(E) Private Profits and Social Problems.

‘Since human well-being depended at every moment on the good will of the Gods and cosmic powers, religion sought their help for the common concerns of everyday life: the growing of crops, the conduct of business, the difficult enterprises of war and diplomacy…It used divination, dream and oracle to seek the will of the powers, it used prayer and sacrifice to gain their alliance.’

(W. Walker. A History of the Christian Church. 1985.)

A great many people assume there’s nothing more to the theory of evolution than ’survival of the fittest’ – among them economists who seek to justify capitalism by drawing a parallel with competition in nature. Among the first to do so was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) philosopher and editor of ‘The Economist.’ It was he who coined the phrase ’survival of the fittest’ and employed this absurd oversimplification to justify wealth and place the blame for poverty with the poor.

150 years on, largely because science is only half recognized and twisted to ideological ends, the phrase survival of the fittest is equated with capitalist success with disturbing regularity in economic literature – even while capitalist economics directly motivates huge misuse of the natural environment.

The absurdity is that communism could just as easily draw upon a plethora of cooperative strategies for survival in the natural world to justify its core ideas. One of the most fundamental of these is the symbiotic relationship between living cells and mitochondria. Occurring about 3 billion years ago, the incorporation of mitochondria allowed cells to produce energy internally and live in the true sense of the word. Thus there is a cooperative strategy for survival underpinning all life on Earth.

More recently, Matt Ridley, author, and Chairman presiding over the collapse of the Northern Rock Bank, in his book the ‘The Origins of Virtue’ employs an evolutionary paradigm, drawing a straight line through the self-interested cooperation of ants, bees, chimps and dolphins – to explain the trade practiced by primitive people. But we must ask of Ridley’s own example, why the Yir Yonrat tribe did not hunt to extinction the stingrays whose barbs they traded for stone axe heads? (p.199-202)

Up until this point his argument is interesting, arguable and defensible, but with the blithe and throwaway statement: ‘money is a proxy for goods’ (p.204) he throws it all away. The Yir Yonrat tribe didn’t hunt the catfish to extinction to amass a pile of axe heads a mile high because they didn’t think of stingray barbs or axe heads in the way we think of money.

Even allowing for perceived differences in value further from the coast/quarry – these material goods remained merely stingray barbs and axe heads with a value dictated by their function. Each party to the trade could only use so many and beyond that it was impractical to trade. Not so with money. Money is an abstract representation of the value inherent to goods, but does not have the functional limitations of the goods themselves. It is lasting and polyvalent, is valued in its own right, and amassed in quantities impractical as any form or combination of material goods. Money therefore motivates behaviours not limited by the practical rationale of a trade in material goods.

As Jeremy Seabrook here confirms: ‘economics is neither art nor science, but ideology. Its system of accounting is extremely selective about what it includes and omits, in terms of both costs and benefits, profits and forfeits, advantages and penalties…These consequences are referred to as externalities, that is, as having nothing to do with economics, and yet economics continues to expand and colonize over more and more areas of our experience.’ (Victims of Development. 1993. p.173.)

On February 7th 2008 the UK Government announced that Northern Rock would become a public corporation – at a cost to the tax-payer of around £25 billion, above and beyond the £16 billion already advanced to the bank in emergency loans. Matt Ridley reluctantly foreswore a £3 million pay-off from his £315,000 p.a. post.

The astute reader will already understand the surface relation between this and previous arguments; the relationship between epistemology, ontology and identity. The ideology of capitalism is not at all unlike the religious ideology of primitive societies, acting as an ostensibly objective authority – while actually controlled and interpreted by the power holder. There are extremely deep common currents between religion and capitalism that might be traced all the way back to ‘abstract representation’ – but that’s not practical here.

Instead we must take for granted the history of society, following as it does from the use of God as an objective authority for law, and pass over the early origins of money; dog’s teeth and seashells before metallurgy, encompassing in a sentence the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, fast forwarding through hundreds of years of history in which the Church of Rome involved itself in the political affairs of European monarchies by assisting in the growth of and positioning itself at the apex of the feudal system – to consider the origins of modern bill exchange.

Bills of exchange are conceptually critical to modern capitalism because they constitute a further break from the reality of a literal transaction of goods for goods, and even coin for goods, to enable a wholly abstract transaction, bills for goods. The bills are supposed to represent a real quantity of gold held in reserve, but that principle, enshrined in the inscription ‘I promise to pay the bearer upon demand the sum of…’ has been dispensed with over time, releasing money from any necessary connection with reality.

Needless to say, the Church are up to their necks in it, as Glyn Davies confirms: ‘Our knowledge of the origins of modern bill exchange is rather vague, and despite some allusions to their use by Arabs in the eighth century and by the Jews in the tenth century there seems to be no concrete evidence of their use before the period of the Crusades. The growth in the use of bills of exchange is therefore coincident with…the rapid expansion in transfers of large amounts of capital required to finance the Crusades.’ (A History of Money. 2002. p.314.)

The Crusades of course, were a series of religious wars conducted by Christians, aimed at securing the ‘holy land’ against Muslims – beginning in earnest in 1095 A.D. and, one might argue, continuing to this day with America’s massive financial support for, and lack of criticism of the state of Israel, established by the Balfour Declaration in 1948. All of which brings us neatly to our next abstract concept – treated as if it had some epistemic superiority to fact: the nation state.