In pre-modern times, (as in many surviving peasant communities) it was considered degrading to engage in trade. Under a mind-set difficult to comprehend today, business and money-making were not regarded as respectable occupations. St. Jerome was quite clear on the matter: “The merchant can please God only with difficulty.” Profit-seeking was avarice, speculation a sin, and all forms of usury were condemned by the church. In medieval times merchants and traders who bought and sold for money were despised because they had no heritage, no roots in the land. They lived by the strongbox, by the rattle of coins and by the system of mercantile alliances they built up with other ‘expatriates’ like themselves. They did not live on the land, nor did they respect those who did so.
To recap, the independent peasant farmer or craftsman lived and worked on the land and in community, learning and developing skills which enabled him/her to take control over and responsibility for their subsistence needs and those of the family and community in which they lived, directly from the land and surrounding countryside. Inherited skills and natural raw materials were available from outside the money economy. Although they might sell a surplus for money, they did not produce for a money income. Throughout human history, for most people most of the time, the idea of employment, of working under orders for money, making things you would never use, with machines and materials you do not understand, in order to buy consumer goods made to the specifications of strangers, was incomprehensible.
In The Politics of Money we trace back to Aristotle the distinction between the social and natural resources economies (oikonomia), and the money economy (chrematistics). The term oikonomia, from which the term ‘economics’ is derived, is concerned with the management of the resources of the household for the benefit of all its members over the long run. If the term ‘household’ is expanded to include the ecological resources of the land and its peoples, its institutions, language, shared values and history, we can visualise an economics designed to benefit the community as a whole. Chrematistics, on the other hand, relates to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange benefits to the individual owner. We conclude, in The Politics of Money, that no community or civilisation can exist without oikonomia, the natural and social resources economies which sustain human life on earth. However, chrematistics, the economy of short-term personal monetary gain, has come to dominate human society. Its cancerous growth now threatens the human species with extinction (see The Politics of Money pages 226-229). Ordinary people in their everyday lives collude in this destruction as they secure their money incomes first, with the never-quite-achieved intention of getting around to thinking about the longer term implications of their impact on the social and ecological infrastructures – eventually.
The chrematistics economy became all-powerful in Western ‘civilization’ through the mortgaging of land and the creation of money debt secured by landed ‘property’. Thus land ceased to belong to the community, but was re-defined as a money-valued asset capable of being held in individual rather than communal ownership. Under the ‘modern’ economy which evolved at the end of the middle ages, production, became geared towards the securing of a monetary reward through trade and exchange so that monetary obligations could be met. There is no reason at all for these monetary obligations to relate to the social or ecological needs of the wider community, and on the whole they do not, in fact, do so. Hence the conventional history of the evolution of western civilisation presents the replacement of feudal ties and obligations with the freedoms of the universal money economy as an unmitigated ‘good’. In this scenario, the necessity to respect social and ecological obligations is viewed as objectionably oppressive of the freedom of the individual. The time has come to scrutinise these conventional value-judgements.