An organic understanding of money
By Sean Jobst, 6 January 2011
Human beings are interconnected to their surrounding environment. From the very moment one human being produced something that the others wanted, some means of exchange was devised. In every culture the medium was something tangible that existed within nature, whether it was precious metals or tangible goods, such as grain. Money was always understood necessarily as being intrinsic in value; something that could be held with the hands or viewed with the eyes.
There was free access to these productive resources, so that labor became the activating factor. The amount of one’s money was determined by the amount of labor they produced. Likewise, there was a sharing of the products of these labor according to need. This organic freedom that was instilled in the earliest human beings, is a natural yearning whose implications are becoming more evident to those who lack this essential freedom, which is free access to the market and the right to choose one’s medium of exchange freely.
“The history of humanity has been largely one long and gradual discovery of the fact that the individual is the gainer by society exactly in proportion as society is free, and of the law that the condition of a permanent and harmonious society is the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with equality of liberty.” (1)
All transactions among these earliest societies were thus based on equality of opportunity and liberty to choose the medium of exchange. Hence, in every sense of the word it was a free market where everyone had equal access to the the market and its tangible resources, with only their hard work or labor determining the nature of its transactions.
History reveals that exploitation only arose in those societies where slavery was instituted. The labor of slaves created a surplus that supported a ruling class. This often created an unnatural disparity of wealth versus labor, so that labor no longer became the deciding factor of wealth, and there was a reverse trend: labor was shared by a greater number of people, while wealth became concentrated into the hands of an ever-decreasing number.
The earliest thinkers recognized that the nature of money was “barren,” as the Greek philosopher Aristotle put it, because it produces nothing of its own. Rather, it cannot be separated from labor which is productive. No matter how much capital one may possess, it will be of no avail without labor to continuously activate it.
However, the reciprocal is very different. Without capital, the laborer would soon be able to produce all their needs by its production. And so our interconnectedness with nature is made even more clear here, for money cannot “mix” with the earth but can only be found from its precious metals, or the crops yielded, or even, in the form of the artificial notion that currently passes for money, the paper that comes from trees.
This is very different with labor, with tilling the soil and planting the crops, where sweat mixes with the earth. “Allah is He who created the heavens and the earth and sends down water from the sky and by it brings forth fruits as provision for you. He has made the ships subservient to you to run upon the sea by His command, and He has made the rivers subservient to you holding steady to their courses, and He has made the night and day subservient to you.”(2) “It is He who sends down water in due measure from the sky by which We bring a dead land back to life.”(3)
It follows then that using the same understanding, with no laborers to consume it capital will remain useless and rot back into the earth. It is through honest labor that wealth becomes activated, in so much as we are stewards of this earth; we depend on it for our livelihood and we should give back to it productively.
And it should be no coincidence that the basis of modern economics is exploitation of real things by artificial entities or concepts. So it is the exploitation of the earth’s actual resources, by denying free access to all which would be justice and would ensure true balance, which is being done by artificial entities called the multinational corporations.
Likewise, the other component of this false structure are the financiers who cannot produce anything of their own but still they take from the tangible labor of others, and burden them with debt – and this is all guaranteed by another artificial entity, the State with its coercive powers, which perpetuates this because it is truly nothing but the merger of government with banking. The politicians are merely the outer wall shielding the real power of the financiers. Yet without the State creating these false hierarchies of wealth, the money masters’ usury would surely crumble.
“Capital is essentially unproductive, and therefore rent and interest are robbery; rent and interest violate the law of fraternity, and cannot do otherwise; the natural increase of wealth tends to their diminution and ultimate disappearance, as is evident from history.” (4)
NOTES:
(1) Benjamin Tucker, Instead of A Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One, New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969, p. 24.
(2) Qur’an, Sura Ibrahim, 14:32-33.
(3) Qur’an, Sura Az-Zukhruf, 43:11.
(4) Charles A. Dana, Proudhon & His “Bank of the People,” New York: Benjamin R. Tucker Publisher, 1896, p. 34.
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