money
Carl Marx was both
a compassionate and angry man.
He, more so than Engels,
photographs well and looks
very much as if he knows
what he’s doing.
He was so driven by the suffering he saw
among the impoverished urban poor
that he used his talents
to show how owning money
and having power were synonymous
and that money in the hands of a few
must inevitably lead to the suffering of many.
He decided that by doing away
with the ownership of money,
power would naturally find itself
distributed fairly throughout a population.
His insights into history were remarkable,
but he failed to understand
one critically important thing:
that hierarchy is necessary
for the formation of society.
All forms of social organization
are composed of separate organisms
that physically collocate
to form structures and pursue goals.
The first thing that happens
in the formation of the social order
is the congregation of individual organisms.
(Communication can sometimes
substitute for transportation.)
The second thing that happens
is the struggle for dominance and control
among individual organisms
and groups of organisms
within the larger system.
It happens every time.
This struggle is an ongoing process,
and where politics are concerned
is not confined to authoritarian systems
as many might suppose,
but applies equally to all systems including
communism, socialism, capitalism and democracy.
This is where money comes in.
Money is the stimulus for congregation.
Money greatly speeds up communication.
Money is key to the formation of hierarchy.
To understand human society
in terms of its politics,
you must first understand money.
Watch where it accumulates,
what forms it takes,
how it moves from one place to another,
who has it and who doesn’t.
Money is the socialization of desire
and desire in turn the catalyst for goal formation.
Money makes completely abstract
the concept of social exchange.
Money is a primary ordering principal
and a universal measure of value.
Money transforms nature.
Money occupies Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs from top to bottom
as both a generalized stimulus and belief system.
Within society,
money is a means to avoid confusion.
It lets you attach a number to anything
that can be bought or sold.
(Once you have a number then, theoretically,
two parties to a transaction
can easily exchange things
without confusion or resentment.
The general consensus used to be
that by providing a symbolic substitute for war
and other forms of physical aggression,
monetary transactions
would serve to reduce social conflict;
we now know that is not the case.)
In post-industrial society,
most of the things a person needs
in order to live safely and comfortably
come with numbers attached to them:
cars, houses, furniture, clothes, food, medicine, etc.
Money becomes most important
in the face of change.
When things change quickly
for a long enough period of time,
a point is reached
at which everything tends to be measured
in terms of money:
love, peace, happiness, health,
loyalty, integrity,
spirituality, even immortality.
At this point money becomes
money becomes the means by which
the measure of social order.
As both a positive reinforcement
and a negative punishment,
money makes operant conditioning
the dominant behavioral paradigm
within advanced societies.
If you understand money well enough,
money can be made to perpetuate itself
without ever having to change
what it is into anything other than itself --
a contract for the exchange of money.
International exchange rates
are a prime example.
Interest rates and stock indexes
work almost as well;
they are just a little slower.
Finally, there are commodities.
A commodity is anything you treat
as if its principal value
is its exchange value.
Commodities allow money
to be exchanged many times more often
than is actually necessary
to make, distribute and consume a product.
Commodity trading creates products
from things as unlikely as weather patterns,
environmental emissions and election outcomes.
Commoditization has a multiplier effect
on the intrinsic value of a product.
Rather than value the product
as if its value were contained within itself,
commoditization creates extrinsic value
by surrounding the product
with transactions --
as many transactions
within as many networks
of transactions as possible.
It is this concept of transaction as money
that converts money into a message
between two or more parties,
thereby creating the opportunity for mediation.
Mediation is the first act to occur
in the formation of hierarchy.
Mediation is the controlling
process underlying commoditization.
The struggle for dominance and control
within society,
especially as it applies
to money transactions,
is a struggle over mediation.
Intermediation, disintermediation and
reintermediation are all part
of the larger process of mediation.
The history of capitalism and of money
is the history of the intermediation,
disintermediation and reintermediation
of various individuals
and groups of individuals
into the chains and networks
of transactions
that constitute economies,
governments and societies.
The rules governing mediation
and the exchange of money
are the principal means
by which these groups of individuals
coexist -- peacefully or otherwise.
Intermediation, disintermediation
and reintermediation
underlie all social institutions:
family, education, religion,
government, economics and war.
Chains and networks
of mediated money transactions
serve to integrate
all the world’s institutions
within the larger social order.
They provide the means by which
value is created
and both wealth and power
are conferred, captured and controlled.
They provide the means by which
the current state of world politics
can best be understood.
When you think about society,
don’t think Plato, Marx, Malthus, Smith,
Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes,
Nietzsche, Kant or Hegel.
Think hierarchy.
Think money.
Think mediation.