Good Evening Friends,



I hope you are all safe and warm during this small or minor hurricane.



I would like to pick up on a point, with some amplification, that I made before. I said that, historically, wherever we look and wherever there was an advanced, monetarized economy, you saw a disdain of the merchants/moneylender coming from the elite of society, even though this commerce sector helped the aristocracy accumulate their wealth. I talked about what I consider to be the reason for this. This is certainly true for the west, as we shall see in more detail, and Christianity might have been a contributing factor; but what accounts for the universality of this tendency?



In China during the period called the "age of warring states," of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., these events culminated in the establishment of the Ch'in empire in 221 B.C., which ruled over more people than the Roman hegemony ever did (Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso. London, New York, 1999. p.55). The class that seems to have done the most to make this achievement possible were the "big merchant entrepreneurs. This was a new social class within a new social formation (Chris Harman, p.56).



Harman said that the influence of the merchants was powerful, proof of this being that the richest of them became chancellor to the future emperor in 250 B.C. He was given land comprising 100,000 households and surrounded himself with an entourage of 3,000 scholars (p.57).



My view is that he and others like him were probably "tokens," a select few whom the powers-that-be of the state - that branch of the aristocratic bourgeoisie - thought could be spruced up and made presentable.



Because, at the same time the state relentlessly attacked the merchants, as Harman points out, under the Ch'in and Han dynasties (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). The first Han emperor, for example, did not allow the merchants to wear silk or ride in carriages. Neither their children nor their grandchildren were allowed to serve in government. The state took direct control of the salt and iron industries in order to ensure the profits were monopolized by the empire to suppress '"rich traders and rich merchants.'" Furthermore, higher taxes were levied on trading profits than on agriculture; and the wealth of merchants who were found trying to evade taxes was confiscated. The state's contention, in official document after official document, that these measures were taken in defense of the poor, are the kind of predictable self justification that we really should not take seriously (Chris Harman, p.57).



By the late Sung period there was a shift in the attitude of the state toward the merchants. Many of the restrictions that had previously controlled their behavior had fallen into disuse. And yet, a representative of the old guard, who pinned for the good old days could complain about the lack of "'control over the merchants. They enjoy a luxurious way of life, living on dainty foods of delicious rice and meat, owning handsome houses and many carts, adorning their wives and children with pearls and jade, and dressing their slaves in white silk. In the morning they think about how to make a fortune, and in the evening they devise means of fleecing the poor'" (p.112).

Now, surely this high official who made this remark, was living exactly this lifestyle himself, if not to an even higher degree of excess. What's going on here? This remark reminds me of that scene in the movie The Godfather and the novel, when Don Corleones oldest son, Santino (Sonny), who presiding over the "family business," while Vito Corleone recovers from his gunshot wounds.

The Godfather is shot because of his refusal to become involved in the narcotics trade, which the other families are eager to participate in, in partnership with a man called Sollozo. Vito Corleones refusal is taken to be an impediment to the business opportunities of the other families. A coalition seems to have authorized the attempted but failed hit on The Godfather. Sonny expresses his determination to be avenged. He is willing to go to war with all the other Five Families of New York and completely paralyze "business" until they hand over Sollozo.

As all the families are at war with each other, "going to the mattresses" and so forth, control over the numbers running operations in New York have grown lax. Too many low-level hoods have grabbed up too much control of these various street-level gambling ventures. Santino talks about the blacks "up in Harlem" having a good time driving around in their big cars and the like, their heads and egos swelled with their seemingly new found wealth and power. It was time to decisively re-establish the firm guiding hand of the Corleone Family.

So, the high official of the late Sung period and Sonny Corleone are both saying that the new people were getting "too big for their britches."

When the Arab empire was a century old the non-Arab Muslims were the majority population in the cities and the key to its industry and trade - which the Arab merchants had abandoned to become a new, wealthy, leisure class. Even though these non-Arabs had growing influence as administrators, they were still discriminated against in different ways (Harman, A People's History of the World, p.128).

I would guess, here, that these groups were discriminated against, at least as much for being merchants as for being non-Arabs, maybe even more so in reality.

Chris Harman wrote: "The Abbasid revolution created space for the expansion of trade and enabled the urban middle classes to influence the functioning of the state. But real power remained with groups which were still essentially parasitic on production carried out by others. The royal court increasingly adopted the traditional trappings of an oriental monarchy, with vast expenditures designed to feed the egos of its rulers and to impress its subjects" (p.131).

One of those "trappings of an oriental monarchy" was the ideology of divine justification of their rule and the prerogatives they were able to arrogate unto themselves as a result. The existence of a merchant/moneylender class, too visibly prominent, tended to put some tarnish to this self-image.

Now let's go back to Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur