THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 469-496

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.469

The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. [...] Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything b ut common-human. That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. [...] The creators of this economic picture were David Hume and Adam Smith. Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. [...] As for Smith's greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.470

As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying "the" science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War, and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.471

Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not o f the waking-consciousness, the intellect. In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.471

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of "condition" of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life's will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. [...] Nourishment and winning-through the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.472

But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is "in condition," well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently this is the time when the banal assertion that "hunger and love" are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of "happiness of the greatest number," of comfort and ease, of "panem et circenses"; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.474-475

All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself. It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless, producing and using wholly for itself [...] To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed an acquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder[...] Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. [...] Politics and trade in developed form the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in gre at seafarers like the Phoenicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.475-476

But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately. One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. [...] He who is out for purely economic advantages as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers' and employees' unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. [...] Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as "his own business," and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up of immense riches [...] And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have "got there" is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great-city sort.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.477

Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.477

In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.479

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. [...] Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase and then extended the resultant scheme so confident ly over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.480-482

With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic life of settled form. [...] That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike producer and consumer is goods, and traffic in goods is the mark of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or even the farm. [...] Exchange in these periods is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another. They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding-scale of felt relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure - for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized. Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener. [...] With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens. As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life "out there" is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. [...] With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money. With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.483

Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. [...] As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.484

All highly developed economy is urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places, the "moneymarkets of the world [...] Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, arc concentrated.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.485

What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.485-486

The Faustian money-thinking "opens up" whole continents, the water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests , the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is laid out in one way or in another in the shape of press, or elections, or budgets, or armies for the realization of masters' plans.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.486-490

As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. [...] All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function. [...] Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money [...] But when, from about Hannibal's time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men's eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. [...] In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money - money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. [...] The decisive event, however, was the invention "contemporary" with that of the Classical coin about 650 of double-entry book-keeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. [...] "Double-entry book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton. . . . With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the ste llar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy. . . . Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities." Double-entry book-keeping is a -pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the "Firm." [...] Our economy-world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value, which is represented by a book-entry.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.492

In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.493

The word "Capital" signifies the centre of this thought not the aggregate of values, but that which keeps them in movement as such. Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its opposite is the provincial econ omy.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.494

Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. [...] Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one's own temples, sea-piracy against one's own city, confiscation of the wealth of one's own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens [...] Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.495-496

But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares because men were again living the peasant life and this explains the immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian's reign, which has hithero been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus's reign onwards, tried in vain to check till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff money-economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.