TURMEL: David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5,000 Years Chap09
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Chapter Nine
THE AXIAL AGE (800 BC - 600 AD)
P223: THE PHRASE "THE AXIAL AGE" was coined by the German
existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.1 Jaspers became
fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570-
495BC), the Buddha (563-483BC), and Confucius (551-479BC) were
all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India,
and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of
debate between contending intellectual schools, each group
apparently unaware of the others' existence. Like the
simultaneous invention of coinage, why this happened had
always been a puzzle. Jaspers wasn't entirely sure himself.
P224: He observed that all these great regions of the world,
China, India, and the Mediterranean, saw the emergence of
remarkably parallel philosophical trends, from skepticism to
idealism- in fact, almost the entire range of positions about
the nature of the cosmos, mind, action, and the ends of human
existence that have remained the stuff of philosophy to this
day.
For Jaspers, the period begins with the Persian prophet
Zoroaster, around 800 BC, and ends around 200 BC, to be
followed by a Spiritual Age that centers on figures like Jesus
and Mohammed. For my own purposes, I find it more useful to
combine the two. Let us define the Axial Age, then, as running
from 800 BC to 600 AD.3 we should probably end it in 632 AD,
with the death of the Prophet.
Axial Age saw the birth not only of all the world's major
philosophical tendencies, but also all of today's major world
religions: Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism,
Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and
Islam.4
the core period of Jasper's Axial age- the lifetimes of
Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha- corresponds almost
exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's
more, the three parts of the world where coins were first
invented were also the very parts of the world where those
sages lived;
What was the connection? We might start by asking: What is a
coin? The normal definition is that a coin is a piece of
valuable metal, shaped into a standardized unit, with some
emblem or mark inscribed to authenticate it. The world's first
coins appear to have been created within the kingdom of Lydia,
in western Anatolia (now Turkey), sometime around 600 BC.5
P225: In both India and China, we can observe the same
pattern: invented by private citizens, coinage was quickly
monopolized by the state.
JCT: And later, usurped back by the bullion brokers cartel
from the state.
Much early Chinese coinage also shows signs of having evolved
directly from social currencies: some were in fact cast bronze
in the shape of cowries, though others took the shape of
diminutive knives, disks, or spades. In every case, local
governments quickly stepped in- presumably within the space of
about a generation.8
8. Our first literary record of coinage in China is of a
kingdom that reformed its currency system in 524 BC- which
means that it already had a currency system, and presumably
had for some time (Li 1985:372).
all of the resulting kingdoms, no matter how diminutive,
aspired to issue their own official currency.
how this must have happened. Gold, silver, and bronze- the
materials from which coins were made- had long been the media
of international trade; but until that time, only the rich
actually had much in their possession.
Large amounts of silver, gold, and copper were dethesaurized,
as the economic historians like to say; it was removed from
the temples and houses of the rich and placed in the hands of
ordinary people, was broken into tinier pieces, and began to
be used in everyday transactions.
P226: How? Israeli Classicist David Schaps provides the most
plausible suggestion: most of it was stolen. This was a period
of generalized warfare, and it is in the nature of war that
precious things are plundered.
but what the Axial Age also saw- again, equally in China,
India, and the Aegean- was the rise of a new kind of army,
made up not of aristocratic warriors and their retainers, but
trained professionals.
P227: By insisting that only their own coins were acceptable
as fees, fines, or taxes, governments were able to overwhelm
the innumerable social currencies that already existed in
their hinterlands, and to establish something like uniform
national markets.
JCT: The best money is money you can use to pay your taxes.
The Phoenicians, for example, were considered the greatest
merchants and bankers of antiquity.12
12. Most of the earliest known Greek bankers were of
Phoenician descent, and it's quite possible that they first
introduced the concept of interest there (Hudson 1992).
JCT: That's what David Astle noted about the banksters'
conquest and enslavement of Greece.
They were also great inventors, having been the first to
develop both the alphabet and the abacus. Yet for centuries
after the invention of coinage, they preferred to continue
conducting business as they always had, with unwrought ingots
and promissory notes.13
JCT: Collateral and credit.
P228: The Mediterranean
Comparing Athens and Rome, we can immediately detect striking
similarities. In each city, history begins with a series of
debt crises. In Athens, the first crisis, the one that
culminated in Solon's reforms of 594 BC, was so early that
coinage could hardly have been a factor. In Rome, too, the
earliest crises seem to have proceeded the advent of currency.
Rather, in each case, coinage became a solution. In brief, one
might say that these conflicts over debt had two possible
outcomes. The first was that the aristocrats could win, and
the poor remain "slaves of the rich"- which in practice meant
that most people would end up clients of some wealthy patron.
Such states were generally militarily ineffective.16
16. The great exception was of course Sparta, which refused to
issue its own coinage but developed a system whereby
aristocrats adopted a strict military lifestyle and trained
permanently for war.
JCT: Actually, I'd heard that Sparta used clay money and
lent the gold out. But of course, they had to be ever ready
for war from the debt-slavers.
The second was that popular factions could prevail, institute
the usual popular program of redistribution of lands and
safeguards against debt peonage, thus creating the basis for a
class of free farmers whose children would, in turn, be free
to spend much of their time training for war.17
Coinage played a critical role in maintaining this kind of
free peasantry- secure in their landholding, not tied to any
great lord by bonds of debt.
few ancient cities, if any, went so far as to outlaw predatory
lending, or even debt peonage, entirely. Instead, they threw
money at the problem. Gold, and especially silver, were
acquired in war, or mined by slaves captured in war. Mints
were located in temples (the traditional place for depositing
spoils), and city- states developed endless ways to distribute
coins, not only to soldiers, sailors, and those producing arms
or outfitting ships, but to the populace generally, as jury
fees, fees for attending public assemblies, or sometimes just
as outright distributions, as Athens did most famously when
they discovered a new vein of silver in the mines at Laurium
in 483 BC.
P229: ("demagogues" here refers to the leaders of the
democracy):
The demagogues needed money to pay the people for attending
the assembly and serving on juries; for if the people did not
attend, the demagogues would lose their influence. They raised
at least some of the money they needed by preventing the
disbursement of the money due the trireme [warship] commanders
under their contracts with the city to build and fit triremes
for the Rhodian navy. Since the trireme commanders were not
paid, they were unable in turn to pay their suppliers and
workers, who sued the trireme commanders. To escape these
lawsuits the trireme commanders banded together and overthrew
the democracy.18
It was slavery, though, that made all this possible. As the
figures concerning Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage suggest, enormous
numbers of people were being enslaved in many of these
conflicts, and, of course, many slaves ended up working in the
mines, producing even more gold, silver, and copper. (The
mines in Laurium reportedly employed ten to twenty thousand of
them.)19
19. Thucydides (6.97.7) claimed that 20,000 escaped from the
mines in 421 BC, which is probably exaggerated, but most
sources estimate at least 10,000 for most of that century,
generally working shackled and under atrocious conditions.
JCT: David Astle points out they were often worked to death.
The quote with the most impact on Page 43:
(Diodorus Siculus (A. Del Mar: A History of Precious
Metals) gives a striking picture of the horrors of marginal
profit gold mining as carried out with slave labor in ancient
times in the Nubia in B.C.50:
"There are thus infinite numbers thrown into these mines,
all bound in fetters, kept a work night and day, and so
strictly surrounded that there is no possibility of their
effecting an escape. They are guarded by mercenary soldiers of
various barbarous nations, whose language is foreign to them
and to each other, so that there are no means of forming
conspiracies or of corrupting those who are set to watch them.
They are kept at incessant work by the rod of the overseer who
often lashes them severely. Not the least care is taken of the
bodies of these poor creatures; they have not a rag to cover
their nakedness; and whoever sees them must compassionate
their melancholy and deplorable condition, for though they may
be sick maimed or lame, no rest nor any intermission of labor
is allowed them. Neither the weakness of old age nor the
infirmities of females excuse any from the work, to which all
are driven by blows and cudgels; until borne down by the
intolerable weight of their misery, many fall dead in the
midst of their insufferable labors. Deprived of all hope,
these miserable creatures expect each day to be worse than the
last and long for death to end their sufferings.")
JCT: I can't imagine Professor Graeber having a worse tale to
tell than that reality. But we'll find out he does!!!
Geoffrey Ingham calls the resulting system a "military-
coinage complex"- though I think it would be more accurate to
call it a "military-coinage-slavery complex."20 Anyway, that
describes rather nicely how it worked in practice. When
Alexander set out to conquer the Persian Empire, he borrowed
much of the money with which to pay and provision his troops,
and he minted his first coins, used to pay his creditors and
continue to support the money, by melting down gold and silver
plundered after his initial victories.21
His armies not only destroyed Tyre; they also dethesaurized
the gold and silver reserves of Babylonian and Persian
temples, the security on which their credit systems were
based, and insisted that all taxes to his new government be
paid in his own money. The result was to "release the
accumulated specie of century onto the market in a matter of
months," something like 180,000 talents, or in contemporary
terms, an estimated $285 billion.23
P230: the story of Rome is, again, similar to that of Athens.
Its early history, as recorded by official chroniclers like
Livy, is one of continual struggles between patricians and
plebians, and of continual crises over debt.
JCT: Actually, increased debt by interest. Never ever heard
anyone complain about owing an interest-free debt.
24. The Roman institution was called nexum, and we don't know
entirely how it worked: i.e., whether it was a form of labor
contract, whereby one worked off the debt for a fixed term, or
something more like African pawn systems, where the debtor-
and his or her children- served in conditions roughly like
those of a slave until redemption
Again, coinage, minted from war spoils, didn't cause the
crisis. It was used as a solution. In fact, the entire Roman
empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine
for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and
distribution to the military- combined with taxation policies
designed to encourage conquered populations to adopt coins in
their everyday transactions. Even so, for most of its history,
use of coins was heavily concentrated in two regions: in Italy
and a few major cities, and on the frontiers, where the
legions were actually stationed. In areas where there were
neither mines nor military operations, older credit systems
presumably continued to operate.
P231: I will add one final note here. In Greece, as in Rome,
attempts to solve the debt crisis through military expansion
were always, ultimately, just ways of fending off the problem-
and they only worked for a limited period of time.
In cities that were not successful military powers, without
any source of income to set up welfare policies, debt crises
continued to flare up every century or so- and they often
became far more acute than they ever had in the Middle East,
because there was no mechanism, short of outright revolution,
to declare a Mesopotamian-style clean slate. Large
populations, even in the Greek world, did, in fact, sink to
the rank of serfs and clients.27
27. What I am arguing flies in the face of much of the
conventional scholarly wisdom, summed up best perhaps by Moses
Finley when he wrote "in Greece and Rome the debtor class
rebelled; whereas in the Near East they did not"- and
therefore reforms like those of Nehemiah were at least minor,
temporary palliatives.
JCT: Nehemiah 5:10 Let the exacting of interest stop and give
them back their foreclosed collateral.
Near Eastern rebellion took a different form; moreover, Greek
and Roman solutions were both more limited and more temporary
than he supposed.
Athenians, as we've seen, history records many intrigues and
conspiracies hatched by desperate debtors, often aristocrats
driven by relentless creditors to make common cause with the
poor.28
Around 100 AD, Plutarch wrote about his own country as if it
were under foreign invasion:
And as King Darius sent to the city of Athens his
lieutenants Datis and Artaphernes with chains and cords,
to bind the prisoners they should take; so these usurers,
bringing into Greece boxes full of schedules, bills, and
obligatory contracts, as so many irons and fetters for the
shackling of poor criminals... For at the very delivery of
their money, they immediately ask it back, taking it up at
the same moment they lay it down; and they let out that
again to interest which they take for the use of what they
have before lent.
So that they laugh at those natural philosophers who hold
that nothing can be made of nothing and of that which has
no existence; but with them usury is made and engendered
of that which neither is nor ever was.30
JCT: Guess they didn't believe that money had babies.
P232 The works of the early Christian fathers likewise resound
with endless descriptions of the misery and desperation of
those caught in rich lenders' webs. In the end, through this
means, that small window of freedom that had been created by
the plebs was completely undone, and the free peasantry
largely eliminated. By the end of the empire, most people in
the countryside who weren't outright slaves had become,
effectively, debt peons to some rich landlord, a situation in
the end legally formalized by imperial decrees binding
peasants to the land.31
India
India could not be more different as a civilization than the
ancient Mediterranean- but to a remarkable degree, the same
basic pattern repeats itself there as well.
Here too we observe, at first, a checkerboard of different
sorts of government, from the famous "Ksatriya republics" with
a populace in arms and urban democratic assemblies, to
elective monarchies, to centralized empires like Kosala and
Magadha.32
Both Gautama (the future Buddha) and Mahavira (the founder of
Jainism) were born in one of the republics, though both
ultimately found themselves teaching within the great empires,
whose rulers often became patrons of wandering ascetics and
philosophers. Both kingdoms and republics produced their own
silver and copper coinage, but in some ways the republics were
more traditional, since the self-governing "populace in arms"
consisted of the traditional Ksatriya or warrior caste, who
typically held their lands in common and had them worked by
serfs or slaves.33
The kingdoms, on the other hand, were founded on a
fundamentally new institution: a trained, professional army,
open to young men of a wide variety of backgrounds, their
equipment supplied by central authorities (soldiers were
obliged to check their arms and armor when they entered
cities), and provided with generous salaries.
Asoka, famously, began his reign in conquest: in 265 BC,
destroying the Kalingas, one of the last remaining Indian
republics, in a war in which hundreds of thousands of human
beings were, according to his own account, killed or carried
off into slavery. Asnoka later claimed to have been so
disturbed and haunted by the carnage that he renounced war
altogether, embraced Buddhism, and declared that from that
time on, his kingdom would be governed by principles of
ahimsa, or nonviolence. "Here in my kingdom," he declared in
an edict inscribed on one of the great granite pillars in his
capital of Patna, which so dazzled the Greek ambassador
Megasthenes, "no living being must be killed or sacrificed."40
40. It's referred to as the "Pillar Edict" (Norman 1975:16).
JCT: Nice to go down in history with such words.
Such a statement obviously can't be taken literally: Asnoka
might have replaced sacrificial ritual with vegetarian feasts,
but he didn't abolish the army, abandon capital punishment, or
even outlaw slavery. But his rule marked a revolutionary shift
in ethos. Aggressive war was abandoned, and much of the army
does seem to have been demobilized, along with the network of
spies and state bureaucrats, with the new, proliferating
mendicant orders (Buddhists, Jains, and also world- renouncing
Hindus) given official state support to preach to the villages
on questions of social morality.
P235 Early Buddhist economic attitudes have long been
considered a bit mysterious. On the one hand, monks could not
own property as individuals; they were expected to live an
austere communistic life with little more than a robe and
begging bowl as personal possessions, and they were strictly
forbidden to so much as touch anything made of gold or silver.
On the other hand, however suspicious of precious metals,
Buddhism had always had a liberal attitude toward credit
arrangements. It is one of the few of the great world
religions that has never formally condemned usury.43
43. Those wishing to become monks had to first affirm that
they were not themselves debtors (just as they also had to
promise they weren't runaway slaves); but there was no rule
saying the monastery itself could not lend money. In China, as
we'll see, providing easy credit terms for peasants came to be
seen as a form of charity.
Taken in the context of the times, however, there's nothing
particularly mysterious about any of this. It makes perfect
sense for a religious movement that rejected violence and
militarism, but that was in no way opposed to commerce.44 44.
Similarly, Buddhist monks are not allowed to see an army, if
they can possibly avoid it (Pacittiya, 48- 51).
As we shall see, while Asnoka's own empire was not long to
endure, soon to be replaced by a succession of ever weaker and
mostly smaller states, Buddhism took root. The decline of the
great armies eventually led to the near- disappearance of
coinage, but also to a veritable efflorescence of increasingly
sophisticated forms of credit.
China
Until about 475 BC, northern China was still nominally an
empire, but the emperors had devolved into figureheads and a
series of de facto kingdoms had emerged. The period from 475
to 221 BC is referred to as the "Warring States period"; at
that point, even the pretense of unity was cast aside.
Ultimately, the country was reunited by the state of Qin, who
established a dynasty that was then immediately overthrown by
a series of massive popular insurrections, ushering in the Han
dynasty (206 BC- 220 AD), founded by a previously obscure
rural constable and peasant leader named Liu Bao, who was the
first Chinese leader to adopt the Confucian ideology, exam
system, and pattern of civil administration that were to
continue for almost two thousand years. Still, the golden age
of Chinese philosophy was the period of chaos that preceded
unification, and this followed the typical Axial Age pattern:
the same fractured political landscape, the same rise of
trained, professional armies, and the creation of coined money
largely in order to pay them.45 We also see the same
government policies designed to encourage the development of
markets, chattel slavery on a scale not seen before or since
in Chinese history, the appearance of itinerant philosophers
and religious visionaries, battling intellectual schools, and
eventually, attempts by political leaders to transform the new
philosophies into religions of state.46
46. Wilbur 1943, Yates 2002. The state of Qin, during the
Warring States period, not only allowed for army officers to
be allocated slaves by rank, but for merchants, craftsmen, and
the "poor and idle" to themselves be "confiscated as slaves"
(Lewis 1990:61- 62).
P236 There were also significant differences, starting with
the currency system. China never minted gold or silver coins.
Merchants used precious metals in the form of bullion, but the
coins in actual circulation were basically small change: cast
bronze disks, usually with a hole in the middle so that they
could be strung together. Such strings of "cash" were produced
in extraordinary numbers, and very large amounts had to be
assembled for large-scale transactions: when wealthy men
wished to make donations to temples, for instance, they had to
use oxcarts to carry the money. The most plausible explanation
is that, especially after unification, Chinese armies were
enormous- some Warring States armies numbered up to a million-
but not nearly as professional or well paid as those of
kingdoms farther west, and from Qin and Han times on, rulers
were careful to ensure that this remained the case, to
make sure the army never became an independent power base.47
P237 In China, while many of the founders of the "hundred
schools" of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States
were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to
city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders
of social movements from the very start. Some of these
movements didn't even have leaders, like the School of the
Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who
set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and
fissures between states.50
50. On the Tillers: Graham 1979, 1994:67- 110. They seem to
have flourished around the same time as Mo Di, the founder of
Mohism (roughly 470- 391 BC). The Tillers ultimately vanished,
leaving behind mainly a series of treatises on agricultural
technology, but they had a tremendous influence on early
Taoism- which, in turn, became the favorite philosophy for
peasant rebels for many centuries to come, starting with the
Yellow Turbans of 184 AD. Eventually, Taoism was displaced by
messianic forms of Buddhism as the favorite ideology of
rebellious peasants.
JCT: Always interested in what appealed to rebellious peasants
because the only real thing they had to rebel about was growth
of debts.
The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems
to have been urban artisans, not only were philosophically
opposed to war and militarism, but organized battalions of
military engineers who would actively discourage conflicts by
volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the
aggressor.
JCT: Wow, talk about putting their lives where their morals
were.
Materialism I:
The Pursuit of Profit
What is one to make of all this? The popular education
campaigns of the period perhaps provide a clue. The Axial Age
was the first time in human history when familiarity with the
written word was no longer limited to priests, administrators,
and merchants, but had become necessary to full participation
in civic life. In Athens, it was taken for granted that only a
country bumpkin would be entirely illiterate.
JCT: As much of a revolutionary cusp as the printing press was
for the masses was general literacy!
Without mass literacy, neither the emergence of mass intellectual
movements nor the spread of Axial Age ideas would have been possible.
No doubt the growth of markets played a role too, not only
helping to free people from the proverbial shackles of status
or community, but encouraging a certain habit of rational
calculation, of measuring inputs and outputs, means and ends,
all of which must inevitably have found some echoes in the new
spirit of rational inquiry that begins to appear in all the
same times and places. Even the word "rational" is telling: it
derives, of course, from "ratio"- how many of X go into Y- a
sort of mathematical calculation previously used mainly by
architects and engineers, but which, with the rise of markets,
everyone who didn't want to get cheated at the marketplace had
to learn how to do.
P238 To understand what had changed, we have to look, again,
at the particular kind of markets that were emerging at the
beginning of the Axial Age: impersonal markets, born of war,
in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they
were strangers.
Within human economies... gifts between equals are usually
fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal
solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on
such matters is a major form of daily entertainment. What's
missing, though, is any sense that the most selfish ("self-
interested") motive is necessarily the real one:
Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all
the more so when trading is set against a background of war
and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers;
when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came
from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing
personal relationships anyway.
JCT: Once a city was conquered, they had to torture the
survivors to find the gold before they killed them. What
a Hellish world.
Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of
how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating
proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best
deal for oneself.
P239 The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of
thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of
motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts
like "profit" and "advantage"- and imagining that this is what
people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as
if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace
has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever
cared about anything else.
money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold
to produce money; when "cutthroat competition" often did
involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to
anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by
peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin
to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia,
wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear.
P240 Shang was harsher than most of his fellow Legalists in
that he believed that widespread prosperity would ultimately
harm the ruler's ability to mobilize his people for war, and
therefore that terror was the most efficient instrument of
governance, but even he insisted that this regime be clothed
as a regime of law and justice.
Wherever the military-coinage-slavery complex began to take
hold, we find political theorists propounding similar ideas.
Kautilya was no different: the title of his book, the
Arthasastra, is usually translated as "manual of statecraft,"
since it consists of advice to rulers, but its more literal
translation is "the science of material gain."60 Like the
Legalists, Kautilya emphasized the need to create a pretext
that governance was a matter of morality and justice, but in
addressing the rulers themselves, he insisted that "war and
peace are considered solely from the point of view of profit"-
of amassing wealth to create a more effective army, of using
the army to dominate markets and control resources to amass
more wealth, and so on.61
P241 Greek city- states did not have kings, and the collapse
of private interests and affairs of state was in principle
universally denounced as tyranny. Still, in practice, what
this meant was that city- states, and even political factions,
ended up acting in precisely the same coldly calculating way
as Indian or Chinese sovereigns. Anyone who has ever read
Thucydides' Melian dialogue- in which Athenian generals
present the population of a previously friendly city with
elegantly reasoned arguments for why the Athenians have
determined that it is to the advantage of their empire to
threaten them with collective massacre if they are not willing
to become tribute-paying subjects, and why it is equally in
the interests of the Melians to submit- is aware of the
results.62
oppositional intellectuals were faced with two choices: either
adopt the reigning terms of debate, or try to come up with a
diametrical inversion. Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, took the
first approach. He turned the concept of li, profit, into
something more like "social utility," and then he attempted to
demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable
activity.
P242 His conclusion: if one could add up the total costs of
aggression in human lives, animal lives, and material damage,
one would be forced to the conclusion that they never
outweighed the benefits- even for the victor. In fact, Mo Di
took this sort of logic so far that he ended up arguing that
the only way to optimize the overall profit of humanity was to
abandon the pursuit of private profit entirely and adopt a
principle of what he called "universal love"- essentially
arguing that if one takes the principle of market exchange to
its logical conclusion, it can only lead to a kind of
communism.
JCT: Why not just call it a "fair game" for all? It's also a
kind of capitalism in that everyone happens to be free to
maximize their economic score to the benefit of the community.
I brought more lumber to the market and scored more chips
(with equipment and education costs paid down faster). About
as capitalistic for everyone as you can get. A kind of
communism? A capitalistic kind of communism is the best blend.
The Confucians took the opposite approach, rejecting the
initial premise... "Why must Your Majesty necessarily use this
word 'profit'?... He appears to be referring to a distinction
originally made by Confucius himself: "the superior person
understands what is right while the inferior person only
understands what is personally profitable" (Analects 7.4.16).
Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself,
preferring what might almost be called an art of decency.
Taoists were later to take this even further with their
embrace of intuition and spontaneity. All were so many
attempts to provide a mirror image of market logic. Still, a
mirror image is, ultimately, just that: the same thing, only
backwards. Before long we end up with an endless maze of
paired opposites- egoism versus altruism, profit versus
charity, materialism versus idealism, calculation versus
spontaneity- none of which could ever have been imagined
except by someone starting out from pure, calculating, self-
interested market transactions.65
65. The Mohist path- overtly embrace financial logic- was the
less well trodden. We've already seen how in India and Greece,
attempts to frame morality as debt went nowhere: even the
Vedic principles are ostensibly about liberation from debt,
which was also, as we've seen, a central theme in Israel.
JCT: Sure, the idea that everyone should just chop as much
lumber as we can for the community and no one keep score is
"feely goody" nice but I bet that keeping score, just so that
the "winner" can get a trophy, is a spur to excellence that
not keeping score cannot match. It's why even Monopoly
Capitalism seems to have more enterprise, unfree or free, than
Communism ever scored in the past. So I think Mo Di found the
same "universal love" as Confucius but by also allowing reward
for excellence.
P243 Materialism II:
Substance
Every now and then too, we are presented with moments of
exceptional clarity: ones that reveal the essence of our own
thought to be almost exactly the opposite of what we thought
it to be.
After the first coins were minted around 600 BC in the kingdom
of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek
cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the
great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have
been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was
Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries
active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their
effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center
of the region and, perhaps, the first city in the world where
everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily
in coins instead of credit.71
71. This is based on the fact that Miletus was one of the
cities, if not the first city, to produce coins of small
enough denominations that they could be used for everyday
transactions (Kraay 1964:67).
P245 Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales,
of Miletus (c. 624BC- c. 546BC), Anaximander, of Miletus (c.
610BC- c.546BC), and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585BC- c.
525BC)- in other words, men who were living in that city at
exactly the time that coinage was first introduced.72
It was something that could turn into everything. As Seaford
emphasizes, so was money... could be exchanged for absolutely
any other object whatsoever.73
73. Or as Seaford (2004:208) puts it, echoing Anaximander's
description of his primal substance, "a distinct, eternal,
impersonal, all-embracing, unlimited, homogeneous, eternally
moving, abstract, regulating substance, destination for all
things as well as their origin" (or, at least, "all things"
that were available for purchase.)
JCT: Yes, chips might seem that magical to non-gamblers.
ancient coins were always worth more than the gold, silver, or
copper of which they were composed. Seaford refers to this
extra value by the inelegant term "fiduciarity," which comes
from the term for public trust, the confidence a community
places in its currency.74
74. Seaford 2004:136- 46; see Picard 1975; Wallace 1987;
Harris 2008a:10. Purely "fiduciary" money is of course what a
metallist would call "fiat" or "token" money, or a Keynesian,
"chartal money." Despite Finley's arguments to the contrary
(1980:141, 196), just about all ancient money was fiduciary to
some extent. It's easy to see why coins would ordinarily
circulate at a higher face value than their weight in gold or
silver, since the price of the latter would tend to fluctuate,
but the moment the coin's face value was lower than that of
its metal content, there would be no reason not to melt it
down.
within a city, that city's currency had a special status,
since it was always acceptable at face value when used to pay
taxes, public fees, or legal penalties. This is, incidentally,
why ancient governments were so often able to introduce base
metal into their coins without leading to immediate inflation;
a debased coin might have lost value when traded overseas, but
at home, it was still worth just as much when purchasing a
license, or entering the public theater.75
JCT: Others call it "seignorage!" The difference between the
metallic value and the tax-paying value. Why they bother with
part expensive metal when clay chips always worked so well,
still do, I'll never know.
75. In the case of truly large states like the Roman or
Mauryan empires, inflation did eventually result, but the full
effects were not felt for at least a century (see Ingham
2002:101- 4, Kessler & Temin 2008, Harris 2008b for some good
discussions of the Roman situation.)
JCT: Inflation is caused by interest rates whether the chips
are metal, paper, clay or volts of electricity. I can make
computer credits inflate by charging interest and playing
"mort-gage" "death-gamble." See the end of
http://SmartestMan.Ca/bankmath for the parlor game.
P246 This is also why, during public emergencies, Greek city-
states would occasionally strike coins made entirely of bronze
or tin, which everyone would agree, while the emergency
lasted, to treat as if they were really made of silver.76
JCT: They could have called them "gold" too.
This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and
Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving
it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the
civic community agreed to make it something more.
JCT: David Astle's whole book Babylonian Woe is about the
pressure of the bullion broker cabal to get governments to
print their money on their monopolized metal. Always
corrupting the Rulers and Priests into not using their own
local chips when they can use these better international ones.
But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be
used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would
eventually set in.
JCT: As long as it still reads "1 Tax Credit," I don't care
how debased the coin is. It can't inflate. Inflation is
I/(P+I), a function of Interest, nothing else. If no interest,
the hat- or coat-check is always worth the hat or the coat it
was pledged on.
It was as if there was a tension there between the will of the
community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek
thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type
of object, one of extraordinary importance- as evidenced by
the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to
get their hands on it- but whose nature was a profound enigma.
JCT: Basing your chips on a substance in scarce supply and
also demanding the chips grow sure is a profound enigma. Must
find a way to pay back 11 when they only printed 10. Remember,
it has nothing to do with the Gold Standard, we're suffering
the same problems today with a Collateral Standard. Why I want
the human Time Standard of Money. I coined the phrase! But
someday, it will be the Rule (in the cashier's cage).
With coins this rises to.. a kind of collective promise, by
which citizens assured one another that not only would the
coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger
sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and
thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone
wanted. The problem is that this collective power is not
unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther
you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery,
and war- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a
cruise might end up on the auction block- the more it turns
into a mere lump of precious metal.78
78. Hence, as we'll see Aristotle's position that a coin was
only a social convention (Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29- 31)
remained very much a minority view in the ancient world. It
did become the predominant view later, in the Middle Ages.
JCT: Money is a "chip" we all agree to take worth a numeraire,
chickens, cattle, even silver we don't have.
P247 It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age
philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage,
but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical
starting place:
JCT: Not so foolish to think that tinkering with the control
rewards system for human activities is basic./
P248 What we see then is a strange kind of back- and- forth,
attack and riposte, whereby the market, the state, war, and
religion all continually separate and merge with one another.
Let me summarize it as briefly as I can:
1) Markets appear to have first emerged, in the Near East at
least, as a side effect of government administrative systems.
2) As a result, everywhere we see the military- coinage-
slavery complex emerge, we also see the birth of materialist
philosophies. They are materialist, in fact, in both senses of
the term: in that they envision a world made up of material
forces, rather than divine powers, and in that they imagine
the ultimate end of human existence to be the accumulation of
material wealth, with ideals like morality and justice being
reframed as tools designed to satisfy the masses.
3) Everywhere, too, we find philosophers who react to this by
exploring ideas of humanity and the soul, attempting to find a
new foundation for ethics and morality.
4) Everywhere, some of these philosophers made common cause
with social movements that inevitably formed in the face of
these new and extraordinarily violent and cynical elites. The
result was something new to human history: popular movements
that were also intellectual movements, due to the assumption
that those opposing existing power arrangements did so in the
name of some kind of theory about the nature of reality.
5) Everywhere, these movements were first and foremost peace
movements, in that they rejected the new conception of
violence, and especially aggressive war, as the foundation of
politics.
6) Everywhere, too, there seems to have been an initial
impulse to use the new intellectual tools provided by
impersonal markets to come up with a new basis for morality,
and everywhere, it foundered. Mohism, with its notion of
social profit, flourished briefly and then collapsed. It was
replaced by Confucianism, which rejected such ideas outright.
We have already seen that reimagining moral responsibility in
terms of debt- an impulse that cropped up in both Greece and
India- while almost inevitable given the new economic
circumstances, seems to prove uniformly unsatisfying.80
P249 The stronger impulse is to imagine another world where
debt- and with it, all other worldly connections- can be
entirely annihilated, where social attachments are seen as
forms of bondage, just as the body is a prison.
7) Rulers' attitudes changed over time. At first, most appear
to have affected an attitude of bemused tolerance toward the
new philosophical and religious movements while privately
embracing some version of cynical realpolitik.
8) The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres
of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand
the market, on the other, religion. To put the matter crudely:
if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish
acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that
soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in
which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values,
material things are unimportant, that selfishness- or even the
self- are illusory, and that to give is better than to
receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all
the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity,
a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure
generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be
imagined without the other; both could only arise in
institutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-
minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared together
wherever impersonal, physical, cash money also appeared on the
scene.
P250 As for the religious movements: it would be easy enough
to write them off as escapist, as promising the victims of the
Axial Age empires liberation in the next world as a way of
letting them accept their lot in this one, and convincing the
rich that all they really owed the poor were occasional
charitable donations.
JCT: Do Part II of Nehemiah 5:10: Give them back their seized
stuff, now only part in alms, but not Part II: Let the
exacting of interest stop. They'll donate some unearned income
back but they won't stop taking from the poor to give to the
rich.
Popular uprisings in the ancient world usually ended in the
massacre of the rebels. As I've already observed, physical
escape, such as via exodus or defection, has always been the
most effective response to oppressive conditions since the
earliest times we know about.
JCT: As the Armana Letters detail, people keep escaping to
Tianna, the Apiru/Habiru capital in the mountains of Canaan.
Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an
oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her
misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided
glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to
create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one
sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people
who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were
religious sects, such as the Essenes- who did so, effectively,
by defecting from the larger social order and forming their
own utopian communities.81
JCT: And when Jesus came along, he really turned on the
Liberation movement by getting the Rich to give their money to
The Poor Commune Treasurer so he could buy others out of their
slavery to join the liberated community. Jesus' The Poor
commune was an anti-slavery movement. Why they were beat on by
the establishment so badly and why they could not denounce the
architect of the anti-slavery system who set them free.
81. Philo of Alexandria, writing around the time of Christ,
says of the Essenes: "not a single slave is to be found among
them, but all are free, exchanging services with each other,
and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely for their
injustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their
impiety in annulling the statute of nature" (Quod omnis probus
liber sit 79).
JCT: And these guys anointed Jesus their King. Get the
connection why he attacked the money lenders in the temple?
And why his most cited quotes describe interest on money?
Jesus' 7-times most-often-quoted Scripture!
1) In Matthew 13:10, the disciples came to him and asked, "Why
do you speak to the people in parables?" He replied, "The
knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been
given to you, but not to them. WHOEVER HAS WILL BE GIVEN MORE,
AND HE WILL HAVE ABUNDANCE. WHOEVER DOES NOT HAVE, EVEN WHAT
HE HAS WILL BE TAKEN AWAY FROM HIM. This is why I speak to
them in parables: 'Though seeing, they do not see; though
hearing, they do not hear or understand.'"
So the quotation is the reason he spoke in riddles so only the
initiated would understand that the Kingdom of Heaven was at
hand.
2) In Luke 8:10, he repeats "The knowledge of the secrets of
the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I
speak in parables, so that, `though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand'... Therefore consider
carefully how you listen. WHOEVER HAS WILL BE GIVEN MORE;
WHOEVER DOES NOT HAVE, EVEN WHAT HE THINKS HE HAS WILL BE
TAKEN FROM HIM."
This reason he speaks to them in riddles so only those who
have the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God's
Heaven and Hell will understand is a Differential Equation
which I call the Slavery Equation. I have found it repeated
seven times in scripture:
3) Again in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:29): "FOR
EVERYONE WHO HAS WILL BE GIVEN MORE, AND HE WILL HAVE AN
ABUNDANCE. WHOEVER DOES NOT HAVE, EVEN WHAT HE HAS WILL BE
FROM HIM."
4) Again in the Parable of the Minas (Luke 19:26): "I tell you
that to EVERYONE WHO HAS, MORE WILL BE GIVEN, BUT AS FOR THE
ONE WHO HAS NOTHING, EVEN WHAT HE HAS WILL BE TAKEN AWAY."
5) Again in Marc 4:25: WHOEVER HAS WILL BE GIVEN MORE; WHOEVER
DOES NOT HAVE, EVEN WHAT HE HAS WILL BE TAKEN AWAY FROM HIM."
6) Again in Thomas 41 of the Nag Hammadi scrolls: "WHOEVER HAS
SOMETHING IN HIS HAND WILL RECEIVE MORE AND WHOEVER HAS
NOTHING WILL BE DEPRIVED OF EVEN THE LITTLE HE HAS."
7) And finally in the Apocalypse of Peter (VII,3) 83:27 of the
Nag Hammadi scrolls: "EVERYONE WHO HAS, IT WILL BE GIVEN TO
HIM AND HE WILL HAVE PLENTY, BUT HE WHO DOES NOT HAVE, IT WILL
BE TAKEN FROM HIM AND BE ADDED TO THE ONE WHO HAS."
So what does Jesus's most-often quoted statement in Scripture
mean? Everyone understands Robin Hood taking from the
abundance of the rich to give to the poor but how does Reverse
Robin Hood work taking from the poor to add to the abundance
of the Rich?
An input (deposit or withdrawal) to a control system with
Laplace Transform 1/(s-i) for differential equation dB/dt=iB
(where B is the Balance and i is the interest rate) has an
output where: EVERYONE WHOSE BANK ACCOUNT HAS WILL BECOME MORE
POSITIVE AND EVERYONE WHOSE BANK ACCOUNT HAS NOT WILL BECOME
MORE NEGATIVE.
Keep in mind I was voted Kook-of-the-Month July 1995 for
positing Christ spoke in Differential Equations. Seems to have
really upset some.
JCT: And Jesus built a working anti-debt-slavery commune.
The Therapeutae, another Jewish group, group rejected all
forms of property, but looked on slavery "to be a thing
absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has
created all men free" (De Vita Contemplativa 70).
JCT: And people were mostly enslaved by debts, not wars.
Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic
city-states of northern India were all eventually stamped out
by the great empires (Kautilya provides extensive advice on
how to subvert and destroy democratic constitutions), but the
Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public
assemblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.82
Buddhist monasteries are still called sangha, the ancient name
for such republics, and continue to operate by the same
consensus- finding process to this day, preserving a certain
egalitarian democratic ideal that would otherwise have been
entirely forgotten.
Finally, the larger historical achievements of these movements
are not, in fact, insignificant. As they took hold, things
began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent.
Slavery faded as an institution, to the point at which, by the
Middle Ages, it had become insignificant or even non existent
across most of Eurasia. Everywhere too, the new religious
authorities began to seriously address the social dislocations
introduced by debt.
JCT: One long report but what a wealth of new information.
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