The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  The imagery of Pound’s argument ties stamp scrip to the fertility of nature, just as he tied credit to “the growing grass.” Metallic money should not stand for perishable goods, he declares, because its durability “gives it certain advantages not possessed by potatoes or tomatoes.” Nor should it represent the value of goods that increase by nature (“Gold … does not reproduce itself …”). But with stamp scrip—as long as the state prints the money and also sells the stamps—a sort of natural cycle is established: money dies in the state and the state gives it life again. It perishes but, like “the clover enduring,” is reborn (increased if the group’s wealth has increased). With the state playing the part of the topsoil, as it were, stamp scrip imitates animal and vegetable goods that decay into a fertile compost.

  The state plays such a central role in Pound’s economic theory that we can touch on almost all its remaining elements by simply listing the functions he assigns to government:

  The state runs the bank.

  The state issues and controls the currency (which will then be “state notes,” not “bank notes”). Rather than pay interest on a public debt borrowed from private financiers, the state should circulate a non-interest-bearing national debt as its currency.

  The state distributes purchasing power. When someone needs a loan or a large project needs financing, the state is the creditor. Money itself—the unit of purchasing power—is issued on the basis of “work done for the state.” And when the national wealth increases, the state spreads the wealth by paying each citizen a national dividend.

  The state sets prices—either by influencing the market with “state-controlled pools of raw products” or by regulating the value of labor.

  The state obviously has a great deal of power, but Pound was not particularly worried about its abuse. He intended the state to be a servant, not a boss. The state is a republic, Pound was fond of saying, and “the res publica means, or ought to mean ‘the public convenience.’”

  The point of Pound’s economics—we mentioned it long ago—is to “get the country’s food and goods justly distributed.” That, at any rate, is the point if we put it positively. But it often seems more accurate to state it as a negative: Pound wants to prevent unjust distribution—he wants, that is, to keep the swindlers from bleeding the public, to catch the crooks and wipe out trickery. No picture of Pound’s political economy would be complete without a description of the crimes it is intended to prevent. We have already seen the first example, the Bank of England creating money out of nothing. Three more specific cases will cover the field:

  “Aristotle … relates how Thales …, forseeing a bumper crop of olives, hired by paying a small deposit, all the olive presses on the islands … When the abundant harvest arrived, everybody went to see Thales …The Exchange frauds are … [all] variants on this theme—artificial scarcity of grain and of merchandise, artificial scarcity of money …”

  “The imperfections of the American electoral system were … demonstrated by the scandal of the Congressmen who speculated in the ‘certificates of owed pay’ that had been issued … to the soldiers of the Revolution. It was an old trick, and a simple one: a question of altering the value of the monetary unit. Twenty-nine Congressmen … bought up the certificates from veterans and others at twenty per cent of their face value. The nation … then ‘assumed’ responsibility for redeeming the certificates at their full face value.” [This was the “Scandal of the Assumption.”]

  “Only God knows how much gold the people have bought during the war, from 1939 to the present time. The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandising the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized.”

  For a general description of these crimes we need first to distinguish between embodied value and abstract value. When you exchange a commodity for cash, the object—the body of the thing—is abandoned, and you are left with the symbol of its market value, the dollar bills in your pocket. In one of the phases of market exchange, value is detached from the object and carried symbolically. The symbols of market value are supposed to bear some relation to the commodity, of course—you don’t pay $12 for a hacksaw unless you think it’s a $12 hacksaw—but there is always a little slack in the line. The symbol is alienable. There is a gap between it and the body. In a famous essay on “Geometry and Experience,” Albert Einstein wrote: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Symbolization in either exchange or cognition requires that the symbol be detached from the particular thing.* We could not think mathematically if we always used real oranges and apples the way children do in the first grade; in a market economy, without money we would have to lug the table and chair to the store when we needed beefsteak and wine. In a symbolic commerce we hope, of course, that our currency or our mathematics will bear some relation to reality when we come back down to earth, but for the duration we sever the link.

  In these terms, the arch criminal for Pound is the man who makes sure that value is detached from its concrete embodiment and then “plays the gap” between symbol and object, between abstract money and embodied wealth. Either the swindler fools the public into using a phantom currency and then grows rich on its increase, or else he gets a monopoly (either on a particular commodity or, better, on the actual symbol of value) and stirs up the market, inducing fluctuations in the relationship between embodied and symbolic value and getting rich playing the one against the other. All the crimes that Pound warns us against come down to one: to profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real. “The finance of financiers is largely the juggling of general tickets against specific tickets.” In a corrupt economy the real worth of the creations of man falls every time some crook makes money by a mere manipulation of the market, or worse, makes money out of nothing. “An increasingly large proportion of goods never gets its certificate [of value] …,” says Pound. “We artists have known this for a long time, and laughed. We took it as our punishment for being artists, we expected nothing else, but now it occurs to the artisan …”

  The difference between an image and a symbol is simple: an image has a body and a symbol does not. And when an image changes, it undergoes metamorphosis: body changes into body without any intervening abstraction—without, that is, the gap which is both the freedom and the alienation of symbol-thought and symbol-change. To connect Pound’s economics to his aesthetics, we need simply say that the crime he would prevent is one in which the enemies of the imagination enrich themselves through the trick of symbolic thought. The economist who connects credit to sheep or who writes that “the Navy depended on iron, timber, and tar, and not on the manoeuvers of a false finance,” is the same as the Imagist who preferred to define “red” with “ROSE CHERRY IRON RUST FLAMINGO” rather than resort to successive layers of generality.

  In his sober moments Pound does not oppose abstraction or symbolic thought, but behind his argument lies the longing—and it is a poet’s longing—to pull the whole world into the imagination. Money itself is a crime against that desire.

  The nineteenth century, the infamous century of usury … creat[ed] a species of monetary Black Mass. Marx and Mill, in spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature. There was even the concept of energy being “concentrated in money,” as if one were speaking of the divine quality of consecrated bread.

  We are back with Müntzer condemning Luther. When a writer declares that “money alone is capable of being transmuted immediately into any form of activity,” Pound exclaims: “This is the idiom of the black myth! … Money does not contain energy. The half-lira piece cannot create the platform ticket … or piece of chocolate that issues from the slot-machine.” To speak as if it does is “the falsification of the word” and portrays a “satanic
transubstantiation.”

  Pound’s remarks on the image are typically cited in explications of his aesthetic ideas, but their meaning cannot be accurately conveyed if they have been removed from their original context, an ongoing argument for a spiritual economy of the imagination:

  The power of putrefaction … seeks to destroy not one but every religion … by leading off into theoretical argument. Theological disputes take the place of contemplation. Disputation destroys faith … Suspect anyone who destroys an image …

  And in the same line:

  The theologians who put reason (logic) in the place of faith began the slithering process which has ended up with theologians who take no interest in theology whatsoever.

  Tradition inheres … in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions.

  When Pound asks, “Who destroyed the mystery of fecundity, bringing in the cult of sterility?” he himself might have answered, “The Protestants and the Jews,” but let us say, rather: the rise of market-value as the form of value. Karl Marx once wrote that “Logic is the money of mind …; logic is alienated thinking and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man.” Both men discern this constellation: logical thinking, detachment from the real, and cash exchange. It is one and the same country where the form of commerce allows financiers to enrich themselves by juggling the general against the specific, where faith is replaced by logic, and where images have lost their life to layers of abstraction.

  What is to be done? Pound offers two solutions (in addition to those we’ve seen—stamp scrip, state banks, and so forth). First, we must speak clearly about money. Over and over Pound quotes the reply that Confucius gave when asked what he’d do first if he were boss: “Call people and things by their true and proper names.” Money is nothing but a “ticket,” it has no real worth of its own, it does not create, and so on. Pound has nothing against an abstract currency so long as we call a ticket a ticket. The tricksters won’t be able to dupe a public that knows precisely what money can and cannot do.

  But more often Pound does not want to clarify the nature of symbolic exchange; he wants to get rid of it. Notice how he uses the word “just”: “The issue of credit (or money) must be just, i.e., neither too much or too little. Against every hour’s work … an hour’s certificate.” Or conversely: “It is unjust that money should enjoy privileges denied to goods.” Justice demands an hour-dollar for an hour-work, perishable money for perishable goods. Pound would like to reattach the symbols to their objects. Thoreau once wrote: “He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved …” The poet longs for a language in which the word is the object, in which speech is as powerful and numinous as a voice in a dream. “A perfect writer,” says Whitman, “would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” The poet of Imagism longs to have symbolic value equal imaginative value. That would be justice. Only then would there be no risk of crime. And how are we to establish this equivalence? Either change the nature of money itself (stamp scrip) or else enforce a “just” currency. Enforce it—with state power.

  “STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note is the best means of establishing a JUST and HONEST currency.” We now have come to the political version of willpower. There’s no need to belabor the point; this should be familiar territory. “The economic conditions of society depend on the will of its rulers,” says Pound, and the “just price”—which attaches value to commodities in a “real” correspondence—is the expression of goodwill in commerce. If we can’t change the nature of money, we will have to police it. Rather than risk letting the crooks (the Hermes-crooks) sneak in, Pound hopes to enforce a just equivalence between symbolic and embodied value through a vigilant goodwill.* And so he called his political economy a “volitionist economics,” and so he was attracted to Fascism. Mussolini offered “a will system”; as the name of the nineteenth century was Usura, so “the name of the Fascist era is Voluntas.”

  V • Bathed in Alkali

  One way to tell Pound’s story is as a history of the world, saying that his mind wakes at the time of Homer and moves forward, through Aristotle, through Saint Ambrose, through the Middle Ages and the song of Provence, on into the Renaissance— where it stops. Or rather, sensing something in the Reformation antithetical to the creative spirit, it stops its organic maturation and leaps four hundred years to graft a medieval economics onto the modern state.

  Pound’s assumptions are tribal and ancient, connecting art, erotic life, natural fertility, and abundance. “The opposing systems of European morality go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops (the scarcity economists of pre-history).” Accepting Aristotle’s distinction between “natural” wealth-getting (farming and so forth) and “unnatural” foreign trade, Pound proceeds to imagine “a natural economic order” (as Gesell called it) in which credit is founded on the pastures, and money imitates the clover. The imagination would be at ease with such an order, for it senses that it is somehow kin to the plants and the animals, and that its products will increase abundantly if only they may be given away, like grain, like clover, like love.

  From such tribal (or classic, or agrarian) assumptions, Pound moves easily into the Middle Ages. He is completely at home with canon law, which sought to codify the structure of a Brotherhood of Man: “My efforts during the last ten years …,” he wrote in 1944, “have been toward establishing a correlation between Fascist economics and the economics of canon law (i.e. Catholic & medieval economics) …”

  But this modernist did not live in the Middle Ages and his economy cannot stop there. In the development of his thought he now must face the same problems that Luther and Calvin faced: how to reconcile the emerging forms of exchange (commodities, cash, the “little usury” of interest) with a spiritual commonwealth. Pound refuses the solution offered by the Reformation, a separation of spiritual and secular life through a new “double law.” It didn’t work, he declares— “Thereafter design went to hell … Azure hath a canker by usura”; spiritual and aesthetic life were destroyed by unbridled market exchange and logic let in to feed in the house of faith.

  Rather than separate spirit and empire, Pound combines them to arrive at an ideology of the state which has in it elements of both tribalism and the medieval church.* But here his troubles begin. Canon law could rest on the assumption of a common and lively faith in the Lord. But the modernist, in assuming the structures of medieval law, must allow the state to stand in for the deity. In the community of faith the Lord gave us our daily bread, but in “the perfect Fascist State” the state distributes purchasing power. Where “Apollus watered and God gave the increase,” the workers work and the state pays national dividends. And where does stamp scrip go when it dies? Not to heaven. In ancient times the first fruits were returned to the Lord in smoke, but now a hundredth part goes to the state in stamps on the first of the month. Under the natural economic order the gift circles into neither nature nor mystery; it circles into bureaucracy.

  In Pound’s favor we should remember that the character of state power was not as obvious in 1930 as it is now; nor was he the only writer in that decade who felt moved to combine commonwealth and state. But the course of this century has revealed a strange equation: state power + goodwill = state power. The reason is simple: at the level of the state the ties of affection through which the will becomes good can no longer be felt. We touched on this when speaking of gifts as anarchist property. There are definite limits to the size of the feeling community. Gift exchange, as an economy of feeling life, is also the economy of the small group. When the commonwealth i
s too large to be based on emotional ties, the gift-feeling must be abandoned as a structuring element. For gift-feeling is not impartial. It will always seek to suppress its opposite. Small groups can absorb such antagonism because they can also support affection, but the antagonism of large groups is organized and cold. All commonwealths are wary of the stranger, but the huge ones—especially when threatened—put him to death.

  One of the issues in the Peasants’ War of 1524–26 was the introduction into Germany of Roman law, Roman property rights, and Roman cash purchase. Taken as a whole, these represent the forms of alienated thought, property, and exchange which are necessary in the organization and operation of a state that is not a commonwealth or brotherhood. Hermes, now the Roman Mercury, springs to life in such empires, for it is Hermes who will make connections when the scale is too large for affective bonds. In separating church and state, Luther and Calvin gave some space to this god.* If you accept the large rationalized institutions that emerged after the Reformation, if you accept in particular the idea of the state, you must also accept some amoral stranger economics.

  In terms of intellectual history, the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world marked a new emphasis on (or need for) symbol-thought and symbol-exchange. Modern logic and the rise of the scientific method quickly followed the Reformation. Less than a hundred years separates Descartes and Newton from Luther and Calvin. But as I suggested two chapters ago, just as “logic is the money of mind,” so is the imagination its gift, and Pound was correct, I think, to mark this as the moment in which the imagination was wounded by abstraction. And he was also correct in connecting that wound with the rise of market exchange and its servants—usury, foreign trade, monopoly, and “detached” units of value. The peasants of the Peasants’ War were fighting the same battle Ezra Pound fought, the same hopeless battle.