17 The MONEY ECONOMY Free Enterprise and Trade.
The money economy (the way we are presently managed) is the chief vehicle of competition. It began long ago with the practice of barter, which grew alongside the concept of possession. This concept of possession recognised title to ownership of things, so reducing the need constantly to defend possession of them, and barter was a means of obtaining things, without having to fight to possess them, by exchange. There is a view, amongst those who are disenchanted with the money economy, that if we returned to barter all would be well. But barter is the ancient father of modern economics which has inherited its characteristics. Barter itself was fathered by the principle of competition, for it is not a means of providing for the needs of all; nor is it a matter of parting with something only in exchange for something else of equal value, which is bad enough, but of seeking to exchange to advantage, which is worse.
The practice of bartering, or buying and selling, is so ancient that we seem unable to imagine an alternative. It is possible to see it as workable in principle if accompanied by goodwill, but whilst true human kindness would be willing to give, the principle of barter is that you do not give without return. The practice of barter has become part of human nature, but in that it serves the impulsions of competitive self-interest and fails to share equally it is unworthy of intellect, and so not our true nature.
Barter might work temporarily, between peoples possessing different things of need to each other and in equal measure. But from the beginning of civilisation competitive human groups fought for possession of territory, and territories were not equal in size or productivity and might have to support many or few people. So some people were rich in resources and could afford to demand the highest exchange value in barter, so becoming richer. Others were poor and unable to afford to supplement their resources by barter, so becoming poorer. Thus, whilst barter reduced the tendency to fight for survival between individuals, and equal territories, it increased the pressure for war between unequal territories. Also, by fostering competitive possessiveness and creating the quality of richness, barter encouraged acts of conquest out of greed for greater riches. All of this which applies to barter applies equally to its successor, the money economy.
The money-economy takes the grounds for decision-making away from human reason. It is a constraint, but upon good as well as bad behaviour. It contains no moral excuse, and the balance it achieves is not for the general good, like the balance of nature, but is between a minority, which may express itself wilfully in all kinds of instinctive and intellectual ways, and a majority, whose expression is restricted and stunted. But those freedoms which the Machine does give to humanity are given on the Machine's terms. No humans are able openly to oppose automatic reality. The minority are free only to exploit the automatic systems. For instance, the farmer is not really free to decide how to farm - the money economy and attendant technology virtually determine his choice of decisions. But he does take those decisions, whilst the farm workers, representing the majority, do what he tells them to do - through him they serve the Machine. They do exert a certain restricted influence in that they make demands on the Machine's supplies, but they have no power of decision.
Money determines both demand and supply, for example in the field of housing. There is no question but that everybody needs good shelter, and all desire that it should be well built, situated and arranged. We are fully capable of building every house accordingly, varying the size only to suit the size of family. But our houses vary enormously, from mansions to hovels, for no good and intelligent human reason, but for money-economy reasons. Those with the most money are able to demand the supply of houses which carry their desires to extremes of luxury. As a consequence, those with the least money gravitate to the lowest extremes of poor housing - to slums and shanty towns. We take this to be logical, because we think in money-economy terms, but there is no human logic in it.
However, in the more 'advanced' societies, we would like to think that humane considerations prevent the extremes of wealth or poverty being reached. The chaotic inhumanity of unchecked competition is acknowledged, but paradoxically it is the main tool of competition, the implacably amoral money economy, which is also used by governing authority - humanitarian, moral or democratic as we might suppose that authority to be - in the attempt to control the worst extremes of competition, by such as taxation and systems of social security. There is a growing movement critical of our present economic systems, but it will get nowhere unless and until it realises that to rectify any one feature of the present social system requires that its whole economy, i.e. management, be changed.
Money economics is not a true human science - if it is a science at all - because, like the whole of our automatic society, it is a mixture of incompatibles; at best it is an attempt of moral intelligence to take a meaningful part in an unintelligent game with its own unchallenged, amoral, hard and fast rules. The money economy is supposed to be the responsibility of intellect but it is beyond human intelligence to predict or control, not only because it is so firmly established, independently of intellect, but because it appeals to human wilful instinct. We should have but one moral standard - that of supraconscious humantruth - but we have three. We might automatically calculate that a project is economically viable, intellectually judge that it is morally indefensible, but as a compromise decide that it is politically acceptable. Even where we succeed in a measure of control over economic extremes, e.g. by the Monopolies Commission (which is a compromise only halfway to intelligent because it sees competition as healthy in that it keeps down prices, as opposed to market domination by one manufacturing concern which results in higher prices), we are not thus controlling the money economy, only partially restraining its overall control of us.
The money economy relies heavily on incentives. The appeal of its material rewards to our instincts incites us to do whatever the Machine requires of us, to the point where we are unwilling to do any work without reward. This gives rise to the view that incentives are a good thing, for without them we would be willing to do nothing, and stagnate. The truth is that without the Machine we would revert to doing that which was necessary, but voluntarily and intelligently. Money incentives cause unnecessary production and give other reasons for activity than the need for that activity and its products. This brings us once again to the inescapable conclusion, which reason must repeatedly reach, that society is not run by humanity in our interests - it runs automatically in its own competitive interests.
The money economy has pursued its own interests by making us units in a consumer society, whose combined function is to dispose of its products so as to make its continuing seem necessary. It has given meaning and purpose to our automated lives by creating the power of money, a power which is conveyed to us as we earn it and released by us when we spend it. Money has also cultivated pride of possession, another source of power to be got from the Machine and from the envy of an automated society which values above most things the ownership of money, goods and chattels.
A major division in our world society is that between rich and poor in terms of money, and between privileged and underprivileged in terms of possession and status. Those on one side of this divide have a very different view of the Machine from those on the other, but both views perpetuate this reality because almost all humans are presently automated. If the poor revolt, it is not against the Machine but for a bigger share of its rewards, and the rich resist because they do not want to lose their advantages. When the average family income is £12000 per year, the family living on £7000 feels relatively neglected, and the individual who is paid £100,000 or more per year for skilled intelligence is being rewarded for his or her least human qualities. This is not the way for an intellectual race to conduct itself - this is the behaviour of a sophisticated animal.
Economics changes the environment, raising its tempo and stripping it of natural beauty in order to bind us to both producing and buying the products and services of the Machine, and thus robbing us of pleasures and contentments of the old environment to which we were instinctively adjusted, or the intellectual fulfilment of a new environment for which we are truly and wholly fitted. We must expect that our growing pressure on Earth requires some technical development, but the way in which our society is developing into a super-Machine is fraught with the pitfalls of unbridled instinct and does not fulfil intellect. Money economics is a mathematical discipline which has, in theory, infinite possibilities but the world, and even the universe, is finite. The competition between nations means that economic development is held back in one place while it forges ahead in another but overall, unless we overcome it, it shall go ever more quickly forward.
It is an incredible fact that we do not see the ultra-stupidity of the competitive money economy, even in the face of its crushing neglect of about a quarter of all humanity and the unequally graded fortunes of the rest from poverty to prosperity. One reason is that the system is served by experts whom we suppose to know what they are about but who are conditioned to money thinking, employed by the system to think that way, and watched and relied upon by other experts who are geared to the identical system. Their findings have to accord with the aims and values of all institutions of the money economy, whose gears are meshed together in the same way.
These experts are on the rich and privileged side of the human divide, their experience, life-style and mental outlook different from the underprivileged on the other side. I have pointed out already that the Machine is perpetuated by the fact that people on both sides are automated Automatic reality has three more tricks to keep it dominant and unchallenged. One is that practically all humans are so preoccupied with either keeping their privileges or trying to make ends meet that few feel free to intellate so as to become critically aware. Another trick is that those in authority are those who have been prepared for it by appropriate conditioning, and are the most highly rewarded, so they automatically support the money economy. The rest who are least succesful or rewarded are subject to responsible authority, and their dissatisfaction is made to look like irresponsible ignorance. The third trick is that being preoccupied with and prejudiced towards the outlook of their own side, neither side sees the other's viewpoint. In particular the privileged lack conscientious sympathy for the deprivations of the other side.
It is commonly thought that we have to have money economics and free enterprise and trade - that's what makes the world go round. This is simply because we have always had them, cannot imagine life without them, presently depend on them, and will not see beyond them. Even communism, which supposedly abhors free enterprise, still uses money, and still trades. All countries progress acording to present economic circumstances and in more or less the same way, whetever their politics. Ask yourself if these things are necessary. Do they work for the general human good? Is the whole money economy inescapable? Is it a system designed fairly to distribute the world's produce, to see that the needs of all humans are met? - if so, it is patently a failure. Or is it merely a means of ensuring that as we are able and willing to give our labour, so shall we receive our reasonable wants? - if so, it cannot be said to work. Is it, then, a means of controlling human greed, by subjecting it to the rigid law of money exchange? But who is to say that this economy does not of itself create and encourage greed, by making it profitable to manufacture things, to arouse desire and demand for them by advertising, and to make their supply available through commerce and trade - things which would not be desired if they, and the economic valuation of them and their possession, did not exist? Or is it just a method of maintaining the natural pecking order? - if so it is unworthy of an intellectual race.
Free enterprise and trade are necessary features of the money economy. These are activities of human individuals and groups motivated by desire for its profits, not by concern for the general human good. When these activities decline - when there is economic recession - human suffering follows, to be relieved by economic recovery. This does not mean that flourishing free-enterprise and trade is a good thing, but that human well-being depends on chance - on the random processes of a mathematical system, rather than on the intelligent care of a humantrue system. The competitive money economy is supposed to be efficient whilst publicly owned industries are said to be inefficient, and this is no doubt so, in money terms. But consider the gross inefficiency of trade, in real terms. With some exceptions, such as certain restrictions on the arms trade in the UK, we will manufacture and sell anything to anyone willing to buy, whatever it is and wherever they are. Goods are transported the length and breadth of a country, often similar goods in opposite directions, or across the world between different countries, for the sake of money profit and without regard to the waste of road, rail and sea transport, of the metal and energy which goes into making the trucks, wagons and ships, or the fuel to drive them.
On top of all this largely unnecessary activity is an equally wasteful, pointless discipline imposed by the money economy. This insists that every transaction of making, buying, selling, transporting and servicing must be accounted for. The processes of money-accountancy are extremely complex, all-embracing, and are taken very seriously by the Machine, yet they are entirely irrelevant to the fundamental organisation necessary to a humantrue society. Were they to be eliminated it would still be necessary to calculate needs, and supplies to meet those needs, but that is all. Think of all those things that are familiar and obligatory parts of our automatic reality but which have no essential part to play in good human relations. Payslips, tax returns, customs and excise laws, bank statements, bills, receipts, cheques, quotations, check-outs, tenders, dividends, share certificates, interest rates, balance sheets, price lists, credit cards, auctions, debt collectors, capital gains, insurance premiums, liquidations, assets, budgets. Think of the huge amount of wasted effort and resources all these represent; how many millions of people are employed, and computers used, to deal with them, and how much private time everybody is compelled or incited to devote to them.
Let me take an example which demonstrates how free trade, by converting desire into demand and then supplying that demand, can obey the laws of the money economy by providing a food which is unnecessary, to say the least, whilst failing to provide adequate supplies of other foods which are vitally needed. In the fifteenth century Western traders discovered an irresistably attractive and therefore highly saleable product - sugar. Up to that time human intake of pure bulk sugar had been limited to occasional consumption of honey. Othwise our healthy needs were provided by the natural sugar which our bodies can efficiently extract from a wide variety of foods from almonds to ripe fruit, and from barley to leeks. The new product was first extracted from sugar-cane in the West Indies, using Negro slave labour. Nowadays it is also extracted from sugar-beet in Europe. It is refined mostly to pure white sucrose, consumption of which has steadily increased.
William Duffy, in his book Sugar Blues (published by Warner Books), points out that sugar is now introduced into many things to make them more saleable - not only foods like bread and tinned beans, or drinks like Cola and beer, but also into tobacco and medicines - and maintains that it is not only unnecessary but, in the large quantities commonly taken, extremely harmful. Sugar is like a drug - most people, in the West anyway, partaking of their quick 'fix' every two or three hours each day. It is held to be unwholesome, contributing to mental diseases, diabetes, cancer, coronaries - "a poison more lethal than opium", especially to those unable to handle it. Sugar has always been a succesful industry of profit to the Machine, which is why the case against it is officially denied and therefore yet little understood by people in general.
Money is not a token to facilitate proper production and distribution of needs - it is a tool of the competitive economy. It is also itself a commodity which, like all other commodities, is unequally and unfairly distributed, and which can be traded for profit, especially between countries. As an economic tool, when given into our hands it compels us to make it work for the Machine. The individual puts small amounts of money to work simply by spending. Large amounts may be used to take possession of means of production and distribution, of land and industrial processes, and to employ intellect, skill and labour - manipulating these facilities in its own interests and for its own purposes, rather than for those of humanity. Furthermore money may be accumulated, as capital which has such power over us as to render our true humanity relatively powerless. It takes away our responsibility and gives it to the Machine, leaving us to do first that which it entices or obliges us to do, or forces on us, and only then to do whatever human good it permits and enables us to do. An example is the industrialist who spends his whole life making vast profits from the sweated labour of others and in his will sets up a charity for the benefit of old retired workers who are suffering the consequences.
We have a certain number of people in the world, representing a certain volume of need, and of labour. We have at our disposal certain resources of energy and material. Logically our concern and activity should be devoted to putting all these assets together so as to sustain ourselves and maintain the biosphere as happily and satisfactorily as we possibly can. The indictment of the Machine and its money economy, in the service of whose highly complex affairs most of us are engaged, is that it does not sustain and maintain the world in this way - quite the contrary.
The money economy has created huge but largely unnecessay facilities and activities which engulf and choke true human potential. Big industrial complexes, commercial groups or financial cartels require big factories, huge machines, heavy transport, big fuel consumption, complex roads and harbours, big sales. They engender service industries, sophisticated accountancy, computerised banking, market research, blanket advertising, prestige building, heavy selling, big worries, dominating powers. In financial terms their products may be cheap, but in human terms they are far, far too expensive. Our labour and intellectual effort is not being applied to our well-being by way of a humane economy but merely to a rapid accelerating, ritual and mindless consumption of resources.
Our society embodies established practices protected by laws, including; administration of law; a system of education; a pattern of rules applied to possession of property and money, its exchange and taxation; a form of governing control over the public. Within these laws, rules and controls our present society provides; road, rail and air transport facilities; postal, telephone, printed, radio, television and computer communications systems; food, clothing, shelter, power, heat and water supplies, and waste disposal. The existence of such comprehensive facilities does not indicate a good society, especially when they are not made fully available to a large proportion of the population. The character of a social system depends on the concepts of reality it obeys. Our world society, harnessed as it is to the Machine and its competitive money economy, has a bad character. This is borne out by the fact that we are divided into competitive nations, each of which devotes a large proportion of its resources to maintaining its own independent military force.
Many of the ills of our society are put down to the inevitable effects of market forces, but these forces are not held accountable for the suffering they cause. They are backed by established custom and have the powerful protection of economic law. Yet many of us are becoming more and more concerned to stamp out the evident ills of our society. This brings us ever nearer to realising the need to remove the economic law which helps to cause them and replace it with human wisdom and compassion. But, so far, we have mostly turned to other institutions of the Machine for temporary cures. In the North, rather than forsake the extravagent habits and diet which the Machine concocts for us, we turn to health-service medicines to counter the ill-effects, and tranquillisers to shield our emotions from nerve-racking automatic affairs. Similarly, rather than face the knowable dangers of economic growth and progress, we put our hope and trust in science and technology to discover or invent ways of averting those dangers.
As individuals we are, or count ourselves to be, privately humane and honest, but the Machine makes collective, public cheats and liars of us all. The competitive money economy is the major dictator of our character, whether as passive demanders or active suppliers. As suppliers, the more scrupulous of us might ensure that our products and services are good but will not hesitate to use deceiptful ways of selling them. The less scrupulous will use the same deceipt to sell bad products and services. Both will see their activity as legitimate, though that which both supply, good or bad, may be humanly inessential.
We view these shameful practices shamelessly because they are so commonplace as to be beyond our sense of shame. Advertising is often a blatant ploy to trick us, but is widely practiced and tolerated. The world of finance is essentially an exercise in bloodsucking, but its human leeches do not hang their heads, and we respect its institutions of banking, insurance and stockbroking. Mature automated men or women might say these were exaggerated charges, but the charges are truly made against the Machine, not against its human adherents who would be expected to deny that they are engaged in trickery or bloodsucking because it is common practice, known as 'business'. This way of gaining wealth, power and privilege is not only condoned by our society - it is applauded. Yet it is a kind of stealing; taking unjustly from others and exploiting them.
Here in the rich North we all take a share in the processes of the money economy and believe that with intelligent application they bring human benefit. In the poor South the majority have no opportunity to take a share yet still believe the process holds their hopes of benefiting in the future, not realising that their poverty is necessary to Northern prosperity. If they in the South are to enjoy economic expansion it will be at the expense of recession in the North. A competitive money economy needs winners and losers, without which it loses its peculiar meaning and impetus.
The competitive money economy depends for its automatic success on creating a consumer society whose major preoccupation is demanding, supplying and using everything the Machine produces. Such a system has its good points. It is exciting because it is energetic and ever progressively changing. The supplier has to sweetheart the consumer to capture demand. This brings a kind of freedom which is better than dictatorship in that humans with power have to watch their step with the public, up to a point. But it makes all subject to the automaton, tied to its objectives and products, squandering the Earth's resources, failing to fulfil unlimited human resources, and relying on the conflict of inequality.
That the money economy does not truly cater for human needs but ignores those needs when they do not serve its own purposes is demonstrated by the situation in the UK in 1987. The economy was in recession, not for human but economic reasons, as a consequence of which four million men and women were out of work. This means they were no longer paid a wage but given at most half the value of their wage in social security benefits. Their needs, or the real needs of the whole community, had not changed. They had done nothing knowingly to cause this recession. A recession is not like a natural calamity, such as a bad harvest or plague, the burden of which is inescapable. It is an unnecessary calamity which we endure or tolerate simply because we accept and do not question the competitive money economy. Those thrown out of work may be buying their homes on mortgages, in which case they would probably be evicted. Those still working for the Machine do not help the others, not because they do not sympathise but because to do so goes contrary to the self-interested norm, which allows us no idea of individually taking responsibility for the whole community as we should. We simply accept that life must be a continual round of booms, recessions, tax returns, wage claims and all kinds of other monetary manipulations and burdens which are irrelevant to our real concerns and potentials.
Money economics is a particularly difficult subject of criticism, partly because it has always been a target of ill-considered protest, partly because it has strong instinctive emotional appeal, and partly because it is so deeply ingrained in our thinking. Protest is usually complaint against the 'haves' on the part of the 'have-nots'; understandable but ineffective because the objective of the latter is to reverse their fortunes, not fundamentally to change the whole system. How firmly the money economy is established is demonstrated by our common acceptance of comparative terms such as wealth and poverty, profit and loss, payment and receipt, creditor and debtor, which would have no meaning in a humantrue society.
This chapter, like the book as a whole, is intended to serve as a programme or stimulus of intellation and discussion. The subject of economics is to be dealt with more fully in pamphlets to follow. The chapters of this book are offered for their radical angles and viewpoints, as springboards for new intellation rather than catalogues of cut and dried information. The important thing is to have a truly reasoned mental foundation, in the light of which all further knowledge can be separated from its automatic connections and brought into true relationship. If we swallow knowledge complete with these automatic connections we shall remain automatically hooked to the Machine. On the other hand, if we take in knowledge, including that which is oposed to the Machine in one or another specific sphere, not wishing to be prejudiced but without a truly reasoned mental foundation, the result will be confusion. The individual's task is to construct this mental foundation, and I am trying to help by easing and shortening what might otherwise be a longer and more difficult process.
Previous Chapters
15 The Wrong Reality
Pt.IV REVELATION
AUTOMATIC DRIVES
16 Competition
Current Chapter
17 The Money Economy
Next Chapters
18 Autoprogression
19 Employment
Back to Home Page INDEX.htm