A Brief Crappy History of Money
In the Classical World the ancient Greeks began minting their first silver and bronze coins around 600 BCE, an idea they seem to have gotten from the Lydians in West Asia. Over the next centuries each polis was minting their own currency, such as the Corinthian coin with its flying Pegasus, or that of Athens with Athena's owl. Naturally the advent of money soon led to their continued opposition warfare, though arguably may also have contributed among the ancient Greeks to an unprecedented, and largely unsurpassed, period of philosophical, artistic and cultural efflorescence. Perhaps no more than today, given the financial malaise of modern Greece, should Western Civilization be reminded of the overwhelming indebtment it has to the peoples of Hellas. The idea of money (and war) was subsequently most useful to the Romans, who issued gold, silver and bronze coins with portraits of their emperors valid for commercial exchange throughout the entire Empire. The only problem was that most coin was horded by the aristocracy, while the plebian masses were increasingly overburdened and oppressed with taxes, mostly to finance the army, which was ever more necessary in keeping the barbarians out of Rome's vast territory.The aureus of a gluttonous Nero was particularly symbolic of the excesses and hardship this caused.
Yet, at the same time, the possibility of using identical coin from Britain to Mauritania and from Lusitania to Syria, did not come without its benefits. In facilitating the spread of classical culture and the State's institutions everywhere, the circulation of money for a long time helped achieve a universal pax in the region that has never been known since, nor has it not been sorely missed right down to today. It also guaranteed the unifying outcome of commercial trade, which, somewhat unexpectedly to the authorities (and initially to their great discontent), also ensured the circulation of new cult rights and spiritual ideas. More appealing than those associated with the traditional gods of the rich, in that they all claimed to offer an eternal prosperity in the next life; these new salvation religions were privately set against that which for most of the public was so grievously lacking in this one, being woefully deficient in coin as they were. Naturally they began to spread like wildfire, just as they would inevitably herald the end of the Classical World.
With the onset of Christianity, for a long time in our Western culture, money was equated with devil's dung. This was of course taught by the Catholic Church, under the pretext that wealth was bad and sinful, and that was it – “It’s harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,” and so forth - and that poverty was in many ways a divine trial to be piously endured; while people naturally given to austerity demonstrated a saintliness that should be revered. This has always perplexed me though, given that the religious authorities were never in any shortage of funds. Indeed they often lived as most opulent princes.
At any rate throughout Medieval history, as had been the case in antiquity, money was generated by land holdings and by production (work on the feud was still paid in kind, or else laborors bartered what they had for what they needed, until eventually proletariats replaced serfs and so were remunerated), while coin was minted by the states: be they monarchial, republican, imperial, papal, etc. - states, which, it goes without saying, were constantly embroiled in intensive competition and antagonism that frequently resulted in war. However, at a certain point, the Renaissance burghers of Florence and Italy, as well as the Northern merchants of Flanders and the Netherlands began making long voyages to distant lands. They brought forth a new age of commercial transactions through issues of credit and check payments on-site between far off places, international banking and, eventually, the bourses. Tradable bonds as a commonly used type of security was another innovation, spearheaded by the Italian city-states of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. Early modernism's New World discoveries, as well as those in the Far East, led to corporate stock being first traded. Some see the key event as the Dutch East India Company's founding in 1602, while others point to earlier developments.
Later men and machines, industrialization and colonialism - each embedded within an ever evolving capitalism - generated a production boom, though at the same time put thousands of people out of work, enslaved others who worked ceaseless hours for a pittance, while making a few exceedingly rich. This led to the sort of socialist action recommended by Karl Marx, the people of Germany and Austria having been particluarly destitute. The German intellectual's fierce opponent, Bismarck, however, believed that the only way to arrest the spread of socialism was to allay the worst hardships of the workers, so that they no longer wanted to turn the state upside-down.
Meanwhile the potential the stock exchanges offered investors under the alacritous resource and market development that industrialization and Western imperialism had caused, inevitably led to the great speculation boom, which was then followed by the Great Depression, but also two World Wars at both ends. Despite a myriad of concomitant causes, money, as has always been the case in the history of men’s catastrophic wars since being invented, was a central, if undisclosed, cause. At this point, however, the financialization of capitalism was implacably underway. Now money was no longer a fact of land ownership and production, as it had been in the Middle Ages, but under the forces of financial alchemy could apparently be self-generated (but also vaporized) in previously unfathomable quantities, according to the moods and sways of the markets.
During the Cold War such economic financialization resulted in unprecedented growth among the capitalist nations, which, of course, the communist countries could neither keep up with nor resist (if only through a nuclear Armageddon); though it also caused their state debts to skyrocket. At the same time rising workers' wages were held in check and mass credit was foisted upon the middle class to satisfy a need for consumer growth, while the lending banks profited from the interest repayments. In short there was great interest in maintining a salary cap, as there was great money to be made even among the modest wage earners by the banks. At this point money on the global scale and as a creature of finance, has currently led to considerations about the notion of communal goods and, as consort to our socio-economic model, about the serious consequences this has for soil consumption, environmental impact, food production and its relative shameful waste, in addition to future concerns over what will be left for subsequent generations. Lastly, according to the Brundland Commission, "we are taking financial loans out on future generations, without the intention or hope of ever repaying any of it back."
PS: The latest crisis of capitalism, which was of course provoked by an ungoverned financial apparatus, has recently triggered a renewed social discontent (especially among the emerging generation), with all the normal protest manifestations that this prompts. In keeping with the times, the contemporary organization of mass protest has been advertised through all the electronic social media and labeled under new brand names such as OWS and its affiliates, which claim to represent the struggle of the haggard and craving 99% of the lower pyramid, against the piggish rapacity of the 1% at the top. At the same time the emergence of the Asian economic powers, in addition to those of the southern hemisphere like Brazil, are causing the advent of a new global order that has inevitably placed at risk the prosperity and supremacy of the West. Such Western states are obviously not willing to part so easily with their wealth and omnipotence, however. Threatened by the possibility of epochal change, the great monetary authorities of the West have thus recently taken action to overhaul the traditional political classes with technocrats more versed in and congenial to all their monetary interests, which have been subtly grafted upon the normal tissue of the democratic institutions. The future of money has thus been assured. To further arrest decline, a new age of military deployment has also been engaged within all the vitally strategic zones, causing mounting tension between irreconcilable civilizations now faced off in a Herculean test of nerves. The case of Iran and the West is particularly problematical in this regard. Phenomena such as the Arab Spring and religiously (as well as economically) driven international terrorist groups have acted, not fortuitously, as the only possible alternatives to yielding submission and forms of resistance thus far.