I'd like to sketch out a few different types of economies and look at how the trade transformation touches people's lives in each one.

Anthropologists think in terms of evolution, say from the gift economy to the palace economy. Whether there is actually an evolution or just reflection of circumstances is a question I'll hold off on until I look at each one.

The subsistence economy is characteristic of hunter gatherers who don't store food and rarely trade. When they do trade, it's probably for things they'll actually use. There is no concept of merchandise. People give what they have. It may be that elements of the gift economy are here in that people are honoring one another with their offerings. Maybe It's somewhere between trade and just sharing.

"Trade is one avenue to a vantage point on ourselves. It lifts us out of the mundane."

This is an interesting and profound assertion. How does it lift us out and what is mundane?

If there is a pragmatism or practicality to religion, morals or ethics, perhaps the greatest or purest local or personal immorality is in essence the consumptive act or trade. If economics is the basis of political systems, borders, deprivation, eclogical destruction etc, this elevation out of the mundane has deeper import, in that our belief's in respect of that which is mundane may well be socially programmed in order to facilitate trade.

There does appear to be an anti-trade anti-consumption or minimalist philosophy that is gaing ground and may represent the grren shoots of an entirely alternate view on that which is mundane. Self sufficiency and the necessity for trade and consumption in general are evolving concepts that may shape the future in a more substantive form than technology

M

This is an interesting and profound assertion. How does it lift us out and what is mundane? — Marcus de Brun

Imagine that you're a resident of a subsistence economy that's closed off from the rest of the world. You tend a pumpkin patch for about 30 minutes a day. You fish. You patch the hut. You play with the kids. Time goes by. Nothing changes. Then one day a terrible storm blows away the hut and kills the medicine man. You wish you'd learned which plants to pick for nausea before he died.

This is the character of a world without any form of trade: it sinks into itself. It becomes blind to itself for lack of any vantage point. It's prone to retrogression. Trade lets some light in. It brings new horizons and new ideas along with old ones about which plants cure nausea.

Fast forward to a society that has dedicated merchants. The merchant is the super-exterior vantage point because the merchant doesn't see food, clothing, building materials, art, religious items, etc. The merchant only sees money. Even people aren't people to a merchant. They're money. The merchant stands apart in another world, facilitating all the things people love including war.

Do you agree or disagree?

...perhaps the greatest or purest local or personal immorality is in essence the consumptive act or trade. If economics is the basis of political systems, borders, deprivation, ecological destruction etc, this elevation out of the mundane has deeper import, in that our belief's in respect of that which is mundane may well be socially programmed in order to facilitate trade. — Marcus de Brun

I don't agree that greed is immoral. It's amoral. The marketplace challenges its residents to wake up from a slave mentality and become self possessed. It's the aristocrat who glorifies the blind submission of the people.

There does appear to be an anti-trade anti-consumption or minimalist philosophy that is gaing ground and may represent the grren shoots of an entirely alternate view on that which is mundane. Self sufficiency and the necessity for trade and consumption in general are evolving concepts that may shape the future in a more substantive form than technology — Marcus de Brun

There is a portion of the world that longs to return to the Stone Age. Would that be best?

Note that I'm not really being belligerent about any of this. Just exploring. I probably need to make up a pseudonym for this post. But I'm too tired.

Imagine that you're a resident of a subsistence economy that's closed off from the rest of the world. You tend a pumpkin patch for about 30 minutes a day. You fish. You patch the hut. You play with the kids. Time goes by. Nothing changes. Then one day a terrible storm blows away the hut and kills the medicine man. You wish you'd learned which plants to pick for nausea before he died.

This is the character of a world without any form of trade: it sinks into itself. It becomes blind to itself for lack of any vantage point. It's prone to retrogression.

I disagree. This is not the character of a world without trade, it is the character of a world without any character.

'You tend a pumpkin patch.' The human intellect is not a static phenomena, there is no going back to the stone age, even those who might appear to return to the stone age must still wash their hands after they defecate. All societies, throughout human history have ultimately collapsed at the face of unforeseen catastrophe. All societies have firmly believed that their faith in God, their evolving intellect and their Science/military would protect them from catastrophe. All without exception were wrong.

In recent times, almost all societies have morphed, and via technology and the universalism of consumption patterns have become essentially one large interconnected society, that in general terms defines itself upon material wealth and the personal and public 'power' that is derived from the consumptive act.

This overreaching 'general consumptive society' might be characterized by the individual member;s preference for a 'dollar', above the individual preference for an 'apple'. The value system of the general society of man, is increasingly defined by the value assigned to the dollar, as opposed to the inherent value within the apple. Man's reference and respect for the natural world without has gradually been transformed into a reverence for himself and it is for this reason that he chooses the dollar, as the contains the subliminal power of self-worship.

The desire for the dollar, is the motive force behind the move towards the impending catastrophe that awaits the 'general society of man'. There are two principle ingredients to the inevitability of this catastrophe.

In the first, the catastrophe is merely upon the horizon, it is not experienced by the general mass in the here and now. Trump for example can assert with confidence that there is no such thing as Global Warming and indeed there are many who believe him. Those who do not believe him, can enjoy the luxury of stating that they do not believe him, but can equally deny or evade the reality of climate change by engaging in the deluded consumptive models that the merchant has presented as the means to address the catastrophe; buying electric cars, green energy, recycling etc etc.

The merchant, in seeing only the dollar, has presented the herd with a potential salvation through the only means at his disposal, through the consumptive act itself. The deluded 'cure' of the disease through the application of more of the disease itself. Within this 'trade based' scenario, everybody is a winner in the short term. Even the loosing aspects of the transaction vis the continued move towards the catastrophe can be used as a call for increased trade in the 'new consumptions'. When the solutions fail we are encouraged to spend more, spend differently and ultimately to fail better.


The second and less considered reason that catastrophe is to be the final gift of the merchant, is the reality that the general perception is not one that is dictated to nor guided by reason, it is guided by the mass psychogenic belief system of the herd. This century has witnessed the explosion of social and psychological programminig upon a massive scale global scale. Thought, morality and the world of ideas has been contracted into a simple relatively predictable computer model one that is defined by social media and is relatively simple in its intellectual outlook and capacity. It might well be simply referred to as the collective mentality of the herd. It is no less homogenised than that which was homogenised at the rallies of Nurembourg.

Your piece contains two examples of this simplistic velief system that perpetuates the status quo.

Your suggestion that those who might call for a simpler moreself sustaining life with an increase in self sufficiency and a decrease upon technological dependence are trying to go back to the stone age, is a common criticism, yet few if any who attempt such non comsumptive simplicity would agree that they are trying to return to the stone age, but on the contrary are attempting to evolve out of the current era of petrified stone age thinking. In referring to this evolved form of thought in the derogatory you display your own unwitting participation in the current delusion that technology and green energies etc will save us.

You refer to the engagement with nature, vis the tending of a pumpkin patch with the same derogation, and in doing so illustrate the worship of the dollar before the enjoyment of nature.

Both these aspects of your thought are biased and ultimately socially programmed.

If you were given the task of constructing a model for individual happiness and ecological sustainability, and an end to the greater portion of human suffering.... such a model would include the 'pumpkin patch' and the 'stone age', but not in the manner that you choose to conceive these concepts.

You are quite right in the assertion that the merchant provides us with an impartial glimpse at the reality of ourselves, he certainly does. But he does so in a manner that merely impartially feeds primitive desires and stone age thinking.

Human salvation can only be derived from freedom. Not the freedom to consume what we want but freedom from the consumptive act itself, only then can man discover his potential once again, save himself from himself and derive value and meaning from his existence within nature.

M

Interesting view. You're concerned with salvation.

In some cultures there is a historic link between salvation and trade, as if salvation can be bought with sacrifices.

But note that in the moment I exchange my flint for a shell necklace, the flint changed for me. My use for the flint has nothing to do with fire. If has to do with coming to own the necklace. — frank

This is a mish-mash assertion. ...The flint changed for you, your use for the flint has nothing to do with fire .....
Either your use for the flint changed or the essence of the flint changed. Which one?

Either your use for the flint changed or the essence of the flint changed. Which one? — Caldwell

What I'm reaching for is a picture of primal ownership. I'm thinking that items of technology or adornment are experienced as extensions of the self. I start the fire. The flint is part of how I do that. The flint is nothing to me beyond what it helps me to do.

When I decide to trade the flint, it's a part of me that is lifted up from a kind of unconscious obscurity to be witnessed as a thing of value. Trade takes things out of the shadows.

When I decide to trade the flint, it's a part of me that is lifted up from a kind of unconscious obscurity to be witnessed as a thing of value. Trade takes things out of the shadows. — frank

Okay.
But I disagree with the above. I disagree with your contrasting "unconscious obscurity" and "thing of value", and caling things being in the shadows until you removed them from their base usage. (Correct me at this point, if this is not what you meant).
What I want to say to that is, objects we own (and I'm not referring to them as in ontology) do have value as they are. A change of ownership does not mean a change in base use of that object -- the other person who traded the necklace would still consider the flint as a thing to make a fire. Unless that person was a collector, in which case, the flint had met its demise.

Do you own a fire hydrant? I hope not. But if you do, and you got it by trading with someone else, where do you keep it now? To me it had lost its value, its true essence, because it's now being used as a display item, a curiosity, instead of sitting on a sidewalk connected to a water source, ready anytime in case there's fire. Its essence had been lost in your possession. It had not lifted anything by being uprooted from its habitat.

What I want to say to that is, objects we own (and I'm not referring to them as in ontology) do have value as they are. — Caldwell

Intrinsically?

the other person who traded the necklace would still consider the flint as a thing to make a fire. — Caldwell

Sure.

Interesting view. You're concerned with salvation. — frank

Not particularly, but for the present exercise I suspect that your own may be at risk, and I am at your disposal should you wish to avoid the general conclusions on the matter.

M

One of the problems with tracing out the trail from palace economies to market economies in the late Bronze Age is that we just rely on bits and pieces of information, one of the most significant being the writings of Homer. An expert on that topic, representing the majority view, is M. Finley. I'm reading his book on the world Homer describes (The World of Odysseus).

Looking at background values, we vary from late Bronze Age people in this: the idea of humanity itself was linked to the city. IOW, there was pressure on every individual to conform that was directly linked to survival.

The idea of going off into the desert to escape the evils of city life will come later in time. The idea of having a right to both individuality and survival: much, much later.

That issue bears on the topic because the value of the produce of our creativity is found in community. The way one thinks about community will impact the way one thinks about value.

Intrinsically? — frank

No. Valuewise, as they are.

Sure. — frank

So, it's your perception that changed.

No. Valuewise, as they are. — Caldwell

So the flint has value prior to being recognized as having value? Some sort of mind-independent value?

So, it's your perception that changed. — Caldwell

A physicist would agree. From a certain point of a view, the use we put things to has nothing to do with what they are.

But then sometimes our uses do have a bearing on what?. And compared to the shaky speculative underpinnings of the physicist's answer to that question, the phenomenological answer has the advantage of immediacy, palpability, and (if this was Jewish poetry there would be a third thing).

But then sometimes our uses do have a bearing on what?. — frank

On taxanomy of objects.

So the flint has value prior to being recognized as having value? Some sort of mind-independent value? — frank

No. The flint is seen as a whole object, the same way we see a "chair" -- you can't separate the idea of chair with "sitting", can you?
Be courageous now, frank.

I'm totally fearless. But that's what I was saying. We see stuff in the light of our purposes.

We westerners tend to think of markets as a step toward social sophistication because the development of a merchant class coincided with an exit from a dimmer part of the European medieval period.

But can markets also be a sign of disintegration? Bronze Age markets appeared at the same time that international trade and its basis in palace economies were on a trajectory toward breakdown.

But can markets also be a sign of disintegration? — frank

You tell me. That's a broad question. Care to bracket it?

I'm reading a couple of books about the history of economies and money. I'm at a stage of reorganizing my thoughts. I'm realizing I was being way too eurocentric.

One of the books is by Jack Weatherford: History of Money. His writing style is fascinating. In the first chapter he explains why donations of food to Africa end up suppressing small scale trade.

he explains why donations of food to Africa end up suppressing small scale trade. — frank

I can see the reasoning behind this -- although I have not read Weatherford.