Our economic system, and in large measure, our social system, is often said to be based on money. This is an exaggeration. The United States was founded on far broader and more important principles than economics can convey. But it is true that money is important to us, but not for the sleazy reasons so often cited. These reasons resemble the envious Karl Marx, to whom money was so besetting an obsession that he thought it ruled the world, and explained history.
Those among us who ignorantly agree with Marx might be surprised to learn that our own twentieth century is reestablishing what the ancient world knew well: that money is not an indispensable ingredient in a civilization, and can ? in fact ? be virtually eliminated.
This insight was first rediscovered by the leaders of the Terrorist phase of the French Revolution. That great prototype of left-wing takeovers was a favored study of Marx and Engels and the leaders of the Russian Revolution. It also remains a subject of study among economists and persons drawn to politics.
Naturally enough, different students extract different lessons. The politically-minded are drawn toward the first progressive income-tax in the West, the rhetoric of authoritarian socialism, the application of anti-Christianity, and the general conscription of property and individuals by the State. The economists are drawn toward the creation of French fiat money (assignats), the subsequent inflation, and the transfer of property from one class to another.
Lenin and his heirs, however, saw the French Revolution through another prism. Lenin focused first upon the subject of terror. Unlike those who were horrified by the violence of the French Revolution, Lenin was scornful. He felt that the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Robespierre, did not create enough terror. "We shall not make that mistake," he said, nor did he.
Lenin and his associates saw that the members of an entire class could be stripped of their possessions, so long as other classes could be made to believe that they would be the beneficiaries of such expropriations. The French Revolution proved that a ruling class could be destroyed within months, and the lives of the remaining millions reorganized to serve the purposes of the state.
Beyond that, Lenin & Co. saw another factor, one that had evaded previous students. They saw that the coinage of a nation could be swept aside as irrelevant to a government. Under Lenin, the Bolshevik Party (which renamed itself a Soviet, after the names of previously functioning Worker?s Councils), applied these insights without limitations.
Therefore, of all the problems that confront the Soviet State, the least is monetary. Soviet citizens are provided a sort of scrip, termed rubles, which are of no value outside the USSR, and are not even valuable, per se inside.
Many people in the West seem to have difficulty visualizing what this means. It means that in the Soviet Union, an individual cannot improve his circumstance simply by gathering a large mass of rubles. Rubles alone do not allow an individual to enter the special store (open only to high Party members and foreigners) and buy from an abundance of goods. Rubles alone do not allow an individual to register in a special luxury hotel, or dine in a special luxury restaurant, or buy luxury clothes and articles, travel outside the country, move to another house, or change jobs. The rubles for all these uses (and many others) must be accompanied by a special Party card, or special Party permission.
Money, therefore, does not translate into individual power in the Soviet marketplace, as it does in the West. Money does not have the same political power in the Kremlin that it holds in Washington, London, Paris or Jerusalem.
Once that USSR system was firmly fixed (and it took a while to establish), the pattern moved across the left-totalitarian world. It prevails in mainland China, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in Cambodia, in the nations of Eastern Europe, and in the Marxist regions of Africa. These are all essentially money-less societies ? where the individual has lost money as a lever of advancement.
In all these lands, where the intellectual pattern is taken from the example of Leninism-Stalinism, the great individual avenue of escape from oppression, of upward mobility, of achieving a higher standard of living, of achieving influence or making life better for one?s children through money, has been closed.
The citizens of these nations know, therefore, what the loss of money means. It means that the great avenue of escape from oppression, available to every diligent person in the West, has been closed. No buffer between the individual and the mighty forces of the State remains and they know ? bitterly ? that despite all the individual weaknesses that money evokes, the absence of money in a civilization does not usher in a rule of virtue. On the contrary: naked power brooks no limits.
The significance of money in the West, therefore, is more than what it can buy in terms of goods or services. Money is inextricably entwined with individual rights. It means, in what remains of the free West, the right to buy whatever one can pay for, to move wherever one likes, to change jobs, to travel, to live according to one?s own standards.
To some extent these are considered negative freedoms. But they are freedoms. We know that the cliché that money cannot buy happiness is true. We know, as a society and as individuals, that the love of money leads to many evils. Certainly many people pay too much for the money they obtain, in terms of a surrender of basic values.
But it should not be forgotten that money, in the sense of the gold and silver coinage of the Western past, accompanied the rise of freedom in the West. Individuals bought their freedom from slavery, from overlords. Individuals became free, then cities and nations. Cromwell converted Britain from a nation in misery to a rich and prosperous land in large part by restoring honest money and ending the arbitrary confiscations of the King.
To think of money in purely negative terms, therefore, is a mistake. The invention of money originally led men out of slavery. In the West money has been the traditional means of rewarding merit, of extending charity, of assisting the poor and the needy, and the worthy, of improving the standards of society, creating schools, hospitals, businesses and churches, and of enabling the private sector to achieve for itself, and individuals for themselves, what the left-totalitarians mandate (on their own terms) for all.
Without money (real money, that is), entire nations can be enslaved, and kept in that condition for eons.
That is the real reason why fiat money (money issued from printing presses, representing nothing of value beyond the power of the State) diminishes the value of real money (which was once usable everywhere). And the reason why the degradation of money in the West, from a valuable commodity in its own right (see Money and Man, Groseclose, U. of Oklahoma, 1976, passim) to the promises of untrustworthy governments, represents a long and dangerous step in the West toward the diminution of individual freedom.
Copyright © 1981?1994 Chalcedon Report, P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251