Специально для lojso я попросила Давида Грэбера прислать текст в поддержку тезиса о том, что рынки созданы и контролируются государствами, а не наоборот ("государство против рынков, свободу капиталу и предпринимательству").
Что-то ни как не могу собраться с силами и перевести с английского.
Поэтому, пока публикую в оригинале. Как получится перевести, повторю по-русски:
The real history of markets is nothing like what we’re taught to think it is. The earlier markets we are able to observe appear to be spillovers, more or less, side effects of the elaborate administrative systems of ancient Mesopotamia. They operated primarily on credit. Cash markets arose through war: again, largely through tax and tribute policies that were originally designed to provision soldiers, but later became useful in all sorts of other ways besides. It was only the Middle Ages, with its return to credit systems, that saw first manifestations of what might be called market populism: the idea that markets could exist beyond, against, and outside of states, as in those of the Muslim Indian Ocean—an idea that was later to reappear in China with the great silver revolts of the fifteenth century. It usually seems to arise in situations where merchants, for one reason or another, find themselves making common cause with common people against the administrative machinery of some great state. But market populism is always riddled with paradoxes, because it still does depends to some degree on the existence of that state,[1] and above all, because it requires founding market relations, ultimately, in something other than sheer calculation: in the codes of honor, trust, ultimately, community and mutual aid, more typical of human economies. This in turn means relegating competition to a relatively minor element. In this light, we can see what Adam Smith ultimately did, in creating his debt-free market utopia, was to fuse elements of this unlikely legacy with that unusually militaristic conception of market behavior characteristic of the Christian West. In doing so was, surely, prescient. But like all extraordinarily influential writers, he was also just capturing something of the emerging spirit of his age. What we have seen ever since is an endless political jockeying back and forth between two sorts of populism—state and market populism—without anyone somehow noticing that they were talking about the left and right flanks of exactly the same animal.
The main reason we’re unable to notice, I think, is that legacy of violence has twisted everything around us. War, conquest, and slavery, not only played the central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected. The story told at the end of chapter 7, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like.[2]
If this book has shown anything, it’s exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it’s even possible to imagine that’s what life is really about. Especially, when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it. As I’ve emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations—that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call “love”—but there’s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, system of hierarchy built on top of it. These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous. Still, what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of calculating exchange. As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor, and owing someone a debt, is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demands equivalence. And such equivalence—especially when it involves equivalence between human beings (and it always seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ultimate values)—only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so, that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: “seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother,” “one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred fifty bushels of grain”…
This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that, historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it. But even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver—melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian woman’s ankle-bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history—could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.
[1] Under the Caliphate, to guarantee the money supply; in China, through systematic intervention to stabilize markets and prevent capitalistic monopolies; later, in the US and other North Atlantic republics, through allowing the monetization of its own debt.
[2] True, as I showed in chapter 5, economic life will always be a matter of clashing principles, and thus might be said to be incoherent to a certain extent. Actually I don’t think this is in any way a bad thing—at the very least, it’s endlessly productive The distortions born of violence strike me as uniquely insidious.
If nothing else this approach helps solve one of the obvious mysteries of the fiscal policy of so many early kingdoms: why did they make subjects pay taxes at all? This is not a question we’re used to asking. The answer seems self-evident. Governments demand taxes because they wish to get their hands on peoples’ money. But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn’t the obvious thing be just to grab control of the gold and silver mines? Then the king would have all the money he could possibly need. In fact, this is what ancient kings would normally do. If there were gold and silver mines in their territory, they would usually take control of them. So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one’s picture on it, causing it to circulate among one’s subjects—and then demanding those same subjects give it back again?
This does seem a bit of a puzzle. But if money and markets do not emerge spontaneously, it actually makes perfect sense. Because this is the simplest and most efficient way to bring markets into being. Let us take a hypothetical example. Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men, and animals, just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions.[1] On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers, and then demanded that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one’s entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.
This is a bit of a cartoon version, but it is very clear that markets did spring up around ancient armies; one need only take a glance at Kautilya’s Arthasasatra, the Sassanian “circle of sovereignty”, or the Chinese “Discourses on Salt and Iron” to discover that most ancient rulers spent a great deal of their time thinking about the relation between mines, soldiers, taxes, and food. Most concluded the creation markets of this sort was not just convenient for feeding soldiers, but useful in all sorts of ways, since it meant officials no longer have to requisition everything they need directly from the populace, or figure out a way to produce it on royal estates or royal workshops. In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption—again, coming from Smith’s legacy—that the existence of states and markets is somehow opposed, the historical record implies exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.
As one might imagine, state theories of money have always been anathema to mainstream economists working in the tradition of Adam Smith. In fact, Chartalism has tended to be seen as populist underside of economic theory, favored mainly by cranks.[2] The curious thing is the mainstream economists often ended up actually working for governments and advising such governments to pursue policies much like those the Chartalists described—that is, tax policies designed to create markets where they had not existed before— despite the fact that they were in theory committed to Smith’s argument that markets develop spontaneously of their own accord.
This was particularly true in the colonial world. To return to Madagascar for a moment: I have already mentioned that one of the first things that the French general Gallieni, conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of the island was complete in 1901 was to impose a head tax. Not only was this tax quite high, it was also only payable in newly issued Malagasy francs. In other words, Gallieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone in the country give some of that money back to him.
Most striking of all though was language he used to describe this tax. It was referred to as the “impôt moralisateur,” the “educational” or “moralizing tax.” In other words it was designed, to adopt the language of the day, to teach the natives the value of work. Since the “educational tax” came due shortly after harvest time, the easiest way for farmers to pay it was to sell a portion of their rice crop to the Chinese or Indian merchants who soon installed themselves in small towns across the country. However, harvest was when the market price of rice was, for obvious reasons, at its lowest; if one sold too much of one’s crop meant that meant one would not have enough left to feed one’s family for the entire year, and thus, be forced to buy one’s own rice back, on credit, from those same merchants later in the year when prices were much higher. As a result farmers quickly fell hopelessly into debt (the merchants doubling as loan sharks). The easiest way to pay back the debt, in turn, was either to find some kind of cash crop to sell—to start growing coffee, or pineapples—or else, to send one’s children off to work for wages in the city, or on one of the plantations French colonists were establishing across the island. The whole project might seem no more than a cynical scheme to squeeze cheap labor out of the peasantry, and it was that, but it was also something more. The colonial government was were also quite explicit (at least in their own internal policy documents), about the need to make sure that peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries—parasols, lipstick, cookies—available at the Chinese shops. It was crucial that they develop new tastes, new habits, expectations, that they lay the foundations of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France.
Most people are not stupid and most Malagasy understood exactly what their conquerors were trying to do to them. Some were determined to resist. More than sixty years after the invasion, a French anthropologist, Gerard Althabe, was able to observe villages on the east coast of the island whose inhabitants would dutifully show up at the coffee plantations to earn the money for their poll tax, and then, having paid it, studiously ignore the wares for sale at the local shops, and instead turn over any remaining money to lineage elders, who would then use it to buy cattle for sacrifice to their ancestors.[3] Many were quite open that they saw themselves as resisting a trap.
Still, such defiance rarely lasts forever. Markets did gradually take shape, even in those parts of the island where none had previously existed. With them came the inevitable network of little shops. And by the time I got there, in 1990, a generation after the poll tax had finally been abolished by a revolutionary government, the logic of the market had become so intuitively taken for granted that even spirit mediums were reciting passages that might as well have come from Adam Smith.
Such examples could be multiplied endlessly. Something like this occurred in just about every part of the world conquered by European arms where markets were not already in place. Rather than discovering barter, they ended up used the very techniques mainstream economics rejected to bring something like the market into being.
[1] See Engels (1978) for a classic study of this sort of problem.
[2] Appealing particularly to debtors, understandably drawn to the idea that debt is simply a social arrangement that was in no sense immutable but created by government policies that could just as easily be reshuffled—not to mention, who would benefit from inflationary policies
[3] On the tax: Jacob 1987; for the Betsimisaraka village study, Althabe 1968; for analogous Malagasy case-studies, Fremigacci 1976, Rainibe 1982, Schlemmer 1983, Feeley-Harnik 1991. For colonial tax policy in Africa more generally, Forstater 2005, 2006.
