It creates nothing but takes a cut for it's privelege.
Rentier capitalism.
Humans are also the first species to be both predator and prey.
This article doesn't just apply to tech bros, but all of these captains of profit (who do nothing but parasitically live on the work of others). Why are gamblers paid the most in this society?
W.D., Your posts are always of great interest to me... This one is of greater satisfaction! Truly a magnificent treatise on the principles of economic and, to a larger degree, social justice.
Had I, in my younger years, been better educated in, and a better adherent to, Aristilian thought, there's no doubt it would have helped save my marriage... Lesson learned.
Interesting question. In principle, they are knowable through reason and any political community which recognized Natural Law would have philosophical, theological, political, and legal traditions of Natural Law reasoning (as Europe did during the middle ages and early modern period). Natural Law actually sets limits to positive law (where the state or however the political community was organized would 'define' or interpret the application of Natural Law into written laws). Liberalism attempted to be neutral on this in the name of limiting state authority. However, in the end you really can't legislate at all well without some notion of human ends and human flourishing. Either children need an education or they don't- pretty much all 'liberal' regimes came to mandate education. Either you need access to clean water or you don't. You really can't legislate sensibly for humans without making some assumptions about what humans are. More recently issues like 'do humans have a gender' need to be decided. They do or they don't. the question is really where do you pull your understanding of what human nature is from.
Thank you. The concept is highly normative so could be quite different depending on cultural and religious factors. It is therefore very vulnerable to specific ideological interpretations. I am most concerned about the global technocratic agenda which seeks to standardise as much as possible across cultures and religions, thus blocking a major feedback mechanism and consequentially paralysing social evolutionary processes. I wonder if you agree?
On point # 4, Usury denies natural limits to accumulation; Charging interest on interest duplicates the original amount in an x period of time, That is exponential growth, When that happens in nature it’s called cancer
Reminds of "buen vivir"...'good life/living well', espoused especially in Ecuador and Bolivia, with respect for community and the natural world. Also the current wave of "rights of Nature", and Indigenous Peoples emphasize one's "responsibilities" caring for all manner of beings. Also, a maximum wage would be one way to curtail the current imbalances that capitalism thrives on.
I didn't know that Aristotle held the same Labor Theory of Value that is most often ascribed to Karl Marx. Aristotle also lived under oligarchs, no? Maybe he'd feel right at home in modern times, only with greater creature comforts? Thanks for the education on the ancients 😎
Profit is a concept that can either be evil (if merely a financialized, monetary gain through fraud or some sort of government favoritism), or an important signal about creating more value than one consumes in the production process.
Where do you stand on the concept of subjective value, that there are no objective economic values? Is it within Natural Law for humans to value different things, and to value them differently, even at different times for the same person? I think it is. And in this case, profit and loss are important signals that allow people to "regulate" the use of scarce resources without resorting to a monopoly-violence institution to coercively determine access to resources and products.
Great questions. Not exactly the same as Marx, but related I think. He was the first to draw the basic distinction between use and exchange values. I mainly made these points not to suggest that Aristotle is a Marxist, but that Marx should be read as a sort of Aristotelian.
I think that your 'subjective value' probably plays a large role in determining the exchange value of commodities. I think that some notion of objective value is important to evaluate whether exchanges are just or not. For instance, the idea of a just wage (the exchange between an employer and employee) is objectively rooted in what it takes to satisfy human needs (ie, that the wage should provide for that). That is obviously a very different question than what the exchange value of the labor is which can certainly fall below a level that would allow the employee to meet their basic needs.
> I mainly made these points not to suggest that Aristotle is a Marxist, but that Marx should be read as a sort of Aristotelian.
Ah! I don't know this from an historical standpoint, but was Marx familiar with Aristotle, and was Marx intending to be an Aristotelian? Very interesting if he was!
> I think that some notion of objective value is important to evaluate whether exchanges are just or not.
But how does that show that objective value actually exists? I think "just wage" is nonsense; it's assumed to be "just" because the word is used in the label, but it requires all sorts of assumptions that aren't objective. Assuming that some people's subjectivity is objectivity doesn't demonstrate the objectivity is real.
I believe Marx was pretty aware of being Aristotelian. You could see Hegel as being a 19th century version of Platonic idealism. Marx was responding to that by 'bringing it down to earth' as Aristotle did Plato (Plato + historical development). See Alisdair MacIntyre for a Catholic interpretation of Marx as an Aristotelian-- or see my 'Revolutionary Aristotelianism' series for my take on that. Marx reliably makes the Aristotelian 'move' vis a vis Hegel as Aristotle did Plato.
Maybe we should actually chat via zoom or something.
'Just wage'. Well, I'm talking 'Catholic' with ya because I think you teach RCIA classes or something from your posts. The entire Catholic 'social teaching' tradition from Aquinas to Rerum Novarum up through Quadragesimo Anno and Laborem Exercens depends on a notion of objective value such that 'a day's labor' entitles one to a 'days sustenance'. I'm pretty certain there is nothing capitalist or market driven in the Catholic (or any pre-modern) tradition.
Not meaning this confrontationally. Would really enjoy chatting and hashing things out. I'm actually rather weak on Catholic doctrine.
Sure, I can chat. Are you back to doing podcasts yet, or did you have something less formal in mind?
I think you'll have plenty to explain to me about Aristotle and Plato and their more modern counterparts!
Yes, I teach OCIA (as they now want to call it, swapping out the R-ite for an O-rder). To be totally transparent, things like "common good" and "just wage" seem like some of the weakest arguments in the current, modern-Western-biased catechism. They rest on pretending there's more objectivity than there really is in life, and on pretending that circumstances are more uniform and universal than they really are. Whenever some "teaching" can't get all the way back to the Gospels and Early Church, I'm highly suspicious of it. Only being able to go back as far as the heretic-killing-is-OK Aquinas is unconvincing to me.
How is it that people whine about the 'capture of the commons' and yet say not one word about the illegitimate claims over the ownership and creation of money numbers themselves, when their role is simply as a common abstract unit to to represent and record the genuine 'value' inputs and interchanges of The People? It is like the peasants still have not figured out the illiterate role of 'finance' claiming ownership of and then loaning the use of the acCounting numbers to the peasantry at interest and pledging all their stuff as collateral! Yanis Varoufakis talks about the illegitimacy of 'ownership' of language and yet does not challenge the 'ownership' of the acCounting units with which the people do their bookkeeping. The numbers on the ledgers are abstract representations of the stuff of genuine value within the society....but the serfs have seemingly not claimed the ability to count and keep their own records........and then they complain when the imperialists treat them as illiterates that will never figure shit out and take legitimate control over their own acCounting activity. Why are we all not yet connecting these dots!?
The question of taxes is usually not addressed on the basis of the illegitimacy of the imperialist first claiming the illiterate power of 'creation' of the monetary unit or the illegitimate imposition of the local "legal tender" which then is the form in which taxes must be paid....So then the dots are not connected to see this whole process and system as a capture and control mechanism by the imperialist over the energies of the peasants. David Graeber and others have tried to bring this to the fore.
Money itself must be understood as a unit of measure....and no one 'creates' units for this purpose.....the governance of and by a free populace defines and specifies the reference criteria for the unit so that any and all can freely and reliably use it for the representational purpose it serves. The role of government then is NOT in unit creation (or in handing this illiteracy off to banks) but is in regulation and adjudication of the consistent use of this tool across the society. del Mar puts it like this: "When money shall be recognized in the law, when it is defined, when its volume, magnitude, dimensions, limits are set forth as precisely, fixed as unchangeably, and protected as securely from alteration, as are now the dimensions of the yard-stick, the pint-pot, and the pound-weight, then, and then only, will money perfectly resemble other measures; for then only will it become a concrete thing of known dimensions. When this comes to pass, Aristotle's definition of its function will resume its original correctness, and money will be as fit in fact, as it is now only in theory, to measure the relation called value." Alexander del Mar, The Science of Money (1885)
Marc Gauvin points out that a valid definition that is unequivocal is missing so far in human history.
When you look at what del Mar is saying and look at the resolutions by the MSTA it is clear that the question involves establishing the specifications that would legitimately allow The People to interchange genuine value by means of a unit based system of abstract representation of that value. This necessarily implies that the unit of acCount cannot, all by itself, be a thing of value... positive or negative.
Most are missing the most basic point about independence and sovereignty when they abandon a genuine process of community wide defining and specifying what money shall be and instead repeat the same imperialist process of "on high" creation of the monetary unit and imposing it on the populace through this very imperialist notion of 'legal tender.'
One can find this imposition throughout history as has been documented by Graeber and others. And the initial process of "creating the coinage" and then restricting and directing the activity that a populace may engage by holding that illiterate 'creation' power to "the government" is the means by which the imperialists have held sway all these many centuries.
I am not a student of the history of Aristotle, but I am speculating that the assertion he was making about "law" may have been in response to a populace that had been using other means to do their own acCounting. His was a time (just like today) wherein the populace was NOT included in establishing these laws....so I find it suspicious that all this time later we are still referring to a time and place where 'governance' was just as aristocratic as it appears to be today.
So those who present some legalistic assessment of money are making a faulty understanding as to what "community wide" establishment actually looks like, since it has never happened. And no people would knowingly and voluntarily establish the illegitimate and illiterate way we are presently doing money. No populace is that masochistic!
When you look at the notion that The People are either free or they are not and that they are always the ones who are going to do the doing that needs to be done, then simply recognizing their power and their skills and their contributions is all that is needed for them to exchange and be free. As soon as some outside thing or outside control or outside requirement gets in the way of the interaction between The People within themselves they are no longer in control, no longer free, and the very power they have is now at the service of the outside interest. So, when The People stop using the money system that comes from outside of themselves and start using a system of their own they become sovereign. Sovereign is not a definition supplied by others- it is a doing that we ourselves do.
Lending money at interest has been condemned by every religion on the planet. It most definitely will not liberate Any People. It can only enslave them.
Native cultures have been for a very long time way more advanced than we know! from 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' by David Graeber. "The supposedly virtuous act of giving is often instead an act meant to create an obligation, an act whereby the giver measures himself against the receiver and requires a repayment, even if that repayment is gratitude:
"[Here] are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer -- an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
" 'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'
"The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."
We have a ways to go to get back to this kind of knowledge!
Yep. Finance is technically a bullshit job.
It creates nothing but takes a cut for it's privelege.
Rentier capitalism.
Humans are also the first species to be both predator and prey.
This article doesn't just apply to tech bros, but all of these captains of profit (who do nothing but parasitically live on the work of others). Why are gamblers paid the most in this society?
https://posthumousstyle.substack.com/p/are-the-tech-bros-insane
I do worry a lot about the tech bros.
They're no different than the "captains of industry" like Rockefeller, Carnegie etc...
Except the tech bros sell even more lofty fantasies.
I like to call them snake oil salesmen.
Here's a good one on how they really don't even understand the brain. Figures, as the past link explains, they're cognitively damaged.
https://posthumousstyle.substack.com/p/neuralink-does-not-read-minds-and
W.D., Your posts are always of great interest to me... This one is of greater satisfaction! Truly a magnificent treatise on the principles of economic and, to a larger degree, social justice.
Had I, in my younger years, been better educated in, and a better adherent to, Aristilian thought, there's no doubt it would have helped save my marriage... Lesson learned.
Wow, that’s a great endorsement that humbles me. Thanks man.
Credit where credit is due, brother!~
excellent article
Thanks Marie.
I presume the state would have to define ‘natural human ends’ which means that any system using such a concept would be totalitarian in nature.
Interesting question. In principle, they are knowable through reason and any political community which recognized Natural Law would have philosophical, theological, political, and legal traditions of Natural Law reasoning (as Europe did during the middle ages and early modern period). Natural Law actually sets limits to positive law (where the state or however the political community was organized would 'define' or interpret the application of Natural Law into written laws). Liberalism attempted to be neutral on this in the name of limiting state authority. However, in the end you really can't legislate at all well without some notion of human ends and human flourishing. Either children need an education or they don't- pretty much all 'liberal' regimes came to mandate education. Either you need access to clean water or you don't. You really can't legislate sensibly for humans without making some assumptions about what humans are. More recently issues like 'do humans have a gender' need to be decided. They do or they don't. the question is really where do you pull your understanding of what human nature is from.
Thank you. The concept is highly normative so could be quite different depending on cultural and religious factors. It is therefore very vulnerable to specific ideological interpretations. I am most concerned about the global technocratic agenda which seeks to standardise as much as possible across cultures and religions, thus blocking a major feedback mechanism and consequentially paralysing social evolutionary processes. I wonder if you agree?
Worry about that as well.
On point # 4, Usury denies natural limits to accumulation; Charging interest on interest duplicates the original amount in an x period of time, That is exponential growth, When that happens in nature it’s called cancer
Reminds of "buen vivir"...'good life/living well', espoused especially in Ecuador and Bolivia, with respect for community and the natural world. Also the current wave of "rights of Nature", and Indigenous Peoples emphasize one's "responsibilities" caring for all manner of beings. Also, a maximum wage would be one way to curtail the current imbalances that capitalism thrives on.
Amen.
I didn't know that Aristotle held the same Labor Theory of Value that is most often ascribed to Karl Marx. Aristotle also lived under oligarchs, no? Maybe he'd feel right at home in modern times, only with greater creature comforts? Thanks for the education on the ancients 😎
Profit is a concept that can either be evil (if merely a financialized, monetary gain through fraud or some sort of government favoritism), or an important signal about creating more value than one consumes in the production process.
Where do you stand on the concept of subjective value, that there are no objective economic values? Is it within Natural Law for humans to value different things, and to value them differently, even at different times for the same person? I think it is. And in this case, profit and loss are important signals that allow people to "regulate" the use of scarce resources without resorting to a monopoly-violence institution to coercively determine access to resources and products.
Great questions. Not exactly the same as Marx, but related I think. He was the first to draw the basic distinction between use and exchange values. I mainly made these points not to suggest that Aristotle is a Marxist, but that Marx should be read as a sort of Aristotelian.
I think that your 'subjective value' probably plays a large role in determining the exchange value of commodities. I think that some notion of objective value is important to evaluate whether exchanges are just or not. For instance, the idea of a just wage (the exchange between an employer and employee) is objectively rooted in what it takes to satisfy human needs (ie, that the wage should provide for that). That is obviously a very different question than what the exchange value of the labor is which can certainly fall below a level that would allow the employee to meet their basic needs.
> I mainly made these points not to suggest that Aristotle is a Marxist, but that Marx should be read as a sort of Aristotelian.
Ah! I don't know this from an historical standpoint, but was Marx familiar with Aristotle, and was Marx intending to be an Aristotelian? Very interesting if he was!
> I think that some notion of objective value is important to evaluate whether exchanges are just or not.
But how does that show that objective value actually exists? I think "just wage" is nonsense; it's assumed to be "just" because the word is used in the label, but it requires all sorts of assumptions that aren't objective. Assuming that some people's subjectivity is objectivity doesn't demonstrate the objectivity is real.
Now, we cut to the chase.
I believe Marx was pretty aware of being Aristotelian. You could see Hegel as being a 19th century version of Platonic idealism. Marx was responding to that by 'bringing it down to earth' as Aristotle did Plato (Plato + historical development). See Alisdair MacIntyre for a Catholic interpretation of Marx as an Aristotelian-- or see my 'Revolutionary Aristotelianism' series for my take on that. Marx reliably makes the Aristotelian 'move' vis a vis Hegel as Aristotle did Plato.
Maybe we should actually chat via zoom or something.
'Just wage'. Well, I'm talking 'Catholic' with ya because I think you teach RCIA classes or something from your posts. The entire Catholic 'social teaching' tradition from Aquinas to Rerum Novarum up through Quadragesimo Anno and Laborem Exercens depends on a notion of objective value such that 'a day's labor' entitles one to a 'days sustenance'. I'm pretty certain there is nothing capitalist or market driven in the Catholic (or any pre-modern) tradition.
Not meaning this confrontationally. Would really enjoy chatting and hashing things out. I'm actually rather weak on Catholic doctrine.
Sure, I can chat. Are you back to doing podcasts yet, or did you have something less formal in mind?
I think you'll have plenty to explain to me about Aristotle and Plato and their more modern counterparts!
Yes, I teach OCIA (as they now want to call it, swapping out the R-ite for an O-rder). To be totally transparent, things like "common good" and "just wage" seem like some of the weakest arguments in the current, modern-Western-biased catechism. They rest on pretending there's more objectivity than there really is in life, and on pretending that circumstances are more uniform and universal than they really are. Whenever some "teaching" can't get all the way back to the Gospels and Early Church, I'm highly suspicious of it. Only being able to go back as far as the heretic-killing-is-OK Aquinas is unconvincing to me.
But, yeah, let's talk some time 😎
How is it that people whine about the 'capture of the commons' and yet say not one word about the illegitimate claims over the ownership and creation of money numbers themselves, when their role is simply as a common abstract unit to to represent and record the genuine 'value' inputs and interchanges of The People? It is like the peasants still have not figured out the illiterate role of 'finance' claiming ownership of and then loaning the use of the acCounting numbers to the peasantry at interest and pledging all their stuff as collateral! Yanis Varoufakis talks about the illegitimacy of 'ownership' of language and yet does not challenge the 'ownership' of the acCounting units with which the people do their bookkeeping. The numbers on the ledgers are abstract representations of the stuff of genuine value within the society....but the serfs have seemingly not claimed the ability to count and keep their own records........and then they complain when the imperialists treat them as illiterates that will never figure shit out and take legitimate control over their own acCounting activity. Why are we all not yet connecting these dots!?
The question of taxes is usually not addressed on the basis of the illegitimacy of the imperialist first claiming the illiterate power of 'creation' of the monetary unit or the illegitimate imposition of the local "legal tender" which then is the form in which taxes must be paid....So then the dots are not connected to see this whole process and system as a capture and control mechanism by the imperialist over the energies of the peasants. David Graeber and others have tried to bring this to the fore.
Money itself must be understood as a unit of measure....and no one 'creates' units for this purpose.....the governance of and by a free populace defines and specifies the reference criteria for the unit so that any and all can freely and reliably use it for the representational purpose it serves. The role of government then is NOT in unit creation (or in handing this illiteracy off to banks) but is in regulation and adjudication of the consistent use of this tool across the society. del Mar puts it like this: "When money shall be recognized in the law, when it is defined, when its volume, magnitude, dimensions, limits are set forth as precisely, fixed as unchangeably, and protected as securely from alteration, as are now the dimensions of the yard-stick, the pint-pot, and the pound-weight, then, and then only, will money perfectly resemble other measures; for then only will it become a concrete thing of known dimensions. When this comes to pass, Aristotle's definition of its function will resume its original correctness, and money will be as fit in fact, as it is now only in theory, to measure the relation called value." Alexander del Mar, The Science of Money (1885)
Marc Gauvin points out that a valid definition that is unequivocal is missing so far in human history.
When you look at what del Mar is saying and look at the resolutions by the MSTA it is clear that the question involves establishing the specifications that would legitimately allow The People to interchange genuine value by means of a unit based system of abstract representation of that value. This necessarily implies that the unit of acCount cannot, all by itself, be a thing of value... positive or negative.
Most are missing the most basic point about independence and sovereignty when they abandon a genuine process of community wide defining and specifying what money shall be and instead repeat the same imperialist process of "on high" creation of the monetary unit and imposing it on the populace through this very imperialist notion of 'legal tender.'
One can find this imposition throughout history as has been documented by Graeber and others. And the initial process of "creating the coinage" and then restricting and directing the activity that a populace may engage by holding that illiterate 'creation' power to "the government" is the means by which the imperialists have held sway all these many centuries.
I am not a student of the history of Aristotle, but I am speculating that the assertion he was making about "law" may have been in response to a populace that had been using other means to do their own acCounting. His was a time (just like today) wherein the populace was NOT included in establishing these laws....so I find it suspicious that all this time later we are still referring to a time and place where 'governance' was just as aristocratic as it appears to be today.
So those who present some legalistic assessment of money are making a faulty understanding as to what "community wide" establishment actually looks like, since it has never happened. And no people would knowingly and voluntarily establish the illegitimate and illiterate way we are presently doing money. No populace is that masochistic!
When you look at the notion that The People are either free or they are not and that they are always the ones who are going to do the doing that needs to be done, then simply recognizing their power and their skills and their contributions is all that is needed for them to exchange and be free. As soon as some outside thing or outside control or outside requirement gets in the way of the interaction between The People within themselves they are no longer in control, no longer free, and the very power they have is now at the service of the outside interest. So, when The People stop using the money system that comes from outside of themselves and start using a system of their own they become sovereign. Sovereign is not a definition supplied by others- it is a doing that we ourselves do.
Lending money at interest has been condemned by every religion on the planet. It most definitely will not liberate Any People. It can only enslave them.
Native cultures have been for a very long time way more advanced than we know! from 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' by David Graeber. "The supposedly virtuous act of giving is often instead an act meant to create an obligation, an act whereby the giver measures himself against the receiver and requires a repayment, even if that repayment is gratitude:
"[Here] are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer -- an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
" 'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'
"The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."
We have a ways to go to get back to this kind of knowledge!