The totality of things… is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things, in the way goods (are an exchange) for gold, and gold for goods.
After the first coins were minted around 6oo BC in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region, and, perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit. Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 BC-c. 546 BC) , Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 BC-c. 546 BC) , and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 BC-C. 525 BC)–in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced. All three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the nature of the physical substance from which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, air. Anaximander made up a new term, apeiron, “the unlimited,” a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but was the material basis of everything that could be. In each case, the assumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled, combined, divided, compressed, extended, or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particular stuffs and substances that humans actually encounter in the world, from which physical objects are composed–and was also that into which all those forms would eventually dissolve.
It was something that could turn into everything. As [Richard] Seaford emphasizes, so was money. Gold, shaped into coins, is a material substance that is also an abstraction. It is both a lump of metal and something more than a lump of metal–it’s a drachma or an obol, a unit of currency which (at least if collected in sufficient quantity, taken to the right place at the right time, turned over to the right person) could be exchanged for absolutely any other object whatsoever.
… Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance–as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it–but whose nature was a profound enigma.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
[Aristotle] … sees that the value-relation which provides the framework for this expression of value itself requires that the house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things, being distinct to the senses, could not be compared with each other as commensurable magnitudes if they lacked this essential identity. ‘There can be no exchange,’ he says, ‘without equality, and no equality without commensurability’ … Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. 'It is, however, in reality, impossible … that such unlike things can be commensurable,’ i.e. qualitatively equal. This form of equation can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things, it is therefore only 'a makeshift for practical purposes’.
However, Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. …
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1
The generalization of commodity production is only possible when production itself is transformed into capitalist production, when the multiplication and augmentation of abstract wealth becomes the direct goal of production and all other social relationships are subsumed to this goal. The “destructive power of money” which was the object of much criticism in many pre-capitalist modes of production (by many authors in ancient Greece, for example) is rooted precisely in this process of the capitalization of society as a result of the generalization of the money relationship.
Michael Heinrich, “A Thing with Transcendental Qualities: Money as a Social Relationship in Capitalism”
Aristotle contrasts economics with 'chrematistics ’. He starts with economics. So far as it is the art of acquisition, it is limited to procuring the articles necessary to existence and useful either to a household or the state. … With the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed … into trading in commodities, and this again, in contradiction with its original tendency, grew into chrematistics, the art of making money. Now chrematistics can be distinguished from economics in that 'for chrematistics, circulation is the source of riches … And it appears to revolve around money, for money is the beginning and the end of this kind of exchange … Therefore also riches, such as chrematistics strives for, are unlimited. Just as every art which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts which pursue means to an end are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit on them, so with chrematistics there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Economics, unlike chrematistics, has a limit … for the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money … By confusing these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the final goal of economics’ (Aristotle, De Republica, ed. Bekker, lib. I, c. 8, 9, passim).
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 4
titsay
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
areudirty
turnnoffyourmind
