Blood and Money. David McNally

the legal domain, which, unlike the purchase and sale of enslaved people, was not a market process. Indeed, the political economy of the law frequently drove that of the market, with transactions in the latter sphere often adhering to the value ratios determined by laws that governed fines and regulated prices. When individuals were called upon to make payments to the state, goods ranging from barley to copper, and from cattle to silver, were used as standards for calculating their contributions. These ratios, established for purposes of measuring tax receipts and fines, often infiltrated the domain of commercial transactions. Recall, for instance, our example in chapter 1 of the ancient Egyptian policeman who bought an ox valued at fifty deben of copper from a workman, yet paid only five deben in copper, and the rest in a variety of other goods. Similarly, in 1275 BCE, during the reign of the Egyptian king Rameses II, a wealthy woman purchased an enslaved Syrian girl at a price equivalent to 373 grams of silver. Yet, none of the payment was made in silver. Instead, a pot of honey, ten shirts, bronze vessels, and ten deben of copper ingots were handed over, in order to arrive at the silver price.²⁶ Here, a standard of value decreed by an ancient state for calculation of legal fines and tax payments was adapted to market transactions as a unit of account. To be sure, various forms of money did emerge as adjuncts to exchange between strangers. However, where centralized governments had developed, money as a measure of value—including the value of persons and their body parts—was often a largely legal construct. The “prices” assigned by law to people, their property, or their body parts did not reflect their purely economic commodification—a valuation through market exchange—but rather a set of sociopolitical values administered by the state.

      To say this is not to deny the role of markets in fostering monetization—indeed, I have shown precisely such a dynamic in the archaic Greek world from the age of colonization.²⁷ But, as I have also shown, market transactions initially came to dominate outside the oikos-centered context of the political community, particularly in the areas of foreign trade, including commerce in enslaved people. Moreover, in societies in which the “economic” sphere was not substantially differentiated from the moral-political one, we should not expect them to show any linear tendency toward full internalization of external market relations. To be sure, relations between Greek lords and peasants were increasingly commercialized in this era. But for lords this involved the use of market exactions, debt in particular, to appropriate land—the foundation of noble wealth and power. Commercialization thus served to reinforce aristocratic forms of wealth and power, while pauperizing sections of the peasantry.

      Without a doubt, the growth of foreign trade did create space for the development of independent commodity production. But there is no compelling reason why these developments alone should have triggered a transition toward the much more highly monetized forms of life that emerged in the era of ancient democracy. For that to have occurred, significant sociopolitical pressures must have intersected with and reinforced economic trends. And this was the case for the whole epoch of anti-aristocratic politics—from tyranny to insurgent democracy—as new forms of public expenditure accompanied the centralization of religious, social, and political life around public temples, the agora, and the assembly. All of this, alongside the city-state’s assumption of the growing costs of warfare, shaped the context for the channeling of wealth into monetary circuits independent of aristocratic gift exchange. More than this, the democratic polis, like the tyrannies before it, seems to have deliberately visibilized circuits of wealth by introducing symbols of public authority—coins—that displaced aristocratic items expressing private power. Looking at state assessment of legal penalties, for instance, we see a distinct evolution away from fines specified in precious goods and metals and toward penalties measured in amounts of coinage. A similar trend took place with regard to state prizes for games and contests, where monetary awards replaced wreaths and cloaks.²⁸ And by the fifth century BCE, government officials used coinage for a growing variety of expenditures, including jury pay, funding of liturgies, and payment for attending the assembly in democratic Athens. Beyond making its own payments in coins, the state also required that everyone obliged to pay (or receive) fines do so in coinage.²⁹ Legal decrees further forbade shopkeepers from refusing coins as payment, upon threat of having their property seized.³⁰ The polis thus made its coinage legal tender, a state-sanctioned currency that all sellers and creditors were obliged to accept. In a society accustomed to pre-coinage monetary forms, these actions gave coins an enforced circulation. And all of this was reinforced by the state’s insistence on conducting its own business with coins, especially by requiring them in payment of taxes and fines.

      In important respects, therefore, monetization was a political process as well as a commercial one, as the state promoted transactions in coins as part of the political-economic circuitry of the polis. The association of coinage with Athenian democracy provoked, as we have seen, an aristocratic opposition. And no one articulated elitist antagonism to democracy with such sophistication as did philosophers in the Socratic tradition. Yet, their opposition to democracy was inscribed by the conceptual forms of monetary relations. Socratic philosophy thus mimicked the universalizing drama of the money form—however much it sought to displace money as a regulator of social and political life.

       Money, Philosophy, and the Violence of Abstraction

      What distinguished the new mathematics and philosophy in ancient Greece was their increasing abstraction from corporeal schema. Early mathematics had been grounded in the body. Units of spatial measurement, for instance, were based upon parts of the human anatomy, such as the forearm, which was deployed as a unit of measure in ancient Egypt, and would later be called cubit in Latin. We refer to numbers as digits, the same term that describes fingers, thumbs, and toes—the body parts used in counting. The division we call a yard was derived from the stride of an average-sized adult male.³¹ In fact, such bodily based metrics persisted even in overwhelmingly capitalist societies into the nineteenth century, with measures based on foot, pace, and elbow.³² The early development of fractions, multiplication, and division also seems to have been related to the body and its sources of nourishment. In ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, the state’s role in allocating resources prompted it to deploy arithmetic to sort out social problems of distribution, such as how to share out twenty loaves of bread among nine people.³³ The social challenge of collecting and distributing economic resources, particularly foodstuffs, constituted the practical-bodily foundation of much early mathematics.

      In deliberately abstracting from corporeal schema, Greek mathematics and philosophy distanced their concepts and procedures from the everyday problems of embodied life. To this end, they elevated logical reasoning over practical demonstration. New methods of abstract thinking were cultivated, in which thought moved from one logical axiom to the next without contamination by empirical data. Squares, rectangles, and triangles were to be analyzed in terms of their logically necessary properties, not by way of mundane issues having to do with the layout of agricultural fields. Mind would thus produce its own logical protocols while rising “above” bodily sensation and experience.

      Reflecting on the significance of these shifts, Sohn-Rethel argued that they originated in the interrelation between monetization and philosophical abstraction in ancient Greece. Crucial here was his analysis of the real abstraction involved in the activity of market exchange. After all, any exchange of commodities requires the participants to abstract from the concrete and specific qualities of the things involved—say, an enslaved woman and twenty barrels of wine—to find a quantitative commonality (e.g., each is judged equal to a quantity of a third thing, such as one ounce of silver). This commensurability is only possible by abstracting from concrete qualities in order to arrive at a quantitative identity. There is, after all, nothing in wine as a use value that corresponds to the useful properties of silver. Market prices thus involve a conceptual and practical abstracting operation that brackets useful properties in search of a quantitative reduction of each along a common metric. It is precisely this that Sohn-Rethel called the exchange abstraction. The inner structure of the latter consists in the fact that “the interrelational equation posited by an act of exchange … establishes a sphere of non-dimensional quantity.”³⁴ This peculiar sphere of quantity is said to be nondimensional insofar as there is no real, physical dimension in which