Blood and Money. David McNally
then turns, in book VII, to mathematics as the science of the unchanging. The true philosophers, he insists, those best qualified to govern the state, should “go and learn arithmetic … until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only.” Along this route, they will “pass from becoming to truth and being.” To see the nature of numbers with the mind only is to leave the realm in which “merchants and retail traders” deal with numbers. The latter imagine numbers in relation to actual goods, objects, and coins; their understanding of numbers is contaminated by sense-experience in the world of things. The philosopher, on the other hand, consciously abandons the sphere of sensation in order to “reason about abstract number” (525, my emphasis). And here, as I have suggested, Plato’s philosophy endeavors to appropriate to philosophy the powers of money as an end in itself.
The quintessence of full-fledged money is to be the universal substance of commodity exchange. Money transcends all particulars; unlike all other commodities, it is the exclusively universal representative of value. It thus embodies the true essence of all things as commodities—it is the universality that unites their particularities. Indeed, commodities only realize themselves as money. Outside their expression in money, commodities lack reality and truth as commodities (i.e., as goods meant to be bought and sold). It follows that money is the “being” of particular goods, unperturbed by their becoming in space and time, by their volatile movements and price fluctuations. Notwithstanding the chaos of market exchange, money persists as the truth of all things. Money is abstract value, manifest in specific concrete quantities of actual goods, but not reducible to them. Money is not the price of this coat, that loaf of bread, or this automobile. It is the very possibility of particular things as numbers (exchange values)—the quality of things that makes the many different numbers (prices) possible. Put differently, nothing could have a particular exchange value if it did not participate in the very ontological possibility of exchangeability. Yet this ontological possibility resides outside the things themselves as use values, and this “outside” property is incarnated in money. Money is the pure form of exchangeability, in the same way that Platonic truth, like the essence of beauty, is a timeless form that resides in a realm separated from the material world of things. “What is absolute unity?” asks Plato. And he answers: it is that which can be “both one and infinite in multitude” (525). Of course, this also describes money, which can assume the appearance of any number (price) without being reducible to any of them, just as truth can pertain to particular philosophical or mathematical arguments without being confined by them. Money and truth are thus infinite in a way that particular prices and truthful propositions are not.
Having, in book I, disqualified money as the architectonic principle of a good society, by the later books of The Republic, Plato has projected the universalizing qualities of money onto philosophy. Philosophical truth—be it in the form of wisdom, virtue, or beauty—is represented as the universal substance of our world. More than this, for Plato it is an ideational substance, one that is sharply separated from the world of sense-experience, and of the body and its labors. Yet, here we encounter two rubs. First, the philosophical production of truth has emerged as a counter to the universalizing powers of money. Philosophy mimics money’s transcendent properties and emerges only where the latter has already made its imprint on society. Minerva’s owl truly takes flight at dusk. Second, money itself is tied to the world of labor. In the ancient case, this notably involved the labor of enslaved people, as was directly evident in the production of Athenian silver in the city’s mines. And this double dependency—on money and labor—undercuts philosophy’s declarations of autonomy, its claims to produce the truth of our world through mind alone. As Marx would later claim in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the ostensible autonomy of mind is thus an illusion. “Logic is the currency of the mind,” he wrote, in parody of German idealism.41 Just as money renders all goods subordinate to it by positing itself as their essence, so Plato’s logic, like all idealism, posits the mind’s thought processes as the truth of all things. Yet, lurking behind the world of mind, making it all possible, is a social process that logic conceals—the division between mental and manual labor. “From the moment when a division between mental and manual labour appears,” declare Marx and Engels, then “consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world.”42 But this “emancipation” is a false one, made possible only by the violence of exploitation, manifest in the surplus product upon which philosophers subsist. Determining the world of the mind, in other words, are the labors of “the motley multitude” (Republic, 494), those excluded from the domains of mind and government, whose activity sustains these hallowed spheres. Just as the enslaved person is the secret of ancient money, so is it the secret of ancient philosophy.
Because he was untroubled in his support of slavery, Plato makes the economic dependence of citizen-philosophers entirely visible. In his Laws, for instance, when sketching out his preferred social arrangements, he declares, “Farms have been entrusted to slaves, who provide them [the citizens] with sufficient produce of the land to keep them in modest comfort.”43 The same text advises the master class on how to govern this “difficult beast,” which should always be addressed with “an order,” with whom all forms of friendship should be avoided, and on whom the whip should be freely applied.44 Once more, we are returned to violence, bondage, and enslaved bodies—bodies that were acquired through war, which had to be fought by common soldiers. The ruling class conceived of the latter by analogy to enslaved people. As much as sacrifice of animals had been at the root of Greek culture, the sacrifice of soldiers was at the root of its wars and empire. And this sacrifice was obtained with money.
Coins and the Polis
With the growth of the polis as the space of public life, sacred ritual increasingly revolved around public temples, many of which were built during the eighth century BCE. With older forms of reciprocity breaking down, aristocrats were pressured to redirect generosity by means of dedications to the temples.45 A new egalitarian sensibility identified public-spiritedness with redistribution via public institutions, over which the demos had increasing influence. To court the goodwill of the gods and of their neighbors, wealthy men were now expected not to host private banquets, but to donate to temples. Growing anti-aristocratic sentiment also brought lavish funeral ceremonies, another form of private display, into disfavor. This change has been described as a shift of redistribution, from gifts-to-men to gifts-to-gods; but equally it was a shift from aristocratic charity to the poor, to (rich) citizens’ obligations to the state, which took the form of temple donations.46
As temples became repositories of wealth—and in some cases the first banks in the ancient Greek world—they also took over from private patrons the distribution of wealth to commoners by way of civic feasts. In a society in which the civic and the religious were integrated, temples readily became sites of economic transactions. They sponsored marketplaces and fairs; they issued loans to city authorities at moments of distress; they paid out wages, particularly for labor employed in temple-building projects; and they sold donated objects in order to raise money to fund their diverse functions. In all these ways, temples became focal points for market transactions, while organizing the ritual events at which animals were sacrificed and food shared.47 Goods that served monetary purposes were thus deeply embedded in an economy of the sacred.
While sacrificial animals were undoubtedly among the votive offerings made by rich men, looking at the epics, we can discern other valuable pre-monetary objects related to communal feasts. In the penultimate book of the Iliad, for instance, Achilles convenes an athletic contest to commemorate his beloved friend Patroclus. At various stages of his description of the contest, Homer enumerates the prizes on offer. Predictably, horses, oxen, gold, and enslaved women are among them. But so are metallic goods related to feasting, in particular “a great tripod to stand over the fire,” and a cauldron. The poet presents us with precise valuations of many of these goods, expressed in oxen. The tripod, we are informed, was valued by the warriors “at twelve oxen’s worth,” the enslaved woman “at four oxen,” and the cauldron at “the worth of an ox” (Iliad; 23:702–5, 886). Note again the role of cattle as a measure of value, as well as the interchangeability of enslaved persons with oxen. Equally significant, the metallic objects offered as prizes—a cauldron and