Access to the money economy and the alternatives

[fpb]

(Note: I rushed to complete this and publish it because, as I am about to leave, I risked losing it.)

I have been skimming - not really reading - some seventeenth-century English history. One half-remembered feature drew my attention: in England in the sixteen hundred there used to be regular riots, because, even in times of public hunger, large amounts of wheat were exported from the country.

That the people rioted is hardly surprising. These were not beggars, but artisans, employed men, even farm labourers, and their wives; and in times when they knew they could not eat and must watch their children starve, they saw wagon trains loaded with good grain, leaving their counties, making their way to the coast. What was going on?

What was happening was something that many people today will not be able to imagine: the buyers in England were unable to compete with those of the Conntinent - and thus to pay for their own grain - because they had no money. That is not to say that they were poor: they were simply very imperfectly inserted in the money economy. They were industrious workers; but a good deal of what they did wass for barter. Worse still, their main contact with the money economy was the payment of rents, taxes and fines. The money they received went out of their hands again. A man might even have a considerable amount of what would ordinarily be called wealth - own his farm and land outright - and still not only be unable to accumulate capital, but barely be able to conceive of it.

In some parts of the world, this is a recent memory - or still going on today. When my mother was a baby, her parents were considerable landowners in the most fertile area of Italy's deep South, Puglia. And she once told me that there never was any problem with anything that could be grown from the farm - mounds of grain, hills of beautiful oranges - but when it was a matter of buying a pair of shoes - drama!! The whole cycle of life tended to go on with small amounts of money, if any.

I say this because it is important to place our situation as westerners in context. The free availability of money is not natural, but something of a privilege. It is a result of the accumulation of centuries of production reckoned into money, and of the access to structures - in particular, banks and insurance companies - that systematize that access. And it gives us possibilities that our fathers never dreamed of; in particular, to budget for our future. Hesiod's farmer, hard-working and hard-headed though he is, cannot see beyond the next harvest; of old age, he only knows that it is odious and defenceless, and certainly looks forward to going on working for his bread until he is physically incapable. We, on the other hand, can plan ahead.

Loooking around me, in this wasteland of debt public and debt private, in which both nations and individuals have lived their lives according to the amount of money they could borrow, I simply find myself wondering whether a clearer understanding of the privilege of being fully within the money economy - even where you are poor - could not have kept us from quite so many follies.

Comments

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

There's something ironic in there as well. It's that a goodly portion of the governments' spending/borrowing/debt-increasing is in the name of helping the poor, who more often than not wind up with immediate concerns helped but no prospect of accumulating anything that might be considered wealth. And then when (not if) their government falls on hard times, or falls like Greece has recently, they fall with it.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

That's how my grandmother described the Great Depression--no one in her family ever went hungry, but there was no money.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting point. I confess I'd pretty much taken access to money for granted before reading this.

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Do you see a parallel with the breakdown of the money system after the fall of the Western Empire? Did the debts of the Romans feed into the dissolution of their power in the West?

Some historians argue this lead to feudalism. Some historical novelists (turning from the profound to the shallow) portray the astonishment of Norman knights, whose society was based on exchanges of duties for land tenure, meeting the "Greeks" whose armies were paid, as were earlier armies, in coin money or salary, not in land. Basically the knights were what moderns would call amateurs or militiamen, unpaid, and the Greeks were professional standing army.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

'The money they received went out of their hands again. A man might even have a considerable amount of what would ordinarily be called wealth - own his farm and land outright - and still not only be unable to accumulate capital'
that's very possible here, today. you may have property and provided it is your only home and you have no other income/capital, you are able to recieve subsistence benefits.

i understand that there are very high levels of petty crime in some parts of the us and wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that rather than being issued cash payment, people in reciept of social supports recieve vouchers for use in shops and for section 8 property rental - before someone shoots, i don't fully understand the system and clarification would be welcomed...

'The free availability of money is not natural, but something of a privilege'
i find this quite odd. historically, people didn't have money or much money and traded by barter? but with the exception of perhaps the letts schemes in various places (uk) and perhaps the skills trading that i understand goes on in some faith communities/congregations, that mode of exchange is pretty much obsolete. what now exists with the developed systems in place is perfectly natural to us now. and are there not plenty of examples of coinage in museums?

funnily enough, i remember using plastic tokens with a monetary value to pay for bus fares -issued by the transport authority (early-mid 70's). i haven't a clue how these things were obtained though, i was very young.

i was quite surprised to note that churchill wrote that one the reasons ramsey mcdonald resigned was because his inability to cope with the idea of large national debt. and also to discover that credit (locally managed 'on tick' type arrangements as far as i could see) was being offered in the 1870's or so for people who were purchasing high cost objects such as furniture and musical instruments!

then there's ford's 5 dollar day, for the model t workers, mass production needs buyers and they need credit for big ticket items - what follies are you on about?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Did your grandmother own land?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I would not go so far. There is a lot of decline still to be suffered before we reach the condition of the Western Empire between 400 and 600 AD. We would have to see the whole manufacturing sector simply collapse and leave nothing behind, like the Roman pottery industry did, which does not seem likely. And the whole Roman attitude to money was pre-modern. The Empire coined money essentially for the use of its soldiers, and one of the main purposes of taxation was to recover the same precious metals placed into circulation by the authorities (hence taxation was always to be paid in gold and silver, and any change was paid in bronze or copper). Also, a great deal of taxation was paid directly in grain.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

you may have property and provided it is your only home and you have no other income/capital, you are able to recieve subsistence benefits.

That isn't quite the same thing -- state benefits don't derive from the productive value of the land/property.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

Her family owned their farm. Her father was a doctor, and by all accounts they were quite wealthy before the stock market crash--her older sisters did the Grand Tour, etc.--but all that was gone by the time my grandma was in her teens. (Great-grandpa Wheeler was, so I'm told, also a sucker for any traveling book salesman who happened by. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.)

I believe the combination of financial security prior to the crash and prudence afterward kept them reasonably solvent; my grandmother went to college, which was not a given for even wealthy Southern women in the 1930s. I should ask my mother about this, actually--I don't know how Grandma's family funded her education.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

yes, they derive from previous contributions (a pay as you earn tax) income, age, illness, disability, care needs, having kids. the only cases where the value of property (productive or otherwise) is taken into account is when it is a second home (capital value - you won't be paid, so must sell) and where rent to be paid is too high for your needs (ie: too many bedrooms - they cap payments). the point i was making was that it's possible to be non-realizable asset wealthy, cash poor and living on state benefits. it is a pretty hand to mouth existence (given that most people don't have kitchen gardens, wood burning stoves, copses to support them and utilities bills are outrageously high) despite what certain sectors of society would have us believe. btw it is possible to have savings of up to 6k for some benefits and there is a sliding scale of reduced payments for 3 - 16k for housing/council tax - accruing savings whilst on benenfits is practically impossible. as far as i'm aware, bartering or skills exchange is not included anywhere, except for the number of hours you might 'work'. obviously anyone who could do so on such a scale as to survive would almost certainly be self - employed and a tax paying business would constitute capital, but they'd be excluded from some benefits on grounds of the type of contributions paid in the previous year anyway... *ahem*

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

still not quite clear: the key is 'only home', all other land and properties are up for grabs - can't remember seeing reference to valuables either.