perish -- specialization of labor is needed and good

Markets are about cooperation, not competition.

Capitalism and markets

Capitalism and markets are as much opposites as equivalent. In a market, one uses the medium of money to turn one commodity into another. C-M-C'. In capitalism, one uses the medium of commodities to turn money into more money M-C-M+.

Middle ages

The middle ages were, for most people, a vast improvement over the axial age. The collapse of empire broke the war/bullion/slavery complex. This also lead to increased political stability, and a localization of political power. The abandonment of the cities meant that each agricultural worker has less mouths to feed. Farm productivity also improved. Coinage evaporated, but the law codes imply a fairly strong credit-based market emerged.

Slavery was widely abolished during this period, not to be re-instituted until the colonial age.

A side question-- where did all the coins go? In India at least, they went into the temples and were melted down to make statues and gilding. Thus to re-create them, an (evil) emperor would have to melt down holy items. Which some did, of course.

coinage and spirituality.

The concept that spirit and flesh were separate seems to emerge with coinage. A tree is living thing, but can be abstracted as wood, which carpentry can turn into a chair, or some other object. A coin is even more abstract, since it turns metal into a collective promise. All in the community agree to accept it, making it transmutable into anything.

Thus peace and community are not things which emerge spontaniously, but need to be stamped onto our baser material nature, just as divine insignia stamped into a block of metal turn it into money. Yet what is money?

Graeber adds that the revolution in spirituality which coincided with the introduction of coinage was NOT the introduction of the concept of a spiritual realm, but rather the introduction of the material realm.

The axial age (800 bc-600 ad)

The name comes from Karl Jaspers, German philosopher. The axial age behind with Zoroaster, and Graeber ends it with the death of Mohammed in 632.

Pythagoras, Buddah, and Confucius all lived at the same time, 570-480 bc. The early iron age was a pause between empires, when the world was a chequerboard of diminutive kingdoms and city states. Externally at war, internally filed with political debate, and the formation of dropout culture.

For the first time, the great questions were investigated with reasoned inquiry. And no new philosophical ideas have been added since.

The trinity of philosophers was matched by the development of coinage. Metal moved out of the great storehouses of temples and kings, was broken into tiny pieces, and into everyday use. Why? War.

Coins to pay mercenaries, gold looted by soldiers... The phoenicians, the great merchants, resisted coinage for centuries.

Credit vs bullion

Gold can be distinguished from credit by one essential feature. It can be stolen. More seriously, it requires less trust and less commitment. Hard currency predominates in uncertain times.

Graeber describes long cycles which alternate between virtual and metal money.
3500-800 bc. Credit. Early agrarian empires.
800 bc-600 ad. Metal. Axial age, the rise of coinage.
600-1450 ad. Credit. Middle ages.
1450-1971. Metal. Capitalist empires.

Liberty

Is it the right to do as one will? Our the right to enter into relationships with others?

If the first, then as I own my body, am I my own slave?

Mesopotamia

In early Sumerian society, 3000-2500 bc, women have status roughly equivalent to today. They are well represented in the ranks of all professions, including rulers. Over the next millenia, all this is lost.

War, states, and markets all feed off each other, creating debt, which turns human relationships into commodities. no man wants to see this happen to his women (wife/sister/daughter) and moves to protect them and mark them as not for sale.

Market vs human economies

A human economy is an economic system primarily concerned with the creation, destruction, and rearrangement of humans. By contrast, a market economy is primarily concerned with gathering wealth.

Maker economies are a relatively new idea.

An ancient use of "money" is to "buy" a bride.  But this is not an ordinary purchase. Rather, the price paid can be seen as an acknowledgment of an unpayable debt. Only another woman is worth a woman. The same with bloodgeld, which, coincidently, often is about the same as brideprice.

These original forms of money are usually closely linked to items of adornment, the clothes which turn a naked body into a social being.

When a market economy meets a human economy, and esp when the market economy is both militarily superior and needs cheap labour, the human economy is turned into a mechanism to produce slaves, generally via these same unpayable debts.

The moral grounds of economic relations

Fundamental moral principles are invoked whenever items are exchanged. The difficulty is that these principles contradict each other. Moral though is founded on this tension.

Reciprocity, justice as a set of scales, is a prime motive of the moral life. Yet when a debt is paid, the two parties can part ways. The relationship is severed. Reciprocity also assumes equality between the two parties, which is not true for many moral relationships.

Graeber proposes 3 main moral principles which can support economic relationships: communism, hierarchy, and exchange.

Communism: common ownership and common management of collective resources. Sharing. No accounts are kept. And it is more than morality, shared pleasures are superior.
Baseline communism is the raw material of society. At this level, reciprocity is vague at best, but mutual responsibility is absolute.

Exchange: a process of interaction tending towards equivalence, in which each side is striving for advantage or to outdo the other. There is no long term commitment. The parties are also equals, and autonomous.

Hierarchy: based on clear lines of superiority. Precedent is the rule. Items or services exchanged are not presumed to be of equal value, nor is it even possible to compare their values.

Side note: the nanny state has its basis in conquest.