Just a few comments to Ed Weick's excellent exchanges with Thomas Lunde:
At 21:33 29/01/98 -0500, Ed Weick wrote:
>Thomas:
>
>>Show me the first city without a countryside?
(EW)
>I'm not saying that there was not a countryside before there were cities.
>But in the original countryside everyone produced only for themselves, or
>for their local group, by a combination of own-use agriculture and hunting
>and gathering. Such trade as took place was very limited and occurred on a
>barter basis.
It depends on what is meant by "limited". In the sense that the number of
their products was very small compared with today, and also in the sense
that trade was relatively infrequent, countryside tribes did indeed trade
in a limited way.
But consider this: without trade almost from the very beginning of mankind
our species would never have been able to spread around the world because
almost every habitat that he penetrated would have been deficient in one
essential item or another. This is a field that has long been neglected by
anthropologists but it is being increasingly recognised that pre-historic
trade routes were very extensive indeed -- for some products (such as
obsidian, a very hard flint), thousands of miles. Salt was essential for
all tribes and seldom found in most territories. The earliest stone age
tribes needed several different types of wood and stone for the optimum use
of different sorts of tools. For example, the immediate precursor of the
bow and arrow, required two types of wood -- a flexible launching stick and
a rigid spear -- and suitable trees were not found everywhere. There were
probably at least a dozen essential products that were traded long before
the Bronze Age. Europe, Asia and North Africs would have been criss-crossed
with hundreds of main trade routes and thousands of subidiary ones to reach
all tribes. In short, relative to their way of life, and as a proportion of
early man's total goods and services, "international trade" was just as
important as today.
Cutting to ....
(EW)
>The major difference between those times and now is that goods
>do not have to be sold right away; they can be stored. As well, we no
>longer need to rely on local production; during the winter agricultural
>produce can be imported from regions able to produce year round.
Ah! And this is almost certainly the reason why money -- a relatively dense
type of wealth -- was invented. When the first sea traders started to trade
between coastal cities and thus bypass many traditional intermediate inland
market places (junctions of tribes/villages) they would have shifted
relatively large volumes of produce. They needed to store it and trickle it
out in order not to cheapen the price. Furthermore, a sea trader wouldn't
have wanted to wait while his produce was slowly sold. He would have sold
all of his goods immediately to a local entrepreneur, receiving gold or
silver in order to return home and do more trading.
(EW)
>If I remember my economics, profit is not a reward to capital, but to
>enterprise. It is the reward going to the entrepreneur, the person who is
>successful in putting capital, labor and land together to some productive
>purpose. Capital accrues interest, which is the price which must be paid to
>the owner of the capital because, while it is in production, he cannot use
>it for any other purpose. Marx did not buy this. He saw capital as
>something like "congealed labor effort" which rightly belonged to the
>working class, but which was stolen from it by the capitalist. And, of
>course, medieval theologians, saw capital as something essentially devilish
>because owners of capital could charge "usury". Why am I saying this? It
>is because I believe that we are forever looking for scapegoats, someone to
>blame when the world is not as we think it should be. Every age has done
>this.
Well said. The "modern" debate about free trade, globalisation and so forth
is merely today's equivalent of the debate about usury that went on for a
thousand years in the Middle Ages (and before that in Greek and Chinese
times). Every time free trade resumes and prosperity revives, some
authoritarian body wants to lay their hands on the profits -- the Church,
principalities, guilds, more latterly nation-states -- and so they start to
impose restrictions on trade by taxing it. This succeeds for a while but
inevitably fails as the general population sinks into increasing poverty.
A final word about the dirty word "profits". There is nothing wrong with
profits. It is the benefit we receive by being more efficient in the use of
energy. This is gained either by importing more efficient goods or by
innovating one's own production methods. At the end of the day (despite
what the economists say!), we have a free gift in the form of the vast
amounts of solar radiation we receive and this, transformed along a myriad
of different channels and processes ends up as profits in the hands of
individuals. Profits is a good clean word and we should be thankful for it.
Without perceived benefits (i.e.profits) none of us would exchange anything
-- or indeed do anything at all except basic food-getting in what would in
truth be a very small number of favoured localities in the world fortunate
enough to have all basic necessities.
Without profits and without trade our total world population would be
unlikely to be more than, say, chimpanzees or mountain gorillas. And our
standard of living would be similar, too.
________________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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