In Adam Smith’s famous words.
Namely the facts the world can, from the perspective of mind, be said to consist of.
See Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, which also points out the total inability of neo-classical economics to move from this preposterous analysis of the individual to an analysis of society.
Economists blame the effects of capitalist activity for crashes (reckless risk-taking, lax regulation, etc.) instead of the cause ( exploitation, inequality, etc.). See John Smith, Imperialism in the 21st Century.
Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life. ‘When an industrial worker runs an electric lathe, he uses products of the labor of generations of physicists, inventors, electrical engineers, lathe makers. He is obviously more productive than a craftsman who carves the same object by hand. But it is in no sense the “Capital” at the disposal of the industrial worker which is more “productive” than the “Capital’’ of the craftsman. If generations of intellectual and manual activity had not been embodied in the electric lathe, if the industrial worker had to invent the lathe, electricity, and the electric lathe, then it would take him numerous lifetimes to turn a single object on an electric lathe, and no amount of Capital could raise his productivity above that of the craftsman who carves the object by hand. The notion of the “productivity of capital,” and particularly the detailed measurement of that “productivity,” are inventions of the “science” of Economics, that religion of capitalist daily life which uses up people’s energy in the worship, admiration and flattery of the central fetish of capitalist society.’
2. The Myth of Money
Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Money converts the quality of life, which is ultimately elusive, into quantity, which can be grasped, measured, stored and stolen · · · Money did not replace barter, but the gift-economy · · · The popularity of money was not due to its efficiency, but its capacity to conceal theft. The most important of all the theft-justifying myths that surround money is that debt is real. Upon this myth the entire dreamworld of modern financialisation is based.
Money automatically converts heterogeneous qualities — the special individuality of people and things, which are embedded in a context — into homogeneous quantities — monetary sums, or scores, which are impersonal, abstract and divorced from the context. Money, Shakespeare’s ‘common whore of mankind,’ is the opposite of unique; it turns everything it touches into a sum and everyone who touches it into sum-maximisers, with one aim only: to get the best deal. For those with no character — no uniqueness, that is — this is no biggie; money cures all problems that want of character presents, except lack of love and the inevitability of death; but it provides the stimulating means to push those bad dreams from view also.
There is one other thing in the universe that man can never get enough of, aside from sex, and that is thought, the sterile mother of money. Both are abstract, infinite and representative of everything; and so can never satiate the desire they generate. For money, like thought, there is no end, no death, no love, no kin, no quality, no context and so, no rest. There can never be an end to it, because there can never be a beginning. Where money comes from and what it really means do not exist, or at the very least do not have to. It is inherently, perfectly, clean: it comes pre-laundered, and is, therefore, an essential component of deception, inadequacy, lovelessness, an essentially meaningless life and mass-theft (see myth 13).
If money, by hiding and justifying the iniquity of its creation, was vital for early experiments in enslaving barbarians, subjugating domestic populations and tearing up the wilderness, it was positively indispensable for early capitalists who, in order to get the project of a totalising, completely self-regulating market system off the ground, had to commodify labour and land and then to tear them from their contexts so that they might be bought, controlled and sold. That human beings and all of nature were not produced in order to be peddled in the market-place was as outlandish a notion for early capitalists as it is for their contemporary progeny, who are busily converting water, conversation, child-care, dating, consciousness and genomes into money-measured commodities.
Some troublesome types seriously pursue matters that do not lead to financial-material advantage. These lunatics are best left to their own devices. Worse though, some go so far as to question the need for a money-system at all, suggesting that perhaps reality is not best served by reducing everything in it to bookkeeping entries. This has forced economists to generate a secondary myth; The Myth of Inefficient Barter. According to Aristotle, Adam Smith, countless textbooks, academic papers and newspaper articles, money, and the market-system which uses it, arose because of the inefficiencies of exchanging goods for goods. Apparently we used to live in a world in which a man with five chickens to sell had no way to get hold of a pair of shoes because the cobbler had chickens of his own; he had to go around barefoot until money was invented and he could sell to the chickenless blacksmith and buy a pair of shoes with the money. This is a convenient story if, like the inventors of coinage (the ‘civilised’ ancient Greeks1), you wish to rip up the world in order to sell the shreds — and, crucially, hide your crimes behind untraceable, contextless cash-symbols — but there is no truth to it.
We use money because it generates and sustains mass-theft, unlimited desire and ego; not because, as the capitalist fairy-tale has it, barter was ‘inefficient’. Prehistoric society and many pre-modern societies did not use barter to allocate resources, but informal, non-usurious, credit, centralized redistribution and the so-called ‘gift-economy’ — just as friends and families do today2. Both money and barter were used only for ritual and for trade with enemies — which is what they are still used for. The difference is that now everyone must be considered an enemy (the official term is competitor) or as a tool (official term; employees) in the insane activity known as business.
All this has been well-known for well over half a century, and is slowly entering common knowledge, but it is, unsurprisingly, never mentioned by capitalist journalists and academics. Economists once made constant reference to the origins of capitalism in primal societies. The moment, however, that it became impossible to sustain this myth was precisely the moment when economists abandoned the study of primitive man as irrelevant to understanding the modern world. No capitalist academic who presumes to make judgements of human nature ever refers to pre-civilised, pre-agricultural or pre-conquest peoples anymore, preferring to base their social theories on the implicit idea that only the last couple of thousands of years of history — minus the unfortunate interregnum of feudalism — really represent human nature.
But although the idea that the invention of money removed one of the key obstacles in our attempts to realise our true nature as rational, wealth-maximising automatons is never explicitly evoked, it remains one of the foundational money-myths (collective term: economics) upon which the modern system is based. These myths include; the belief that we need money to organise society, the belief that most money is created by mints or central banks (when, in fact, it is written into existence by private banks — the actual, inflationary, ‘magic money tree’), the belief that money exists as a consequence of economic activity3, the belief that funds (or resources) are limited (see myth 3), the belief that the post-capitalist economy is based on anything real (anything other than finance, that is), the belief that money is a commodity or that it represents ‘the power of capital’, the belief that speculation will somehow, this time, not lead to catastrophic inequality, widespread misery and another horrific crash4, and the belief that, left on its own, the mythic value of money grows by itself.
This last hex is one of the founding myths not just of capitalism, but of civilisation itself. We have come to believe that if we store money, not only will it, unlike substances in the real world, not decay, but it will actually increase in size. Yes! We have created life! Capitalists call the magical generative powers of stored money interest. Non-capitalists, who understand that this miracle money is coming from someone else, call it usury, a form of legalised theft, like rent and taxation, which is literally written into the fabric of Western civilisation.
Usury means lending to make a profit on compound interest. The original debt accrues interest, and then not just the the debt, but the debt plus interest, accrues interest. The debt doesn’t just grow, it grows exponentially. Basing, as we have, our society — indeed our entire civilisation — on usurious debt, doesn’t just mean that we never have enough to repay, but what we do have to repay multiplies, like the fabled rice grain on the chess board, until it fills up the universe. In order to maintain and justify the abyss of degradation that this inevitably leads to — mass poverty, exploitation, despoliation, anything to scrape together enough to make the next payment to the swelling monstrosity that the lender was fast becoming — a moral duty to repay debts had to be impressed on borrowers; an understanding not just that they owed tribute to this or that lender, but that the universe itself is a debtor-creditor arrangement. Human beings are born owing (aka sinful), and can never settle their accounts. When they inevitably betray the benevolent Gods-by-proxy who pay, feed, house and clothe them, they are then defined as ungrateful5, criminal or insane. This understanding is also sometimes known as ‘religion’.6
The powerful lend money to the powerless, who must then pay back more than they borrowed until they are enslaved, or dead. This self-reinforcing feedback loop of borrowing at interest from the future inflates the power of the elites, and with it the bubble of the society they control, until it pops, bringing everyone down with it. The most extensive and catastrophic version of this process began in the 1970s with the end of the idea that capital should be controlled, the beginning of unlimited, unregulated money-flow and speculation, and the creation, manipulation and trading of increasingly sophisticated forms of debt; a process of, effectively, printing money (instead of extracting it as tax from the hyper-wealthy7) known as financialisation, which created unimaginably vast profits for the financial sector by evaporating the world economy, along with all the institutions which manage it, and uploading them, and us, into an inflationary, virtual hyper-economy. This dream-asteroid we find ourselves clinging to, hurtling towards the waking-world, makes the bubbles before it look like microbial burps, and the crashes before it look like derailed slot cars.
Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Caroline Humphrey, Barter and Economic Disintegration, Charles Eistenstein, Sacred Economics, R.D.Baker, The Implausibility of the Barter Narrative & Credit Money in Ancient Babylon.
Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money. Pettifor, a socialist, believes that the solution to monolithic corporations creating their own money, is for monolithic states to do it.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
‘After all I’ve done for you!’
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years. See myth 25. It should now be clear that the superstitions of, say, Christianity, are essentially no different to those of economists. Replace the father, the son and the holy ghost with capital, money and interest and you’ve got yourself The Dismal Church.
‘…by replacing tax revenue with debt, governments contributed further to inequality, in that they offered secure investment opportunities to those whose money they would or could no longer confiscate and had to borrow instead. Unlike taxpayers, buyers of government bonds continue to own what they pay to the state, and in fact collect interest on it, typically paid out of ever less progressive taxation; they can also pass it on to their children. Moreover, rising public debt can be and is being utilized politically to argue for cutbacks in state spending and for privatization of public services…’ Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Streeck also notes, following Magdoff and Sweezy, that underconsumption — fewer people buying fewer things because they’ve been made poorer — has also driven capital owners to look for ‘speculative profit opportunities outside “the real economy.”’
3. The Myth of Scarcity
The white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor. In either case the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes…
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
The system cannot function unless there is never enough. This we call scarcity, which is the opposite of abundance · · · The system must make the fact of abundance impossible to depend on and the idea of abundance impossible to take seriously · · · The inevitable end-point of the system is a reality in which everything is a ‘scarce resource,’ including air, water, time, affection and even conscious awareness of one’s own body.
We can’t afford it, there is not enough money. There is also not enough food, enough energy, enough jobs, enough houses, enough space or enough time. Just as we invent money and then see the world as colourless ideas (sleeping furiously), so we invent capitalism and see the world as a battle for finite resources. The entire universe is reconfigured as a mind-knowable system of facts and all of nature as a war of all against everything for scarce objects. And all this, most extraordinarily, is how it has to be. Just as things can only be sold by being rationally ripped from context, so they can only be bought when they are scarce. The market cannot function unless there is not enough, and so it must ceaselessly work to make sure that nobody ever has enough. If food, water, energy and opportunities for meaningful and enjoyable activity are plentiful there is no need to produce commodities at work or consume them at play. If time is abundant, if space freely available, if necessities are within reach, why bother working for them? Why bother saving them up? Everything crash!
In the real world — a place, alas, so far from most people’s experience it appears to them as dreams do — scarcity does not exist. The natural state of man and woman, is abundance, or endless affluence. This is not, as the systems-man would like to believe, an airy-fairy self-help fantasy, but a demonstrable fact. Scarcity, along with gruelling toil for subsistence, was unknown before civilisation, and was unknown in those societies which, until recently, survived outside of it.1 Observers of non-sedentary, immediate-return foragers are frequently astounded at the profligacy and faith in the future of people who are only ever a few days away from starvation2. Even medieval society did not consider the commons scarce, let alone space or time. It was only when ‘civilisation’ began generating needs, and when capitalism began multiplying them — only when the monolithic system began curtailing access to necessities and capitalism began annihilating them — that human existence filled up with infinitely increasing desires for ever dwindling resources; a word which, in modern usage, always implies something there can never be enough of.
Thus ‘production’ means withdrawing capital from circulation in order to ensure a high rate of return on that which is permitted to dribble out through ‘investment,’ thereby guaranteeing inequality. Thus ‘education’ means learning under the false assumption that knowledge is a scarce product manufactured in an artificially manufactured ‘reality’ in which opportunities to use that knowledge, in the activity we call ‘work,’ are also scarce. Thus ‘travel’ means locomotion under an imposed need to gain access to scarce road, rail and flight resources and to consume scarce energy resources in order to access scarce production or consumption resources placed artificially far away. Thus ‘health’ means access to artificially scarce medical resources, ‘society’ means access to scarce bandwidth, and scarce free time, ‘love’ mean access to scarce mating stock (particularly scarce eggs), ‘achievement’ mean access to scarce media attention, ‘wealth’ means access to scarce money and ‘truth’ means access to scarce facts, or to scarce ‘learning resources’.3
All of which, under a late-stage market system, is inevitable. A usurious, technocratic, debt-economy which forces everyone to pay not just more than they have, but more than exists, inevitably creates a quenchless thirst to produce and consume our way through a diminishing world of quantifiable resources artificially generated by tearing them from their context and then rendering them as money-values. It also creates a huge number of institutions which, in order to survive, must multiply needs and artificially impose deficiencies; which is to say create needy, deficient people, which must then be cared for by caring people. The disabling system and the crippled men and women it produces, crawling over each other in order to obtain their share of an artificially shrinking pie, is therefore masked by the service, aid and the tireless altruism of professionals employed to care for them (see myth 28).
We are told that we cannot take care of our land, or leave nature alone, or build nice houses for everyone, or produce marvellous tools for ordinary people to use... because there is ‘not enough money’. ‘The state,’ Margaret Thatcher told us, ‘has no source of it; it all comes from what we earn’ And yet, amazingly, the states affected by the 2008 financial crash found trillions of dollars to bail out the banks when their power to create money threatened to bring the entire system to its knees.
In actual fact money is one of the key means by which the power of men and women to live is made scarce by the system which cannot survive unless abundant educational opportunities become scarce resources (housed in ‘the best schools’), abundant health becomes a scarce resource (bought at expensive delicatessens or recovered in ‘world-class’ clinics), abundant care for the elderly becomes a scarce resource (‘sorry dear, no time to stop and chat, got to clean forty more rooms today’), abundant places for children to play become scarce resources (which must be protected from ever-circling paedophiles), abundant physical affection becomes a scarce resource (Authentic Girlfriend Experience, £200 an hour), abundant water becomes a scarce resource (shipped from the antipodes), abundant nature becomes a scarce, not to mention intensely managed, resource and abundant life is constantly trickling away. Even the opportunity to inhabit our own bodies, to rest, to idle, even to sleep, even this, our very self, must be a scarce resource under the system in its most highly developed form.
We may never reach the capitalist utopia of pay-per-use bodily organs with operating systems which must be installed every six months, of chairs which decay like mushrooms and have to be reprinted every half-hour, of idea-rental and sunlight-meters and water extracted from the moons of Jupiter, but there can be only one way forward for the market-system; permanent, omnipresent existential scarcity, a nightmarish, computer game of endlessly proliferating bar-charts which not only never stop diminishing, but are used up at ever faster rates; and any attempt to stop this process, or even slow it down, is ipso facto, criminal or insane.
The classic account of ‘primitive affluence’ is Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society, which demonstrated that modern scarcity and hard-work are unknown in pre-civilised societies. Sahlins’ work is generally accepted as accurate, if limited, over enthusiastic and a tad sloppy (see for example T. Kaczynski’s corrective, The Truth about Primitive Life). For a thorough overview of how little hunter-gatherers work, and what kind of work they do, see e.g. Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers. Note also this conclusion in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers: ‘The most important challenges to economic orthodoxy that come from the descriptions of life in hunter-gatherer societies are that (1) the economic notion of scarcity is a social construct, not an inherent property of human existence, (2) the separation of work from social life is not a necessary characteristic of economic production, (3) the linking of individual well-being to individual production is not a necessary characteristic of economic organization, (4) selfishness and acquisitiveness are aspects of human nature, but not necessarily the dominant ones, and (5) inequality based on class and gender is not a necessary characteristic of human society.’
Not that this means pre-conquest foragers did not plan; far from it — some of their hunting and gathering strategies required as much forethought and long-term coordination as civilised design — but that these plans were not predicated on a stingy universe.
Ivan Illich, Towards a History of Needs.
