Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government. By George Caffentzis. Pluto Press. 2021.
This is a slightly revised, second edition of a book that originally came out in 1989 in which Caffentzis argues that John Locke, who lived from 1632 to 1704 and whose writings all university students of politics and philosophy are required to study, was ‘the philosopher of primitive accumulation’. Even supporters of capitalism recognise, in fact hail, Locke as an early advocate and ideological defender of their system. This is because of the justification he provided for the private ownership of land and industry and his view that the basic role of governments is to protect property ownership.
Locke’s argument was simple enough. Accepting the traditional Christian view that God originally gave the Earth to humanity for its members to use to satisfy the needs of all of them and not to waste, he argued that in a ‘state of nature’, i.e. before governments and laws were established, individuals worked the land to satisfy their needs and were entitled to what they mixed their labour with – his so-called ‘labour theory of property’. However, at first this was only up to the point where their needs were satisfied; if they produced more than they could consume themselves, they couldn’t let it go to rot but were obliged to give it away or let others use it. This changed, Locke went on to argue, with the emergence of money as a means of exchange and a store of value as it meant that any surplus could now be converted into something that would not rot – the precious metals silver and gold.
This – what Caffentzis calls a ‘state of money’ – led to a ‘social contract’ between people to set up a government to protect the property of property-owners, especially of the wealthier among them. Locke used the ridiculous, in fact outrageous, argument that in agreeing to the use of money the non-wealthy had tacitly agreed to its consequence of ‘a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth’ and ‘an inequality of private possessions.’ This, argues Caffentzis, shows that Locke supported not only some members of society becoming landless but also the accumulation of wealth in the form of money, the two conditions Marx pointed to for capitalism to get going as an economic system.
Locke was not just a philosopher. He was involved in government. For instance, he drew up a constitution for the Carolinas, then still a British colony, which condoned chattel slavery. He was also involved in monetary policy, a discussion of his view on which is the theme of Caffentzis’s book. The main currency in England in Locke’s time was silver coins of a given weight. By the mid-1690s, due to clipping, most no longer contained their face-value weight of silver. To remedy this, which had become a hindrance to trade, it was decided to call in all existing silver coins, melt them down and re-coin them. The question was at what rate. Some wanted to devalue the pound and the shilling by defining them as a smaller amount of silver. Locke was against this. Caffentzis interprets this as meaning that Locke realised that, without a currency free from government manipulation, Britain would never come to dominate world trade. He also links this to Locke’s theories of knowledge and language.
Caffentzis presents his case in a clear, easy-to-follow style. The same cannot be said of the 23-page Introduction by Paul Rekert. This should be skipped or read afterwards in case its academese puts you off going on to read Caffentzis himself.
In a Preface Harry Cleaver writes that ‘escaping money has only recently returned to the agenda of revolutionaries’ as events ‘have made growing numbers of those looking beyond capitalism conclude that decommodification of life and escape from money are essential to the conceptualization and building of new, non-capitalist worlds’ (that could be said simpler too). Which is all to the good, though for some revolutionaries it has never been off the agenda.
Adam Buick
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