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UCSD PHIL 166 - Money and Commodities

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Money and Commodities (Excerpt from Spheres of Justice) MICHAEL WALZER The Universal Pander There are two questions with regard to money: What can it buy? and, How is it distributed? The two must be taken up in that order, for only after we have described the sphere within which money operates, and the scope of its operations, can we sensibly address its distribution. We must figure out how important money really is. It is best to begin with the naive view, which is also the common view, that money is all-important, the root of all evil, the source of all good. "Money answereth all things," as Ecclesiastes says. According to Marx, it is the universal pander, arranging scandalous couplings between people and goods, breaching every natural, every moral barrier. Marx might have discovered this by looking around in nineteenth-century Europe, but in fact he found it in a book, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, where Timon, digging for buried gold, interrogates his object: Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides; Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless th'accurst; Make the hoar leprosy ador'd; place thieves, And give them title, knee, and approbation, With senators on the bench: this is it That makes the wappen'd widow wed again; She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again. Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that putt'st odds Among the rout of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature.l Timon has been brought to a state of nihilistic despair, but this is nevertheless the familiar language of moral criticism. We don't like to see priests corrupted, or stout men robbed of their comfort, or religions broken, or thieves admitted to rank and title. But why shouldn't the "wappen'd widow" be spiced to the April day again? Timon is moved here by an aesthetic, not a moral, scruple. The point, however, is the same: the widow is transformed by her money. So are we all, if only we are rich enough. "What I am and can do," wrote Marx, "is not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful women for myself. Consequently, I am not ugly. . . I am stupid, but since money is the real mind of all things, how should its possessor be stupid?"2 This is the "right nature" of money-perhaps especially so in a capitalist society, but more generally too. Marx, after all, was quoting Shakespeare, and Shakespeare put his words into the mouth of an Athenian gentleman. Wherever money is used, it panders between incompatible things, it breaks into "the self-subsistent entities" of social life, it inverts individuality, "it forces contraries to embrace." But that, of course, is what money is for; that's why we use it. It is, in more neutral language, the universal medium of exchange-and a greatconvenience, too, for exchange is central to the life we share with other men and women. The simple egalitarianism of Shakespeare's plebeian rebel Jack Cade: . . . there shall be no money!3 has its echoes in contemporary radical and socialist thought, hut I have difficulty imagining what sort of society it is meant to suggest. Contemporary radicals certainly do not intend to re-establish a barter economy and pay workers in kind. Perhaps they mean to pay workers in labor/time chits exchangeable only at state stores. But these would soon be exchanged more widely, behind the backs of the police if necessary. And Timon would reappear, digging for buried chits. What Shakespeare and Marx objected to is the universality of the medium, not the medium itself. Timon thinks that universality is of the nature of money, and perhaps he is right. Conceived abstractly, money is simply a representation of value. Hence, it's not implausible to hold that every valued thing, every social good, can be represented in monetary terms. It may be that a series of translations are necessary in order to get from this valued thing to that cash value. But there is no reason to think that the translations cannot be made; indeed, they are made every day. Life itself has a value, and then eventually a price (different conceivably for different lives)-else how could we even think about insurance and compensation? At the same time, we also experience the universality of money as somehow degrading. Consider the definition of the cynic attributed to Oscar Wilde: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." That definition is too absolute; it's not cynical to think that price and value will sometimes coincide. But often enough money fails to represent value; the translations are made, but as with good poetry, something is lost in the process. Hence we can buy and sell universally only if we disregard real values; while if we attend to values, there are things that cannot be bought and sold. Particular things: the abstract universality of money is undercut and circumscribed by the creation of values that can't easily be priced or that we don't want priced. Though these values are often in dispute, we can investigate what they are. It is an empirical matter. What monetary exchanges are blocked, banned, resented, conventionally deplored? What Money Can't Buy I have already referred to the sin of simony, which we might take as a paradigmatic example of a blocked exchange. God's offices are not for sale-not, at least, so long as God is conceived in a certain way. In a culture different from that of the Christian Middle Ages, the block might be broken: if the gods can be appeased by sacrifices, why can't they be bribed by glittering gold? In the church, however, this sort of bribery is ruled out. Not that it doesn't occur, but everyone knows thatit ought not to occur. It is a clandestine trade; buyer and seller alike will lie about what they have done. Dishonesty is always a useful guide to the existence of moral standards. When people sneak across the boundary of the sphere of money, they advertise the existence of the boundary.


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