April 20, 1998

Money, Material and Immaterial

When trade begins, it is internal to society. Individuals trade use-values for use-values, i.e., cows for wheat.

Trade between societies also first takes this form of use-value for use-value. Whence exchange-values? At first, trade in tokens is neither an IOU for later delivery of use-values nor is it that a poorer society trades with a wealthier society in order to gather use-values for the former for survival, nor is it that a poorer society trades use-values for tokens from the wealthier, whatever those tokens may symbolize.

Exchange-value, trade in symbols, can only come about after each party to the trade can subsist, i.e., after survival is no longer an issue. Symbolic trade can only be symbolic of trade in the surplus of the material wealth of the society, that which is not necessary. Only nonnecessity allows symbolic media to carry value from one society into another, where those media can be used within the other society for a variety of purposes. Only surplus material wealth within the society allows these media to be used for a variety of purposes. Thus trade is necessarily abstract from the beginning.

When the token is taken for the thing, however, symbolic trade in surplus has already reached into the previously sated economy of necessity, the economy of the household: symbolic trade becomes an end-in-itself, a byproduct cum goal. Money has been liberated. There are good arguments that the Romans for instance, could see this danger on the horizon, which is why they were so resolutely against banking.

The realm of work does not at first share the unreal character of this goal because now the entire society has been reoriented toward symbolic trade, i.e., the accumulation of exchange-values. This process of accumulation simultaneously became precisely the means of survival for those who formerly produced use-values, which had become plentiful enough to allow exchange, which later allowed symbolic trade, which has now resulted in accumulation for no necessary reason at all. Symbolic trade, which presupposes surplus, reproduces the original survivalist state of affairs.

Manipulation of media via electronic communications technology, interest rates, currency exchanges, and derivative instruments of all kinds—not only options and debt-backed securities, but stocks and bonds themselves—allow the symbols to siphon off every drop of the wealth (the opposed concepts of use-value and exchange-value no longer apply here: the symbolic trade - oriented society has no use for values other than exchange) produced internally, to trade it internationally, for more symbolic wealth. These techniques, combined with automation, allow those most adept with them to replace exchange-value production with services to facilitate symbolic trade. Here, now, the ancient abstraction reaches into the realm of work itself, and nonproductive sectors bloom; the parasitic sectors in general grow out of all imaginable proportion.

The symbolic impulse—idolatry—run rampant finally results in the status quo deistic model of human society, after which will surely come the anthropology corresponding to atheism; in this process of abstraction, the essence of civilization—fruitful labor—shrinks away through the epochs of agricultural, industrial, and electronic management of the former to an infinitesimal-yet-infinitely-interchangeable, omnipresent-yet-immaterial mathematical point.

Spring 1998

money cash work trade labor.theory.of.value