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09/09/2009
On the wrong side of the coin
Oleg Yuriev takes a black tomcat to the crossroadson Christmas Eve to
gain
new perspectives on the nature of money.
1. Selling a black tomcat at the crossroads on Christmas Eve.
The
motif of a coin or a bank-note, in other words a piece of money,
that cannot be spent is a motif that exists in folklore
the world
over. The money always returns to its owner. The purchased wares/and
or services, however stay where they
are – practical, eh? The only
thing you can't do is get change (leave it on the counter or give it
as a tip: keep
the change!) otherwise the coin loses its magic power.
This serviceable item can be acquired through one or other magical
operations
of middling difficulty. In Russian, for example, you have
to tie up a black tomcat with a tarred piece of string, take
it to a
particular crossroads on Christmas Eve, and sell the caterwauling
creature to a certain Somebody (who will appear
automatically) for one
silver rouble (no less, no more, however many millions are offered!)
This, at least, is how the
procedure is described by a wonderful
Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831 – 1895) in his story of 1894 about
"The
Magic Rouble."
Undoubtedly this fairytale motif reflects the (all too) human desire
to be relieved of material concerns,
the dream of the land of milk and
honey. A pocket land of milk and honey, so to say. But we know and the
fairytale knows
that this is impossible – folklore as a whole seems to
be almost entirely void of a story in which the possession
of a coin
that always returns to its owner ends happily every after. Sooner or
later the coin is lost and everything
it brought ends in misery. It's
as if such a thing was not intended for us. This is the difference
between magic money
and other magic objects which pay in kind – the
magic wishing table, for example, which lays on a spread whenever
asked.
If
it's not meant for us, who is it meant for!?
II. Money is uncanny
Money is a relatively recent discovery
in the history of man and we
have still not come to terms with it. What is money and why does it
buy everything, where
does it come from and where does it go? - our
forbears shuddered at all these questions, until the economists of the
18th
and 19th centuries convinced us (and themselves) that they could
explain it. And since then, we have been shuddering at
all their
answers.
Magic money shows the fear that simple people have of the magic of
money. Another (and more
general) manifestation of the same fear is
"money fetishism" as Karl Marx liked to call it.
Perhaps it is because
of all this fear and idolisation, that the motif
of the magic coin has enjoyed such little currency in Western art and
philosophy.
After all what metaphorical basis does it offer us? We
naturally identify with the owner of the coin, and this brings nothing
except
moral and pragmatic platitudes: work and expect nothing for
free, there's no such thing as a free lunch. We know all this
already:
the good Lord Money taught us that thousands of years ago!
Admittedly the possession of a magic coin is
a triumph, if fleeting,
over the uncanny powers of an almighty god; but Westerners have long
since abandoned their beliefs
in such triumphs, and what's more, in
recent times they have settled into an amicable arrangement with the
money fetish.
The idol has become relatively merciful. Of course we
could never (nor would we want to) say that everything is rosy, but
...
if things don't get worse, we are quite content... Why should we
want to start thinking about some bouncing coins? Everything
is fairly
clear isn't it? Surplus value, productivity, globality.
In contemporary Russian literature, on the other
hand, which, for
professional reasons, I observe systematically, three or four prose
pieces and countless poems are
published per year, which deal in some
way or touch on the motif of the magic rouble. The motif has made a
comeback.
This probably has something to do with the fact that Russia
(as at the end of the 19th century when Leskov wrote "The Magic
Rouble")
is once again in a transition phase between commodity
fetishism and money fetishism, and the Russian population is
struggling
to keep up. It was different in the Soviet era. In the
classical (ideological) Soviet society of the 30s through to the
60s,
it was not money (the defeated capitalist god) that determined a
person's value, but his proximity to power, his
direct share in it.
Later, in the internally de-ideologised USSR of the 70s and 80s, it
was, again, not money itself
but consumer goods that were the focus of
society's interest - as would be expected of an economy of scarcity.
III:
Back to the here and now – on the wrong side of the money
First and foremost we are interested in the here and
now, and not in a
lot of old stories from the East. Of course. We live in the here and
now. And money is flowing through
each one of us here and now. It
enters and leaves... But where does it go?
Let's look at the flip side of the situation
with the magic coin - not
through the eyes of the coin's owner, but from the perspective of the
baker or butcher, who
are on the losing end when the coin bounces out
of the till. Suddenly there's a lot more to see. Everything gets a lot
more
interesting and - most importantly – more personal. We suddenly
see that the paradigm of the magic money reflects
the entire way
Western civilisation functions, and what's more, how it effects us.
It's just that we are not the ones
who pay with the magic coin; we are
the ones who get paid with it.
We are not buyers. We are sellers, just as old
Marx tried to try to
tell us. But under the pressure of consumer propaganda we have, to
this veryday, failed to take
his warning on board. We sell our work,
our time, our bodies. And occasionally our black tomcats, too, not
that we have
any takers.
And we get money in return for our wares, but where is it all? Money
disappears, we all know this. The
person who pays us the money
probably gets it back. He already has the goods and he seems to have
the money as well.
So it must be our money that is filling his
pockets.
We are simply on the wrong side of the coin.
Somebody
else has the magic coin and we are living off the change that
he forgot on the counter, or left as a tip. The rest is for
you. -
Thank you Mr. Somebody. In principle we are living off tips (that here
and now are generous, so we are ... no,
of course we're not content,
but... we can survive...) But who is this other person, the owner of
the magic money, who
seems to have the entire social and economic
system in his grasp?
Different people will give different answers to
this question –
depending on their political and philosophical views, experiences and
ranking in society. Everyone
knows (or thinks they know) to whom and
what they are selling - work, time, bodies or black tomcats, whether
it be employer,
state or audience. And the point of turning things
around is to find the person with the magic coin: the great, anonymous
one.
The great, anonymous one, however, will not be so easy to find,
probably impossible to find if "he" does not want to be
found, but it
is more important to start looking and to learn some stuff along the
way. It's not so much about finding
that lot - to find yourself (or at
least see yourself from another perspective) would be pretty good
going. Alone the
possibility of being able to answer the central
question of our time "Where does all the money go?" with "It goes back
where
it came from" is a light to guide us in the dark. Even before we
have defined that lot.
The first thing that springs
to mind, of course, is the credit
services sector, "the banks" who are the real villains in most
people's way of thinking.
Without wanting to absolve these "loan
sharks" of blame, I do want to keep them out of this story: the money
that we
"borrow" from the bank is bought at great expense. This in not
money that we receive in payment and then discover is missing
from the
till. We know all along that it's not ours forever.
So I'm not talking about these "profiteers". And ultimately
it would
be too easy and uninteresting to think of them as that lot. After all,
everyone else thinks of them as that
lot.
IV. In the land of the farmasons
Our image also functions at a macro-economic level. Now we find
ourselves,
as inhabitants of the wealthy West / North, on the right
side of the money for once, which makes the fact that we are "on
the
wrong side at a personal level" more bearable and financially secure.
The wealthy West / North is apparently in
possession of a magic coin
which always returns, no matter how much money - whether in aid,
payment for raw materials
or cheap labour – the East / South gets (we
won't include loans here, although they could be said to represent a
form
of gift or payment whose repayment is neither expected nor even
wanted.)
In the family tree of Eastern European
legends about returning money,
there is one, very tender branch: the belief that somewhere "in the
threetimesninth land
in a threetimestenth state" – as Russian folklore
calls a fairytale kingdom, there is a magical land – where
the
"farmasons" live (a folksy pronounciation of the franc-maçons or
freemasons). The "farmasons" - in 19th century
Russian argot the word
simply meant "scoundrels" or "thieves" - are the ones who, in their
"farmason land" are in possession
of the magic money. This is where it
originated, this is its home. In the 19th century, the land of the
farmasons might
have meant some sort of folkloristic kingdom, but
today it clearly means Europe, "the land of holy miracles", as Fyodor
Dostoyevsky
half-mockingly-half-admiringly called it. Or more
precisely: the European Union.
This is why the desire of the Eastern
and Southern European countries
to join the EU has an exaggeratedly sacred, irrational undertone –
they all want
to get onto the right side of the money. The EU is an
inexhaustible bag of coins according to the "hopeful candidates"
(although
the Brussels Eurocrats seem to be of the same opinion). But
that's a slightly different fairytale motif and it would lead
us
metaphorically to very different, if fertile, territory, which has
more to do with the understanding of money as
a raw material, a
natural product which, for unexplained reasons, is made available to
certain individuals and peoples.
So it does no one any harm to take
from it, endlessly. This explains how budget structuring works in
certain state and
superstate organs, but it doesn't bring us any
closer to the mysterious being behind the image of the magic money.
This
image is much more closely related to the nature of money, which
we are discussing here, than with human nature or the
nature of
nature.
It seems important to reinstate the motif of ever-returning money in
the (collective) consciousness.
Particularly here, in the homeland of
the magic coin, and now, at the peak of its power. It is always worth
gain a better
understanding of things, as the history of the human
race would teach us, had it not refused to some time ago. History
is
in the middle of a teacher's strike, you might say. Thank God
geography's still being taught: the farmasons are living
in the
"threetimesninth land in a threetimestenth state" – at least we still
know that.
V. The (post)
Marxist (magic) formula
At this point I could declare my duty done, having reinstated the
motif of the magic coin
in the collective consciousness. To do more is
not a matter for a single author, you'd need lots of thinkers and
artists
from different cultures to contribute.
What worries me and keeps me from wrapping up this tract, is the fate
of
the poor black tomcat which, on Christmas Eve, was tied up with
tarred rope and sold, caterwauling, to someone for a silver
rouble at
the crossroads of four streets (one of which leads to the graveyard).
Why does this somebody need him, and
what happens to him next? What
becomes of him? The cat, I mean.
...Suddenly I know the answer! The cat will be trained
as a 'magical
helper'. These are the creatures in the fairytale world who help the
heroes achieve their goals. They
are often animals: a wolf, a
hunch-backed pony, a cat. Puss-in-Boots, for example.
...Does every cat get boots?
I allow myself to doubt it.
With or without boots, our black tomcat will emerge from his training,
able to transform
himself into whatever commodity he chooses,
whereupon he will be offered for sale by his owner. As soon as he's
been
sold, he will turn back into a cat and return to his owner.
Clever, eh?
This is another great eye-opener. Because
we live in a consumer world
which supplies us with a steady flow of things of questionable
necessity which, shortly
afterwards, disappear again (whether it be
into the bin, the cellar, oblivion or thin air!) On both micro and
macro-economic
levels!
... But what happens if they meet again, the black tomcat and the
magic coin? If you pay for disappearing
goods that return to their
owner with disappearing money that returns to its owner?
What if we add a black tomcat
(T) to Marx's formula of C(ommodity) -
M(oney) -C(ommodity):
T - M - C = M - C - T, or simply T - T - T?
Would
that be an allegorical confusion or its opposite? It's something
us economists, poets and philosophers need consider in
more depth.
VI. P. S.
And what happens when the owner of the world's magic money summons it
all back at once,
out of our purses, tills and banks?
Correct: financial meltdown.
*
Oleg Yuriev was born in 1959 in Leningrad
in the former USSR, where he
graduated in 1982 from the College of Political Economics and Finance,
having completed
his studies in the field of Economic Mathematics and
System Theory. In 1991 he moved with his family to Germany. He writes
pieces
for the theatre, essays, reviews, and prose in Russian and
German. He has his own column in Der Tagesspiegel. His most
recent
novel "Die russische Fracht" ("The Russian Cargo") published 2009 by
Suhrkamp. It describes the trip of a mysterious
ship with a mysterious
cargo of dead corpses from Petersburg to Germany.
Translation from German:lp
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