Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

[Cite Stefano Fenoaltea] Nor does the capitalist machinery automatically exploit and alienate the proletariat. It didn’t in the United States, which was and is notoriously non-socialist even in its working class. After all, your ancestors and mine were impoverished and ignorant peasants and proletarians. And yet here we are, you and I, their descendants, well-to-do people spending a pleasant evening together discussing the virtues and vices of capitalism, though still working for wages, big ones, or at any rate a nice pension. Feeling alienated recently? Really? A wage slave? Some “slave.” And have you noticed that you, not the bosses, own your human capital?

For another thing, again, we don’t want to prejudge everything about the mechanisms and morals of capitalism by defining it the way Marx did in Chapter 4 of Capital (at any rate according to the old standard, and inaccurate, English translation) as "the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone. . . , this boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value."⁸⁸ The original German actually says “solely the restless stirring for gain. This absolute desire for enrichment, this passionate hunt for value”: nur die rastlose Bewegung des Gewinnes. Dieser absolute Bereicherungstrieb, diese leidenschaftliche Jagd auf den Wert.⁸⁹ The words of the English translation, such as “never-ending” (endlos, ewig, unaufhörlich) and “boundless” (grenzenlos, schrankenlos), are nowhere in Marx’s German. The normal German word for “greed” (Gier), which most people would attribute to Marx’s theory, does not appear anywhere in the chapter. Indeed, Gier and its compounds (Raubgier, rapacity; Habgier, avarice; Geldgier) are rare in Marx, attesting to his attempt to shift away from conventional ethical terms in analyzing capitalism. Marx’s rationalist scientism, the historian Allan Megill notes, prevents him from saying “here I am making a moral-ethical point,” even in the exceedingly numerous places in which he was.⁹⁰ The first 25 chapters of Das Kapital, through page 802 of the German edition (page 670 in the Modern Library edition), contain “greed” and its compounds in Marx’s own words only seven times (mainly in Chapter 8, “Constant Capital and Variable Capital”), with a few more in quotations.

Yet the sneer at the bourgeoisie’s endless/boundless greed is common enough, and Engels after all approved the English translation. Townspeople such as the bourgeoisie had long been despised, seen by the priest and the aristocrat as vulgar. “I hate the uninitiated mob” (Odi profanum vulgus), sang Horace in priestly style long ago, and scorned to take in exchange for his Sabine valley any fashionable riches more burdensome. Still today, as always, markets and innovation are threatened by the scorn of priest or knight or gentleman or poet, from Green to neo-Nazi. And now they are threatened, too, from within the bourgeoisie itself, by a new and foolish pride elevating market prudence to the exclusion of other virtues—the “greed-is-good” theory of behavior, encouraged by economists and inside traders. It is the modern descendent of eighteenth-century ideas that Prudence Only—reason, utility, Enlightened self-interest—suffices. We need instead to balance the virtues of courage and love and faith and prudence in an ethical business life. But as a matter of fact most businesspeople are already ethical, contrary to the populist line that they are price-gougers and the Marxist line that they are carriers of an evil system or the conservative line that they are simply vulgar.

In any case we do not want disdain for commerce to be preordained by the rhetoric.

&Chapter 6:

The Bourgeoisie Has Been Disdained

Such sneering at commerce from the heights of the aristocracy or the depths of the peasantry is ancient and usual. It is a trifle strange, of course, since commerce itself is also ancient and usual. We all get our livings or our food from it. Most of us literate people nowadays and for many centuries past have spent most of our lives doing it.

Yet wherever we are in the social hierarchy we suspect that the other person in our penny capitalism is cheating us. If “cheating” means “leaving us with less profit that we would have had if the other was idiotically imprudent or wonderfully charitable,” then every single exchange involves it. Anxiety and irritation have always flowed from the gap between what you are willing to pay and what the seller is willing to accept. The gap characterizes all deals in the realm of exchange—wage deals, house deals, bread deals. In the realm of violence, by contrast, your satisfaction is not at issue: you will be distressed that the thief has robbed you or the judge has sentenced you, but you understand the violence being applied. “If you ever go to Houston, you better walk right,/ You better not stagger and you better not fight./ etc. At the far other end of human relations, the realm of rhetoric, by contrast, after the persuasive act you are satisfied. When someone persuades you to believe the Pythagorean Theorem, or to believe in the mutual gains from trade, or to buy a Toyota, or to marry, or to worship, you are not anxious (buyer’s remorse and the dark night of the soul aside). You have “changed your mind,” as we say. In the middling realm of exchange, though, your mind is given—the economist’s assumption of given tastes—and you try to get what gain can be achieved by a deal. But after the deal you always know that it could have been more favorable to you. In the nature of mutual advantage, you could have got more of it. There’s always that annoying gap.

Marshallian economists and their heirs the Samuelsonian economists call the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to accept “the sum of consumer’s and producer’s surplus.” Marxists call it, more vividly, “exploitation” or “surplus value.” It is the social gain from trade—the value created by trade—to be divided somehow into your profit from the transaction and the other person’s. The “somehow” is the source of the irritation. The amount that makes trade good for both parties also leaves both parties thinking they could have done better. In fact, either could have. Did I get the best deal I could? Has he made a fool of me? Gullible Jack in the English folk tale sells his mother’s cow for a silly handful of beans, and the mother is outraged by the cheating, and by her son’s gullibility. The beans prove to be magical, of course, resolving the tension aroused in the listeners by the first act (imagine the story of Jack and the Beanstalk ending abruptly with the original “cheating”), and Jack proceeds to himself cheat the giant and thereby amass his own profit. It is a peasant’s view of exchange, always cheating, cheating, cheating, taking every advantage however small. A market transaction is viewed as zero sum, your loss being my gain. “Country life,” reflects the academic narrator in a J. M. Coetzee novel about rural South Africa, “has always been a matter of neighbors scheming against each other.” The narrator’s early impression of his neighbor Petrus, who tries to cheat him in every deal, is that the man though admirably hard working was “a plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning.”⁹¹

All this cheating magic of markets has long angered people (though not when they themselves practice it on others: from that point of view it a bargain, een goedkoop, say the plotting Dutch, a “good buy.” I won and he lost. Hurrah). Only briefly in recent European centuries did a coherent rhetoric arise to assuage the anger against the other side of a market transaction. It half-persuaded people that markets are positive sum. I’ve called it the Bourgeois Deal: let me make profits off deals in the market and in the long run I’ll make us all rich. Modern people, though subject to outbreaks of populist reversion to peasant type, and if highly educated a reversion to an aristocratic disdain for trade, act as though they pretty much accept the Deal.

The acceptance is historically rare. The commercial Chinese, for example, have long been burdened by a Confucian disdain for the class of merchants, ranked in the hierarchy since 600 BCE even below peasants. Recently the mainland Chinese seem to have gotten over their disdain, as their cousins overseas have managed to do for centuries. Chinese real income per head is still one tenth of what it is in the United States, so there is plenty of time for the Chinese to revert to Confucian type and kill the golden goose. The Christians in their beginnings were among the most anti-commercial people of faith, more so than Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Zoroastrians or even Buddhists. By late in the first millennium of Christianity the dominant theorizers about the economy were monks and mystics and desert fathers, deniers of this world in the style of St. Augustine. Their asceticism was, somewhat illogically, attached in their minds to union with God—illogically because after all God made the world as His Son made tables for sale in Nazareth. The desert fathers were a large influence on Muslim mysticism, too, despite their devotion to a tent-making merchant.⁹² The main factual paradox of the present book is that, startlingly, it was a Christian Europe slowly after 1300 and unstoppably after 1700 that redeemed the bourgeois life.

Yet, I repeat, the disdain started early for people who buy low and sell high, people who are neither aristocratic nor clerical nor even peasant-like—“honest” in a recent sense but poor. It was prominent for a very long time, even in Europe, especially in the classical Mediterranean (with perhaps less prominence in the ancient Near East). Fernand Braudel wrote in 1979 that "when Europe came to life again in the eleventh century, the market economy and monetary sophistication were 'scandalous' novelties. Civilization, standing for ancient tradition, was by definition hostile to innovation. So it said no to the market, no to profit making, no to capital. At best it was suspicious and reticent.”⁹³ The German sociologist Georg Simmel had put it well in 1907: “the masses—from the Middle Ages right up to the nineteenth century—thought that there was something wrong with the origin of great fortunes. . . . Tales of horror spread about the origin of the Grinaldi, the Medici and the Rothschild fortunes. . . as if a demonic spirit was at work.”⁹⁴ Simmel is being precise here, as he usually is. It is the masses, the populists, hoi polloi, who hold such views most vividly. A jailer in the thirteenth century scorned a rich man’s pleas for mercy: “Come, Master Arnaud Teisseire, you have wallowed in such opulence! . . . . How could you be without sin?”⁹⁵ Echoing Jesus of Nazareth when he speaks of rich men and camels and needles, another of Le Roy Ladurie’s Albigensians declared that “those who have possessions in the present life can have only evil in the other world. Conversely, those who have evil in the present life will have only good in the future life.”⁹⁶

Such disdain for possessions in the present life, and the matched disdain by landed aristocrats for the vulgarity of trade, is still hard to ignore even among the elite, because it is built into European literary and religious traditions, providing the foundations for novels like Lewis’ Main Street or Richard Power’s Gain and movies like Wall Street, I or II. The peasant envied profit makers—though she took profit on her sales of barley. The proletariat grumbled about his boss—though he changed his tune when he became one. The aristocrat disdained traders—though he engaged in profitable trade when he could. Michael McCormick notes that the “late Roman legacy of contempt for commerce,” reinforced by the rhetoric of the modern clerisy ashamed of its own bourgeois origins, has occluded the evidence for a revival of European trade in the eighth and especially the ninth centuries (note: two or three centuries earlier than the Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne had put it in 1925, or Braudel following him). “Christian dislike of commerce—if not for its proceeds—allied with the new aristocratic ethos of a warrior life to produce a ruling class” (and therefore surviving evidence written by or in praise of them) “that was often indifferent and sometimes even hostile to the trading life.”⁹⁷ It continued in another version the scorn for the bourgeoisie that aristocratic Greeks and senatorial Romans displayed.

Even in commercial Italy the line between aristocrat and borghese was sharp—and even when the aristocrats were, like the Medici, descended from the middle class. The story-teller Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was the son of an employee of the Bardi bank of Florence (the bank was soon to be brought down by the refusal of proud Edward III of England to honor his debts). He was raised up to be a banker. In his collection of tales, The Decameron (composed 1349-1351), Boccaccio treats merchants respectfully—at any rate by the standard of his Florentine countryman Dante fifty years before, in The Divine Comedy, who finds them on his voyage to Hell down at the Nth*** level. Yet Boccaccio’s story about Saladin disguised as a traveling merchant of Cyprus (in order to discover and outwit the European preparations for the Third Crusade) depends on the irony of noblemen unable to conceal their nobility—though allegedly mere mercanti. The Italian host, Torello, a “gentleman” (gentile uomo) or “knight” (cavaliere), a member of the Lombard city gentry and not of the aristocracy (“he was a private urban citizen and not a lord”: era cittadino e non signore) exclaims of the three noble Saracens, before he had quite penetrated their merchantly disguise, “May it please God for our part of the world to produce gentlemen [gentili uomini] of the same quality I now find in Cypriot merchants!”⁹⁸ Nobility shines through. Torello “thought they were men of eminence [magnifichi uomini], of much higher rank than he had imagined at first.” He gives them in Polanyi’s style of reciprocal exhange silk- and fur-lined robes. The Saracens, “seeing the nobility [nobilità] of the robes, non-merchant-like [non mercatantesche],” fear he has sniffed them out. Though Torello does not entirely realize the great eminence of his guests (in European literature after the Crusades, Saladin is treated routinely as the most noble of opponents), he exclaims on parting—one last insult for the borghese compared with magnifichi uomini—“whoever you are, you can’t make me believe for the present that you are merchants!”⁹⁹

The result in most of Europe diverged strikingly from the zest for both trading and warfare one finds in the elite of the pagan, Germanic north. It continued to characterize, McCormick notes, the later saga literature of the Christian thirteenth century.¹⁰⁰ Vikings were traders. The words in Irish for “market,” “penny,” and “shilling” all come from the Norse traders and enslavers. The facts make one of the contrasts between the cultures of the Mediterranean and of the German Ocean look strange.¹⁰¹ Germanic law codes of early times encourage cash compensation for dishonor. (At least for free men. The laws we have are only about them, using the words “free” and “man” precisely, and therefore were about aristocrats and other high-status men relative to a dishonorable if large majority class of slaves and women.) An eye for an eye is always possible and honorable in the German laws. But so is thus-and-such quantity of silver for the eye, which payment abruptly ends the blood feud. Tacitus is a little surprised that minor crimes are punished simply by a fine, in cattle or horses (in keeping with his claim that the Germani knew not the use of coined money). The major and capital crimes he instances with stunned amazement are not mere assault (on that eye, for example) but large matters like cowardice or treason. Among the Germans, Tacitus writes, “even homicide can be atoned for by a fixed number of cattle or sheep,” and therefore “feuds do not continue forever unreconciled.”¹⁰² Tacitus (probably of Gaulish origin but of course thoroughly Mediterraneanized) is astonished that the Germans let profane cash into matters of sacred honor. The prudent answer to a crime, you see, is to demand wergelt, dissolving endless blood feuds in the solvent of the cash. The hero the Icelander Gunnar in Njáls Saga does so, as did every honorable Icelander in those heroic days, at any rate according to the sagas written three centuries later.

By contrast in the South, from Homer to El Cid to The Godfather, honor is absolute. What is strange is that the implacable Southerners had long lived by a monetized and commercialized Mediterranean, heirs to a classical civilization based since the early first millennium BCE on seagoing trade. The savages of the Northern forests were making delicate calculations of monetary equivalences in a supposedly less commercial society. The honorable—that is, the aristocratic—part of the civilization of the classical Mediterranean had always been suspicious of getting money, though of course very eager to have and spend it. By contrast the Icelandic sagas (written well after their events, I’ve noted, and admittedly therefore perhaps anachronistic) are about men unashamedly at the margin between commerce and piracy. Arriving at a new coast they had to decide whether to steal what they wanted or to trade for it. Great hoards of Byzantine coins are found in Norse settlements around the Baltic and North and Irish seas, evidence that the piratical and commercial ventures of the Vikings were not narrow in scope.¹⁰³ But all this merely enlarges the paradox, that the apparently advanced part of the Western world had from the beginning to the present a more primitive code of honor—or at any rate a less bourgeois one.

The pagan Viking attitude towards merchants did not win out. Mediterranean values did. In late fourteenth-century England, for example, Chaucer favorably characterizes the three most admired classes, “A KNIGHT there was, and that a worthy man. . . . A poor PARSON of a town/ But rich he was of holy thought and work. . . . With him there was a PLOUGHMAN who was his brother/ . . . Living in peace and perfect charity.”¹⁰⁴ He characterizes the two-dozen other pilgrims mentioned in “The General Prologue” (1387) of The Canterbury Tales in notably less flattering terms. True, the owner of the Tabard, Our Host is described genially throughout (“a fairer burgher is there none at Cheapside”). The five urban craftsmen of the middling sort mentioned together as dressed in fraternal livery (haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer, and tapestry maker) are described, too, as “fair burghers,” worthy to “sit in a guildhall on a dais,” or to be aldermen (for property they had enough, and rent), but such folk are not further characterized in the extant Tales—except that the bourgeois Miller’s Tale makes merry of a carpenter.¹⁰⁵ The Sergeant of the Law was “cautious and prudent,” of “high renown.”¹⁰⁶ But four of the five solidly bourgeois figures, the Merchant, the Reeve, the Miller, and the Doctor of Physik, are described in the “General Prologue,” unsurprisingly in medieval literature, as cheating dealers: the Merchant “proclaiming always the increase of his winning”; and “full rich [the Reeve] had a-storèd privily,” cheating his master; and “well could [the Miller] steal corn, and charge its toll thrice”; and the Doctor “kept the gold he won [that is, earned] in pestilence./ For gold in physik is a cordiàl [that is, in medicine is a cure]./ Therefore he lovèd gold in speciàl.”

Yet with the exception of the three honored classes and a few hearty, harmless, or holy others, all degrees are greedy in Chaucer. A non-bourgeois and religious figure, the avaricious seller of papal pardons, is also characterized as eager “to win silver as he full well could.” And the begging Friar deals only with rich people, and gladly hears confessions of men hard of heart who cannot truly feel sorrow for their sins, and “therefore instead of weeping and prayers/ Men must give silver to the poor friars.”¹⁰⁷ And so forth. Throughout the Tales one class accuses another of greed and hypocrisy, supplemented by lust. That, after all, is the running joke.

Right down to the Reformation, and in anti-clericalism down to the present, the merchant has replied to the charge of worldly corruption that the priest, too, in his splendid robes, is indulging in the world’s pleasures as he should not. Chaucer’s Monk, who loved hunting, regards the rule of St. Benedict as “old and somewhat strict”: “he was a lord full fat and in good point.”¹⁰⁸ The Merchant character in David Lindsay’s Satire of the Three Estates in Scots of 1542-1544 does not defend his own social usefulness directly, as a couple of centuries later in Scotland he would have most vigorously done, but spends most of his stage time complaining about the clerical characters and their multiple benefices (that is, holding many parishes simultaneously without preaching at any of them) and simony (that is, selling for money a reduction of time in Purgatory).¹⁰⁹

One must not get carried away with literary examples like these. As a leading student of early Italian capitalism points out, Chaucer or Boccaccio or other imaginative “portrayals” of merchants are “organized by a complex system of stereotypes and rhetorical images often resulting from ancient cultural models.”¹¹⁰ For example, Merchant’s obsession in Lindsay’s Satire with the sins of the clergy is a standard turn in medieval literature, one estate complaining about the other instead of answering the (presumably true) charges just mentioned against itself. These are literary works, with, as the professors of literature after Julia Kristeva say, an “intertextual” relation to Horace or Virgil complaining about the pursuit of riches (while sitting pretty, it should be noted of both, on riches earned by their poetry and their politics). Literary and other texts are not somehow “objective” reports from the cultural frontier.

A century after Chaucer the Flemish-English play Everyman turns on a repeated metaphor of life’s account book, from which one might mistakenly infer that commerce and the middle class were uncritically admired. Everyman says to Death, “all unready is my book of reckoning”, and later when he believes that Kindred will save him, “I must give a reckoning straight.”¹¹¹ His deeds on the credit side do not suffice, as the character named Good Deeds himself says: “If ye had perfectly cheered me,/ Your book of count full ready had be.” As Everyman goes to his grave he says, “I must be gone/ To make my reckoning and my debts pay.” But the inference to an admiration of trade is of course mistaken. The metaphor of life’s balance sheet before God is routine in all religions, whether well disposed towards bourgeois profit or not. Christianity in particular, though hostile from the beginning to commerce, is based on a metaphor of redemption of debt through Christ’s sacrifice. The Greek word used in the New Testament for redemption [apo]lutrosis was a commercial one. At the end of the play Everyman appeals to Jesus: “As thou me boughtest, so me defend.” And the third of his earthly companions to betray him, after Fellowship and Kindred, is a much-beloved character, Goods. Everyman laments “Alas, I have thee loved, and had great pleasure/ All my life-days on goods and treasure.” To which Goods replies, as in olden times did the prophet Joel and the messiah Jesus, and anti-consumerist clerisy still do, “That is to thy damnation, without leasing/ For my love is contrary to the love everlasting.” “My condition is man’s soul to kill.” And this too is, anciently, routine literary stuff. [