For love or money. Will do. Won’t do.
“Not without money, honey.”
“I love you darling, but this other man has money.”
All of us whores.
“Need somebody killed? Call Mack.”
Herodotus credits the Lydians with the invention of money, of first coining gold and silver and electrum. The Lydians are also noted as being the first to trade items not of their own manufacture, to have the custom of prostituting their daughters, and to arouse the wrath of the Persians.
The Chinese began using paper money in the Sung. Kublai Khan forbade the circulation of metal coinage, though (as reported by Marco Polo) his notes were redeemable in metal at his mint by metal smiths and jewelers. Exchanging worn and tattered bills for fresh printings cost 3 percent.
In the West, the first circulating paper money was created in Sweden in 1661 by Johan Palmstruch, who got government backing by promising half of the profits to the crown. He did well for a while, but printed too many bills. His bank collapsed. As an act of mercy, he was allowed to go to prison rather than being executed. Fifty years later the Scotsman John Law made a deal with the government of France to give his bank a monopoly in printing government money, promising to pay off the national debt. Law’s scheme also worked for a while: trade soared, new industries were given low interest loans, and Law’s bank financed road building and other infrastructure projects. Then his bubble burst, and he died penurious in exile. Neither Law nor Palmstruch was evidently “too big to fail.”
The first issue of paper currency by a government in the West was in Massachusetts in 1690, to finance a military expedition. Banks, states, and wars.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
—James Madison, April 20, 1795
Wars, states, banks. The eternal triangle.
Alexander Hamilton thought a national debt would be a national blessing, not only binding the people together but also creating a need for taxation that would force people to work harder: “We labour less now than any civilized nation of Europe, and a habit of labour in the people is as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies as it is conducive to the welfare of the State.” Of course, Hamilton was a banker, and stood to make a bundle.
Julius Caesar borrowed large sums of money from his officers. Not only did this enable him to pay off his mutinous troops, but it insured that the future success and prosperity of his officers depended on his own.
Paper money is revolutionary. Printing presses (such as Benjamin Franklin’s) financed the revolution in America, and later the revolutions in France, Russia, and China. Inflation caused by the promiscuous printing of money tends to favor debtors—it has an equalizing effect. The United States was born from hyperinflation. The biggest debtor, of course, was the government itself.
Edward Gibbon, writing at the dawn of the age of imperialism, said that money was a stimulant—the drug that got us off our asses to rise above “barbarism.” So we run around on speed, inventing new doodads to sell, and suffering the lash of withdrawal if we fall behind. Economists talk of “injecting” money into the economy: stimulus. Like freebase cocaine. Hooked on money, then held hostage. “I’m the pusher, if I fall, you’ll be cut off cold turkey. So you pay my bail, my tickets, and my lawyer.”
Money as a drug: if the right dosage can be found—printing just enough, not too much—it’s like magic. As long as people keep buying things they don’t need. As long as those in the business don’t hoard too much—which is of course their only reason for being in the business. As long as the real resources don’t dry up, the illusion of prosperity can be maintained with more and more IOUs. To the future. To the earth. Like all stimulants, money steals from tomorrow.
A shrine to money in a place of business is wholly appropriate: the first dollar bill framed on the wall by the cash register. Let’s keep it straight. Let’s keep it clear. Commerce flows through here. Banks don’t do that, though, nor brokerage houses. It would be too obvious. Overstated. Money is our business but let’s say, instead, that it’s about your future: a warm beach, your money for nothing and your chicks for your money.
Success counselors say you have to attract money with your attitude and your mantras. Repeat every morning: “I admire the rich. I want to be like them.” Surely you don’t want to be one of the have-nots. I, too, wish to be paid. Will I get paid for this? Shall I dance? May this be my mantra, a spell: “Money, money, money.” Maybe just writing the word will be enough. Invocation. Makes the world go round.
It is more easy to write on money that to obtain it; and those who gain it jest much at those who only know how to write about it.
—Voltaire
Sigh.
Perhaps Jesus does smile on wealth, in spite of his sandals. The Calvinists thought worldly success a mark of the elect, and made hoarding a virtue. Hoarding, of course, is anal. The fecal, excremental nature of money has been analyzed by Norman O. Brown:
Until the advent of psychoanalysis and its doctrine of the anal character of money, the profoundest insights into the nature of the money complex had to be expressed through the medium of myth—in modern times, the myth of the Devil. The Devil, we said in our chapter on Luther, is the lineal descendant of the Trickster in primitive mythologies; the evolution of the Trickster, through such intermediary figures as the classical Hermes, into the Christian Devil reflects the history of anality.
—Life Against Death, 301
My grandmother, a woman who always liked to carry a wad of bills, taught me that money was dirty and that you had to wash your hands after counting it. Which is really pretty obvious.
And yet there is a Dionysian quality to money, or at least to spending it. Burning money would be very Dionysian. “His alternative worship is war.” Norman O. Brown. War or potlatch: the dilemma of late capitalism.
Burning money. Art project for Burning Man—an offering to Dionysus, a superstitious rite to avert bloodshed and cataclysm, to bring true prosperity, peace. A large cage, the metal rods plated with gold and silver, set atop a wooden pyre. Everyone contributes a dollar bill. Thousands. Large blowers whirl the bills in a vortex, then it’s burned. Gas cannons. Flame throwers.
People dance.
Aristotle said that money was meant to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. He called the ability of money to engender itself usury (), the birth of money from money, and called it the most hated sort of moneymaking.
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura
—Ezra Pound, “Canto XLV”
Is money the best system? That lack of certain pieces of paper can condemn ordinary people to misery and early death does not seem “best” in any way. Yet as globalization seeks out and destroys the last vestiges of the old economy—based on barter and networks of reciprocal obligations—poverty will be the inevitable result. A few, of course, will find new power and privilege, and lots of new gadgets. Everyone, in fact, will have new gadgets, even the poor. The poor may no longer have gardens or a pasture held in common or their own fishing boats, but they will have new gadgets.
Money is about poverty, and the threat of poverty. It is poverty that gives money value. By threat of poverty, one must not only work—which people have always done—but must work for money, even if that work has no value or is destructive. And money is about power—power backed up by arms and prisons. Poverty, power, and prison are money’s soul, flesh, and bones.
Do I have a better idea? No, but that doesn’t change my analysis. Still, just for fun, let’s remove one leg of the tripod: legalize counterfeiting. Would the world be better or worse? Would there be less poverty, or more? Less crime, or more crime?
“Oh, Moe’s Money, sure, I’ll take that.”
“Treasury note? Hmmm. You got anyt
hing else?”
One could carry around whole rolls of money in case one got mugged. Counterfeiting would naturally prey on the big currencies. Local scrips would acquire a new respect. And while the paper value of the tycoons would drop, they would still be tycoons—they’ve been printing money for years. For everybody else, actually, life would go on just fine. Maybe there would be more trading. And maybe you’d want to know the person you were working for, and whose money it was you were taking.
But paper money is a relic anyway. Money today is mostly a web of interlocking databases. There have been proposals in the government to phase out the hundred-dollar bill, to curb the black market. Even the writing of checks has declined. More and more financial transactions are electronic and invisible: card swipes, bits shifting on a hard drive. Little fees can be sliced off, the house take at the gaming table.
And the “house” can create more money whenever it wants to—a note of obligation—which can then be bundled and sold. Who needs a Fed? Get the U.S. out of the money business. Leave it to private businesspeople, who know what they are doing and have such a great record. Like banks, or insurance companies. Ha Ha. We take your money and then we’re gone.
Burned.
Burned me.
Caesar burned me.
My partner burned me.
I’m busted.
I need a hundred dollars.
Now gimme money.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Back to metal? An ounce of gold for a couple of pounds of laptop? Or further back, before money. There are still things of value—cowrie shells, strings of dentalium, beaten sheets of copper, herds of cattle or horses. “Big men,” those with much, give feasts, and thereby earn prestige. Ordinary people get by. Maybe a young man has to take risks to earn the bride price if he’s in love with a girl from a big house.
It’s a question of scale and edge: before money, subsistence level was the poorest one could be, and it was the way most people lived. Money has created a poverty below subsistence. Today some “earn” enough money in one hour to feed and shelter one hundred people for a whole year, or to pay twenty thousand people minimum wage, or to pay almost five thousand people twenty dollars an hour and still leave two hundred dollars an hour for oneself.
Milton Friedman’s grandfatherly voice tells us that those women in the sweatshop aren’t being exploited, they are being given a chance—they are working their way up. After all, when they lived on farms they didn’t have any money at all. Now they can buy things. Now she’ll do a strip tease. Now she’ll let me fuck her.
Perhaps the bottom of the scale is a better measure of the wealth of a society than the gold and jewels at the top. We need something better than the silly and wholly self-serving Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which really has nothing to do with “product.” A country that destroys its farming soil to force out three record yields isn’t making itself richer, it is impoverishing itself. We can save money by not dealing with our trash—better bottom line. Put the trash in the water. Put the trash in the air. Plastic in the oceans. Save money. Write another IOU. Maybe deserts aren’t so bad. I’ll be dead. But hey, I’m rich now. Money defines only itself as “capital,” excluding air, water, forests, and the health, happiness, and harmony of citizens.
The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money.
—George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara, 1907
One of eleventh-century Chinese statesman Wang An-Shih’s reforms was to make low interest government loans available to farmers, to undercut usurious loan-sharking.
Any of the recent U.S. bailouts would have been better served by giving the money to the people: $5,000 per person, $10,000 per person, $20,000 per person. Thousands of new businesses spring up; there is money in circulation, new joint ventures, new banks, education in neighborhood collectives—a chance to break out of the cycle of poverty. Who knows better what is good for the people than the people? Not Papa Banker and his cronies at the Treasury.
The single most successful issue of paper money in the colonies, in Maryland, was given directly to the taxpayers.
How to play the game? Let’s be rational, think this through. Cooperate or double-cross? Tit for Tat or Screw ’em all the Time? Actually, let’s cheat: collude, merge, monopolize the market and then split the take. That’s win-win. Let’s bankrupt the company, pocket the money, pay a couple of fines, then retire. Rational.
They dance, out of sight, and play muted tambourines, all the way to the bank. We would like to quiet their laughter and wipe the smirks from their faces, perhaps call them philistines, but they own the speakers and the paper. A mass of cold air is pouring through the mountain passes: I need a jacket. No money. Zen Roshi Robert Aitken once opined, somewhat enigmatically, that it is easier to practice “true poverty” if you own your own home.
Money, you must realize, is a dharma. Like all things—pickup trucks, loaves of bread, flashy jewelry—money is a part of the Buddha’s body, and therefore just as precious and as deserving of respect, as a bucket of water. “It dazzles, and it slips us by,” writes Gary Snyder in “Money Goes Upstream.” That which seeks to own the source: winged Hermes, god of commerce and thieves.
6
ALL MY RELATIVES:
THE BINARY FRACTALS OF THE GIFT ECONOMY
BARBARA ALICE MANN
One of the most successful cons in modern history has people—intelligent people, educated people—believing that capitalism is the only “realistic” economic system to support complex, sophisticated cultures. There are intrepid iconoclasts out there, refusing to reify capitalism, but they are typically waved off as fantasy-prone, Marxist, or unemployed. Most Westerners sadly accept that the only alternative to capitalism ever attempted was the “failed” Soviet experiment. Thus has future economic discussion been ceded to the realm of Western imagination, where one idiosyncratic dys/u/topia after another is proposed only to be dashed. Before we all jump off the utopian pier into rippling delusion, however, let us try quizzing the original premise.
Is capitalism the only system ever to support large-scale, sophisticated cultures?
Hell, no! Gift economies have been doing that splendidly, throughout history.
Around the world, both historically and into the present, gift economies have thrived. In Native North America, they were the right hand of our constitutional democracies, and still flourish underground. The gift economy of the magnificent Iroquois League supported five nations from the year 1142 on, adding the sixth nation in 1712, and including another sixty or so affiliated nations along the way.1 The Lahu, or mountain people of southern China, have survived both colonial capitalism and Maoism into the present, their gift culture battered but intact.2 The Berber women in Kabylia continue to manage abundance without capitalism in the unforgiving lands of North Africa.3 The Minangkabau of Sumatra do just fine without capital; indeed, their gift culture weathered the 2005 tsunami.4 The Sami (“Laplanders”) of Finland are emerging from centuries of oppression, by both Soviets and Western Europeans, with their gift economies alive.5 These are just some of the gift economies extant in the world, and the list does not even scratch the surface of the theoretical work that has been done on the economics of the gift.6
Why, then, the steady, determined gaze away from these healthy alternatives, all of them with economic histories longer and more robust than that of capitalism?
Part of the determined oblivion has to do with ignoring the competition so it will go away. Obviously, the West’s Cult of Capitalism—and it is a faith system—does not wish to lose converts. The rest of the oblivion has to do w
ith the structure of gift-giving cultures: they are all matriarchies. Indeed, the gift economy is the one, constant characteristic that all matriarchies, worldwide, hold in common. You, the reader, do not know about this, because, in the West, these facts are taboo, forbidden knowledge.
The hatchet job that Western patriarchy has done on matriarchy is a masterpiece. As a silencer, the fiat worked fine in academia, where, until the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology and history flatly forbade matriarchies to exist. No one got a PhD by noting that they did. Marija Gimbutas study groups were banished to a moldy corner of the gym. The male-run, raiding economies of Western Europe were officially billed as The Way It Is and Always Has Been, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME!
Elsewhere, Western law declared women nonpersons, while in religion, that companion-in-chief of capitalism, desert monotheism, spent two thousand years blackening the eye of every woman from Eve on, while insisting implausibly that men had birthed everything in sight. That last violation of common sense worked because people had grown accustomed to swallowing at least three impossibilities before breakfast: denial of death (“Jesus lives”—and so can you!), denial of woman-worth (Adam’s rib, Eve’s sin, Lilith’s nonexistence), and denial of compassion (everlasting hellfire, Armageddon).
Clearing away the underbrush for a plain discussion of gift economies requires us first to look away from Western culture, a task that most Westerners have an awfully hard time managing. Even when they think they are discarding Western ideas, they continue Euro-forming the data with energy.7 This is because the most basic concepts of any birth culture seed themselves so deeply into the consciousness of their members that pulling them into the light for rational evaluation is a time-consuming, emotionally unpleasant, readily sacrificed chore.
What Comes After Money Page 6