- 07 Mar 2019 02:25
#14992666
Continuing my musings on Spengler's work in relation to my own hostility to today's Money Power and it's hold over people's minds and souls, I found this excerpt to reflect on;
I made some breaks there for ease of reading. He says firstly that;
This, despite the fact that Spengler is a Traditionalist and considered ''Right Wing'', is the same thing as Marx's 'Commodity Fetishism', with Money itself as the ultimate abstracted and reified good to be traded and multiplied, created out of nothing like God with Creation itself. He goes further and speaks to absolute indifference with which the Money Power looks at the Land and the People of the Land, as nothing more than a resource to be exploited.
Then he goes on to say;
Spengler talks about how in the Urban life of a Civilization, people are characterized by being often in a state of high active consciousness, brains working at a higher rate of speed and complexity a great deal of the time. And a large proportion of that time activity revolves around money and questions and answers about what money can and/or must do for the individual. This is not a good state of being to be in, not for very long anyway.
But then;
Being an abstracted thing, Money, that really is nothing more than a placeholder for value, not value itself, people regain a sense of it's unreality and Civilization starts to lose it's power over people, with the defeat of the Money Power.
Quote from: Spengler vol II p.98
With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored.
Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil.
[...] Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures.
But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.
I made some breaks there for ease of reading. He says firstly that;
With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored.
This, despite the fact that Spengler is a Traditionalist and considered ''Right Wing'', is the same thing as Marx's 'Commodity Fetishism', with Money itself as the ultimate abstracted and reified good to be traded and multiplied, created out of nothing like God with Creation itself. He goes further and speaks to absolute indifference with which the Money Power looks at the Land and the People of the Land, as nothing more than a resource to be exploited.
Then he goes on to say;
... Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures.
Spengler talks about how in the Urban life of a Civilization, people are characterized by being often in a state of high active consciousness, brains working at a higher rate of speed and complexity a great deal of the time. And a large proportion of that time activity revolves around money and questions and answers about what money can and/or must do for the individual. This is not a good state of being to be in, not for very long anyway.
But then;
But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.
Being an abstracted thing, Money, that really is nothing more than a placeholder for value, not value itself, people regain a sense of it's unreality and Civilization starts to lose it's power over people, with the defeat of the Money Power.