27. An Inquiry Into the Wealth of Nations

At a basic level, the ruling power of every empire is not motivated by "material necessity", nor is such an excuse even seriously presented as a justification for the rulers. Slaves are pushed into material necessity and material conditions, but masters by their own logic exist outside it and must if their mastery is to mean anything. The imperatives are political ones and thus they are wholly affairs between men. This is very different from the genuine character of productive enterprises, regardless of the "mode of production" they occur in. The productive enterprise at a basic level has nothing to do with "society" as an abstraction. It only somewhat becomes a social matter because there is a political matter in that society that makes a presumptive claim on a productive process that is wholly alien to the political imperatives and machinations. It is a simple fact of machines that there would be in gatherings of humans—who are in the final analysis machines like any other—potentials that are never realized by a single human. So too are the pacts between humans to cooperate on any endeavor machines of their own. Whatever agreement exists among humans to cooperate towards some goal, the agreement between them is like the men themselves an instrument for a purpose, and only that. Nowhere in genuine cooperation do the participants abase themselves before a totem of "the collective". That is an artifact of corporate government and its preferred institutional germ, the firm. The political affair in human society is presented not as a productive or economic enterprise, but as a matter of force against force, where the state's primary business is war and maintain supply for the army and the ruling court. This is not to say that collectivity and sociality are impossible or inadmissible results of what humans do, or that humans must be miserly and spiteful towards each other by some law of nature or fate. What human beings hope to accomplish in their society and in their lives, which are lives that require coexistence with other entities, is really a spiritual matter, and those spiritual matters are only shared between them for motives that have nothing to do with political or material necessity. Few instruments can suggest that humans have any inherent reason to be part of a thing called "society" or care about such a situation. In their experience, most of humanity sees society correctly as a proposition that only brought them toil. For most of humanity, the social life they would prefer involves very little to do with large gatherings, let alone the ritual of abasement before something they've always known to be foul and pointless for anything good. All of these—a spiritual longing that is effectively basic to speak of the human animal's meaningful potentials, a political task that has been waged for mostly spurious purposes, and the simple facts of machinery and physics being necessary to navigate the world we live in—set up the traditional expectation of how labor was divided, and would be divided in the future. It is into that situation that corporate government steps in, and it is that situation that all of mankind, most of whom never particularly liked the arrangement or saw it as useful, must inherit. The true origin of why this situation existed was entirely due to the narrow interest of those who had found in their minds a "master key" that would allow them to command and cajole the world, which they had done from an early departure point in the history of civilization. In various way, all three orders were aware that this is what transpired and why they were consigned to the struggle that only benefited the schemers and the grifters. It is apparent even to a middling intellect that this arrangement of society is not particularly productive or useful, and a few of them had the temerity to ask if there was a better way. Surely there was, but what in their history suggested it would be different? Those who truly wanted it to be different would first find their wishes put on hold for the "greater jihad", and then terminated very violently in a grand display as the ugliness at the core of the human race asserted what it always had been, and declared triumphantly "no innovation!" The true wants of the people are not immediately relevant to the question of political economy, for their wants are neither political or economic in the sense that was described. Political economy was and remains the animal of the high scholars, who ask simply how they can better exploit what they held. By the time political economy is established, those scholars had accumulated the influence that was true and relevant, and did not need a "revolution" to transform the world to their liking. Political economy arises where there was no revolution to speak of, let alone the sort of "violation of nature" that the narrative theory of history told after the fact, where any effort of the common people to claim office is intrinsically unseemly. The political economists worked within the precedent of autocratic monarchies, viewing "republics" and "assemblies" as cumbersome things that could be negated by planning and scheming. Only once the preferred monopoly over what truly allowed rule was confirmed would a change of the guard be "allowed", with the intended victors becoming indispensable to the state and establishing their institutional stronghold, one more secure than the castles and noble privileges of old. The ideal, foreseen by anyone who really thought about the matter, is that the monarch, a mere mortal, was to be replaced with the corporate firm and its logo in all places, and in all other respects the "royal prerogatives" were to remain entrenched. The political economists and the new class they hailed from were the beneficiaries of that imperial largesse and always knew that you're not really rich until you're a made man in the imperial mafia. The point to remember is that nothing about political economy or capitalism was "revolutionary" or suggested that class struggle was necessary to create such a condition. Kings and dynasties could be removed, but the men who came into power had already possessed the meaningful levers of policy. There would be a revolution from below, but it was not waged for "economic motives" as crass imperial histories always recapitulate. Like any incoming government, the new corporate government picked winners and losers, and could not deny the promotion of men who weren't "supposed" to succeed in their grand design. Corporate government's total victory was still in the future, and so it competed with every other interest that was seen in the "new class" of men whose fates were tied, for one reason or another, to technology in a way that past classes were not. Political economy did not "invent" the concept of a general theory of technology or the interest itself, as if men were too stupid to understand what machines were until the imperial economist taught them the correct values and invaded their brain with the power of ideology. Political economy is best understood as the stake of corporate government to understand this new situation, which it did not yet fully control or create as it pleased. It is that way with every program that has been proposed before or since. A socialist does not scream petulantly "me wantee" to make the world into a fantastical unicorn; he acknowledges that there is a debt to political economy, as we may see in a future chapter. In any event, a new "economic system" is always created first in response to a historical situation, or a historical situation that can be predicted with reasonable certainty rather than empty insinuation. For a socialist, at their core the program a socialist endorses is not suggesting a "total economic system" that micromanages private life, but something very different. The socialist rival was not capitalism but individualism and the conceits of liberal political ideas. So too did the liberals compete for position not as they pleased, but in the conditions they inhabited and could predict as if the future were a real concern of theirs rather than a wishlist of what they wanted the world to be.

An effective inquiry into this matter does not succumb to the conceits of the planner. The planner, whatever it is, has to operate in the world they inherited, and plans for every contingency and for apocrypha that do not fit neatly into any "total system" where the world is neatly arranged in a narrative for hermetic fuckery. So far I have viewed political economy with utter contempt for the men who advanced it and humanity in general, because that has been the situation I encountered and my goal is to explain why humanity turned out that way and could have this terrible effect on the world, when the world has very clearly shown that none of that torture and humiliation was necessary, nor was it necessary that the worst humiliation fell on the honest who committed no crime, possessed no vice or defect or character, and their great crime was a lack of enthusiasm for a ruinous eugenic creed and the cult that many chucklefucks of this sad race aided and abetted for the stupidest reasons one can imagine. Such nastiness has been seen throughout history, and it was not invented out of whole cloth by anyone. The cajolers and schemers didn't even bother inventing a novel understanding of the world or the tasks humanity undertook. Meaningful critique can lead to some novel understanding, but the most basic construction of any scientific model is established by discovery of things that are basic and can be commonly reproduced. Insinuations and koans do not constitute a worthwhile discovery, and such faggotry—and it is faggotry—has long been judged with appropriate contempt. Even if the study of political economy were wholly contemptible in that way with nothing to redeem it, there is a reason why this division of labor did become consequential. Aristocracy and its running dogs may treasure instigation and transgression as sacred powers, but they only travel far when they can reinterpret an already extant world where humans and animals have lives. Without any specific instigator inserted into history, the inquiry into political economy can only work with things that are known to the vast majority of humanity, and in some way are difficult for any to ignore. Someone who is institutionalized or lives the most wretched lives does not need intellect to see their relation to these terrible Satanic apes that surround them.

In Book 2 Chapter 19 I wrote on the "ecological claim" as the origin of theories of division of labor. By itself, the laborious process is only compared against itself, without regard for the utility of the labor performed or any notion of quantified labor-power. The starting point of the inquiry is not a presumption of divided labor, but of what happens when laborers meet in some way to produce a product. In Adam Smith's classic example, it was the pin factory. The workers knew by their own means how to make pins, and did not need the manager to tell them how to organize pin-making; and in any event, if a foreman were to lead this effort, this management would be just another of the mundane details of production, beneath the dignity of any inquiry. In the classic pin factory example, the division of labor is only something done because this is expedient for the task at hand. Whether someone should engage in social production at all was not the question, for such cooperation in labor is simple enough for a child to understand—and it would often be children or young teenagers who worked in those days and under those conditions, whether apart or alongside adults. The distinction of age, sex, race, or any other quality inherent to the bodies of the laborers was of little interest for the purposes of the boss or the task at hand. The work undertaken was all deemed of little skill or distinction. The important feature of the pin factory is that the work of such a unit was inherently social, and every division of labor is internal to the factory's work, rather than any natural law or authority from the state or any overarching influence. The division of labor exists, but only so far as it is useful for the task at hand; and so, a sentimental attachment to rank or privilege within the hierarchy of the pin factory would be dismissed like similar faggotry. "Congratulations, you are the lord of a pin factory!" There are reasons why this division of labor is expedient, rather than a general rule that division of labor is always expedient by any formula. The determination of those facts is a matter of science rather than social convention or the abilities of particular men. If there were a theory to sort the population into grades of civic worth, it has nothing to do with this pin factory. There is no preferred "ecology" that can be made into a productive unit. In principle the same judgments that can allow comparison between ecosystems would allow that ecosystem to be analyzed as if it weren't any particular "ecosystem". That would mean that there could never be solid ground for the "firm" as the entity managing productive affairs. What could not change is that some people gather for laborious undertakings, whatever the type of labor may be.

The subdivision of this labor into stock that may be traded and hawked is at first arbitrary within the conditions that such an arrangement can set. There is an extent to which these laborious undertakings develop, which Adam Smith describes as the extent of the market. For example, there are no porters in small towns, and villages are not cities with the amenities of such. Likewise, there are not vast agricultural fields within a metropolis center, and this affects what those living in the city center can do with their lives so long as they seek work in the metropolis rather than its outlying territory. The domination of country by city is not directly important to the extent of the market, nor can it be a given of nature based on whatever conceit humans had when building civilization. It is only after stock has been declared out of the laboring peoples' effort that it can be chopped up, and the productive process micromanaged. The men must be habituated to the watchful eye of some managerial scheme in order to be disciplined by it, and none of those measures can be taken for granted. Had management referred directly to the productive units and their relations, scientific management would have become a very different beast, and not necessarily for the better. All such labor is carried out at first because there was a want for its products. All of the potential products are realized by men rather than the dominant "system" at work. For more primitive conditions, all of the labors are lumped into the obligations of the peasantry. Once dispossessed, the peasants are told to fight over the most petty distinctions in vocation, and this is the imperatives of those who manage rather than their own idea or something that accomplished anything good whatsoever for the project. Without the schemes of managing this product envisioned by the manager, the division of labor could not lead to dependence for the most basic functions. With the schemes of management, Man becomes utterly dependent on cooperation to do the most basic of things in society. Things that have no value whatsoever become valuable in exchange, and things of great value are irrelevant to exchange. The entire history of monetary economy is one where this seemingly odd behavior is reproduced ad nauseam, because the money was always a contrivance for creating conditions to manage this mass of labor, rather than an accounting tool. It is not difficult to assess the production of corn, shoes, timber, iron, steel, or any product that would only exist because a prior condition brought about by labor allowed the creation of novel products. It is only after the managerial conceit is introduced that the division of labor is noted by economics. Changing the "system" does not affect the reasons for this division of labor. The system only notes a division of labor that exists presently, and can do little to alter the situation on its own. If the objective of the system was to introduce change at that level, every hitherto known system has been woefully inadequate for the task. What political economy can do is manage the extant division of labor and devolve it to its essential units. The specialized labors are now not merely labor in the pool of available labor for a society, but are embodied in the humans that carry them out. This completes a long process by which particular types of men were specialized, where one is a bricklayer, another a soldier, and so on for every imaginable profession. The capitalist situation cannot by itself claim this division is total or "natural", but it certainly exists. The stock of any particular society can be subdivided by its specialties and by the men who comprise that society's functioning agents. It would take a much more thoroughgoing system to essentialize the distinctions of men so that true caste assignments premised on ability could be mandated; in other words, that grades of civic worth can be assigned by the imperious authority alone, without any necessary allocation of money or notions that any man with the means to exist could do so. Until that arrived, the distinction of grades would either be by the high institutions like the clergy, the army, the slave power, and those close the political apex, and by the distinction of money throughout the commons, which extends to the laboring masses who are, while not constitutionally aligned with the technological interest or the commons, men with no particular mark of inferiority forbidding them from contact with the commons. If the workers had money and standing just as the bourgeois commoners did, there would be no class distinction between them at first appearance. The same is not true of the lowest class, who is never mistaken for a valid member of society under any circumstances. It is through the lowest class that any managerial scheme would have to press its advantage. All others were disciplined primarily by their efforts to avoid being in the lowest class, or becoming a target of those who were operationalized to carry out some foul deed.

What is really at work is the trading of the office of employment and its resulting entitlement to goods, more than the laborious process itself which required no office. The employed is elevated above basic labor not by any necessary merit but by the esteem the employer grants to them. Had this labor been for the goods themselves or some sense that work was the right thing to do, it grants no reward that involves political life. The primitive hunter doesn't hunt to meet quotas, but for his standing in the tribe, and the right to hunt grounds without harassment from other hunters. A great bulk of labor occurs that never enters social circulation, and little is done to discipline it beyond the whims of workmen. None of that labor translates directly to the claims on wealth that are necessary for the enterprise. The labor that does enter society's regulation is, either by its willing submission or by compulsion, bound to some managerial need that is outside the labor itself. This could be a direct spiritual authority to shepherd men to do the gods' bidding, or it could be a token of esteem or credit that is honored by the society like money or a mark on a ledger. It can begin as little more than an agreement between two workers who are themselves something other and more than beasts of burden, or a vague sense of either that there is a purpose to life outside the task ahead of them. If however the work task is to be studied for its meritorious qualities rather than our assumptions about them, the calculation of what we should do changes considerably. None of the office-holding incentives care too much about whether the labor produces a good in the best manner possible, "best" here being defined by some objective criterion such as efficiency, potential utility, durability, etc. for the good as it presents to a reasonable user. The office-holder, even the crudest type, is invested in this interpersonal relationship, and the labor is only something these people do, that constitutes some offering they may offer or that may be extracted from them. The slave is under management and is socially engineered to comply; the free man expects patronage for any contribution and will set standards of living that must not be transgressed. In any event, the real conditions of the world cannot override what labor truly produces. No amount of incentives or wizardry can alter the product of labor to be something it is not. What can be done is to mutate the meaning of the good itself, so that the arrangements of men to dicker and deal over their labor-power can be directed towards the workers' demise. This cannot be done by arbitrary thought experiments. It is accomplished because the concept of holding office is worked out and the historical example is set for all in a society to observe. Without that, all of the efforts to assert the existence of "value" fail because nothing will stop people from recognizing that ideology or guns do not feed people like corn does. Whatever the propensity of people to truck and barter, the participants will insist they need something edible to eat and maintain definite requirements for security. Only when the example is set that security is irrelevant for the subject can an inferior product claiming to be security be sold piece by piece. That is what money would have to represent if it were valuable; the money would have to be a guarantee of goods and services rendered, whose value does not fluctuate wildly and whose mechanisms are predictable to all who use money. At the very least, people recognize that they need money to pay taxes, or that the tax collector is most interested in money rather than goods in-kind. No such system of money could mean the same thing if the issuer was some random bookkeeper of no consequence. The offices of employment were not declared imperiously at some arbitrary point in history. Command of men preceded the establishment of civilization. It is only in civilization that there is enough activity in exchange for stable monetary economies to exist, where it would be possible to speak of something called "the market". Even with this, "the economy" as an egregore of all of humanity's vice and woes would not manifest until shortly before our time, and it was recognized when it first appeared as a cargo cult before politicians began invoking "the economy" as a farcical promise to the plebs. Only when labor became an obligation to society did it take on this quality. Without that, labor is done either because it was deemed truly useful for what it created, or the labor was that of an animal doing what it would do for whatever murky reasons animals hold. It did not take long for the social obligation to become an office to hold rather than a thing people happened to sell. Truly free men did not "work" at all in the sense that laborers did. The workman was expected to keep with him a sheet of his legitimate employment to prove he wasn't an unemployed bum and thus subject to the Poor Laws. Before the Poor Laws, there were expectations of men of property and expectations of men with no property, and the distinction was not lost on anyone. This could only be sensical once imperial society as we know it could form out of the city-states of classical Antiquity. Before, the normative expectation was that all men were slaves, and the warriors and priests were slaves of a higher and distinct sort. What is truly described in the sale of labor is a generalized slavery. The particular type of slavery mattered less than the true essence of slavery itself. If a truly free society produced all of its labors and they were of superior quality to the slave labors, that would be great, but all societies had to account for productive metrics that were not of their own choosing. Those metrics did not inform the values assigned to different labors. They were the requirement held over people to enforce the first compliance; that if these metrics weren't met, they would be overrun by a hypothetical enemy or other that did meet them more efficiently.

Simple agreements between the men would only travel so far before the "agreements" became compulsory, with oaths and curses abound for those who would shirk the obligation to work for increasingly dubious causes. There is no doubt that different labors would carry distinct values, which are not comparable arithmetically by any contrivance. What doesn't change is that compensation for labor under these contracts can only take one form, which is some unit of patronage that grants to the worker a promise of payment in goods. The unit does not neatly correspond to money or something that can be conveniently calculated and carried, but all such patronage is comparable to other types by a common understanding of the participants. Where there is no common understanding, there could be no such patronage nor any reason to believe that exists among the participants. There would be no reason to take the oaths and curses of something very alien at their word, let alone do so consistently. If the exchange had carried on voluntarily or in some manner that allowed the participants to leave if they didn't like it, the unit would not be effective as "money" in any way we would find familiar. It would be little more than an accounting scheme of a bookkeeper who made it his or her business to facilitate favors, which in of itself served no necessary function. Even if this middle-person understood their role was superfluous and offered to be a way to mitigate the numerous contradictory favors that might arise in this situation, there is an acknowledgment that it was the situation that had arisen, rather than an accident or a simple propensity that was inborn. I do not believe it is wrong to attribute that propensity to truck and barter to human beings, since any propensity in men begs us to ask the question why that exists, but such an inquiry is by Adam Smith's admission not a topic of interest for this inquiry, nor could it be one that he could resolve by a grand declaration without great difficulty. It is worthwhile to note that before and as the propensity to truck and barter develops, there are many other motives that would create the incentive for men to offer favors to another man, much the same as the dealings to dicker and deal over goods themselves or efforts to accumulate more stuff to use or sell or hold as stock. Those too would not be relevant to an inquiry on monetary wealth because those imperatives understand the market and monetary economics as a hazard to avoid. So far as the inquiry was into wealth in the form of gold treasure or things that were exchanged for it, it would be improper to assert psychological or philosophical motives to create a "total system" to account for all human behavior. When the "system" of capitalism becomes more totalizing—which would have happened regardless of any further inquiry on the topic—the assumption that participants in the market were mere competitors that could segregate the market from their person would be a dangerous fallacy. What can be spoken of is not constrained by the "essence of money" as if money had special powers by being deemed money, but by what money represents in this situation, which is the holding of offices. The first and necessary office is the office of employment, or the office of social validity that allows a man to be a man of any sort of property rather than one of the invalid who has been throughout human history treated and disposed of openly as something lower than an animal. Among the lowest class, a similar scheme of incentives and offices might be envisioned and remain beneath the dignity of proper society, and at times elements of the lowest class can be dragged out of the muck for some utility and then discarded, but no one is under any serious impression that these two groupings are or ever could be social equals, nor do the lowest class seriously desire such if they ever learn of the obligations and rites of the valid to maintain their position. The members of the lowest class would find they would have to lie about their entire history for the rest of their life to fit in, and this they will never accomplish forever, nor would they be particularly successful at hiding for long. Those of the lowest class who can pretend to be valid for a time do so in a state of total fear, at the mercy of the established association that never forgets the true spirit of the human race and why this undertaking began in the way it did. But, in principle, the monetary tokens pay no heed to this ancient struggle of humanity, even if the issuer of money understands that the lowest class must never for a moment appear valid enough to exist "outside society", that beast that has always been alien to us. If money is to mean anything, it must be presented as a temporary salve to stave off the predatory element; that if one possesses coin, he or she can buy security, preferably at a bargain price, and this would be enough to somehow survive to middle age. By old age a reasonable human—even if dim—would have to question the schemes of gain and exploitation even if they were beneficiaries, for they are growing old and the world cannot be bribed to stave off old age. They would also have seen enough of humanity's eagerness to throw away the old and celebrate the cult of youth, so that the same ignorant folly can repeat generation after generation.

It is the stock that can be deployed more than living labor-power, and through stock that these favors can be granted. It is shared with the stock that is used for consumption, whether immediately taken from storage or actively used over time like articles of clothing. The portion that is set aside for hoarding is deemed to be capital, and that capital consists of machines that have been appropriated rather than "congealed labor-power" as such. They are only useful as capital so far as they are machines with particular uses. Included in the stock is wealth, which is definitionally drawn from the world but interpreted as yet another machine with peculiar properties. All of the stock is from the world in some way, but among the stock are abstract objects whose exchange occurs in the minds of men and by the mechanisms of information rather than by the sale of some good or service as a singular occurrence. The stock that would become intellectual property, a concept scarcely recognized in Adam Smith's time, cannot be consumed as food and is not tangible. It only becomes capital when intelligence itself can be enclosed, accounted for, and policed, or when an uncommon idea is first developed and must propagate by the limited means available for information. Even by limited means, nothing stops humans from thinking for themselves or reverse-engineering the idea, or independently developing such an idea. Once intellectual property circulates without the fetters of forced ignorance, it would become as common as dirt, if not more common than dirt when considering all of the possible permutations of ideas and what may develop from a simpler kernel. If the claim is one of office-holding then there is no "natural" limit on what can be claimed as capital or stock for any purpose, including obviously fictitious stock. Fictitious capital is recognized early as a menace to be avoided and it can be plainly described, and no lie can last forever by the "power of Lie", no matter how many asinine insinuators tell you otherwise. But, there are pieces of fictitious capital that are very relevant to the world and how humans conduct political life. The cults of the city or the notion of the state are ultimately fictitious constructions. Nothing in nature created the "state", and the "state" could disintegrate in secret when its officers tire of the present edifice of the institutions and desire a new one, or if the ruled no longer believe in the state and cease to recognize any of its threats as more than crass violence. Even when the state is a going concern and enjoys the acceptance of the ruled, it does hold any of the presumptive claims all states must make to be viable states. The state primarily exists in the real world through its officers who are the embodiment of the state. The deputized man of commerce is, too, an embodiment of commerce and this thing called "the market" so far as the market has any real existence. The state may command machinery that has been set on its own power, such that the designs of men cannot easily turn it off at a whim, but commerce has no such inertia. It relies entirely on the imminent decision-making of all who engage in commerce. We may after the fact notice interest earned from some capital as if it were a passive force, but all of these are calculations made by men who have judged interest to be a legal fact of their society, rather than any force of nature or the world ginning up "natural usury" for the merchant's enjoyment. When the information changes or can be derived by men acting on their own knowledge, so too do the decisions and the volition of that creature, the "rational agent". This is where the dishonest claim that they can possess "perfect information in perfect markets", but that was never a precondition of commerce or free trade. Privileged information of importance to this economic calculation, or a keen sense of the future and consequences of these calculations, distinguished the effective merchants from the ineffective ones. It is trivial to demonstrate the silliness of "perfect information" and the impossibility of "perfect markets" that are the creation of very imperfect men for a peculiar purpose. Two outcomes of the free trade arrangement are clear. The first is that all who engage in commerce, even the invalid, are deputized as "rational agents", however dubious their rationality is. The second is that the commanding heights of this situation belong not to the old guild monopolies or chartered companies, but to a new class that would eventually rule by intelligence alone, and would have to claim this general intelligence is something that has to rise above the more immediate calculations at work in the market. If not for this intellectual leadership, what would be the point of inquiry except a series of just-so stories to say greed is natural and good? It was impossible to tell people to believe there were no commanding heights as if this were a serious proposition. Concentrations of wealth and money are inherent to civilization as we have known it, and certainly concentrations of authority to rule and command the city exist even if wealth were held in common. A society with no rulers or political elite of any sort would by the very declaration of such be warned of the alternative that concentrations of authority would exist, and would be aware of every and any avenue by which this command could be asserted. Their own lives would depend on it, since such a society would too deputize all in the society as officers of the ruling interest. That is how every democratic polity or anything like it had to function, unless someone envisions an elaborate scheme of mind control distributed among the agents. Such a society was far outside the purview of the inquiry named here, yet the dishonest assert with ever-increasing certainty that this would be the future—total mind control as the ultimate defeat of democracy.^[1]

The stock of a country is on the surface no different from the stock of an individual. Countries or nations do not hold office or extend favors, and so, the question when posed to a nation becomes very different. Above all, the greatest peril to any nation is its internal discipline and that ever-present danger to humanity—other humans, particularly those closest at hand. The laborious association that is the germ making all of this possible is not intrinsically an "office"; only its treatment for this purpose is. The association of labor is made not by the will of men to assent to office, but by the actual conduct of them. In a factory or some enclosed space, it is trivial to see the association at work, even if coworkers dislike each other and compete for office. For "society" generally, there is an association of humans to reproduce the city, the family, and this is done not in the name of any particular institution but because those structures were originally works of labor carried out for a real purpose. Only after they are constructed are they transmuted by some philosophical alchemy into the institutions, where the product of mankind to build the city is appropriated by those who manage the city and declared to belong solely to the latter. In practice, the workers at the site of production could pilfer the masters' claimed product and this is recorded as a cost of production or some inefficiency, rather than the workers taking what was really produced for their own purposes. The worker is expected to serve its genuine wants rather than the wants of the institution, and this does not always mandate individual gain or the most crass greed. The result is that a shadow economy always exists alongside the free market of a city or a village. Favors can be extended in this shadow economy just as they are in the legitimate economy, but there are those strange souls that see the ruin such office-holding creates for them and those they care about. If they want this to be different, they extend favors not on the basis of office or some conceit of standing. They do not extend the favors out of an abstract notion that it is the right thing to do or says anything about the person or entity doing that good. Those who work in spite of the tendency to dicker over office do this because they see that if they allow the same calculation to become automatic, they work only to hasten the ritual sacrifice that segregated the valid from invalid. For those in the favored grades who believe this will hasten their promotion and share of the national wealth, spiteful favors against the beast are less common, but even privileged members of society can see that there is a purpose to this endeavor of social production that has nothing to do with politics or opportunistic grasping, and that if they wish for the city or whatever arrangement to continue, they would meet the needs of people rather than meet the needs of ritual sacrifice. Because that calculation will never be admissible as a "rational" one—since the implication is that those who work against the proclivity of ritual sacrifice are waging a futile battle in the long run, while the going concern of Empire lasts longer than any individual edifice—it cannot be included among the considerations of stock and political economy, except as a seemingly irrational corruption that must be extirpated. Where could this be tested in natural science, except the "biological nation"? The country or nations as they existed in early modernity might be interpreted as roughly analogous to a biological nation, and humans have never failed to notice tribalism, clan associations, or the clubs that are formed more out of humanity's hedonism than any ulterior motive. If the origin of this stock is beneath the arbitrary whims of office-holding, as it must be for political economy to point to anything real, it would imply the reproduction of these motives, in some form, within the biological nation, and this is supported by sufficient evidence. We have reasonable expectations of what humans are as individual lifeforms and their primitive associations, their families and rituals, and what they do when they meet together. Humans are constituted as individuals and must maintain executive functioning to participate in their "nation", whatever it may be. Tribalism could be relied on as the "most rational" action, contrary to the expectations of state or Empire if the state and Empire were interested in anything good or moral or right. Never forget that intelligence chooses invariably the shortest solution to any problem, regardless of whether that solution is thorough or reconciled with the actual world the problem pertained to. Absent any compelling reason to believe in the sacredness of the individual—for there is nothing sacred or inviolable about how humans are constituted and that was never the purpose of the liberal idea—or any compelling reason to believe in the presumptive claims of institutions like states, there are two options. The first answer is for tribalistic behavior to assert itself "by nature". The second is for Empire to step in as the "invisible hand" with super-authority over the situation, since "obviously base humans would resort to favoritism and tribalism". Those are the only two options that appeal to "pure intelligence", which was never a necessary claim regarding the "rational actor" but was superimposed on reality because the intellectual aristocracy at its core is a tribalistic formation that was never told "no" in their lives. If however the firm or the rational expectations of wise men were to override the poor judgment of intellect alone, we return to the same problem of why humans never built institutions worth a damn in their history. Maybe this time it would be different, but clearly that did not happen and wasn't intended to happen. A problem for all participants is that their stock never did really serve the imperatives of capital. Trucking and bartering was a thing to be avoided if it could be avoided, and cooperative ventures usually had nothing to do with trade. The most likely way for two humans to cooperate is a mutual want of security against a predatory society, and no one is willing to trade that security in portions. The condition where humans "agree" to this lack of security in the dubious name of liberty is only possible in a grossly unequal exchange, and it is almost unilaterally on the terms of the predatory who were the source of the problem.

We see the problem. The stock is inherently a social product. Even when produced alone and apart from the rest of society, the stock is relevant only in relation to other people. Alone in the world, the stock of a particular man is only that which sustains him and that he may carry for whatever purpose, and the rest of the world is fair game for exploitation at whatever future date, so long as his abilities allow him to do this. Any force from other agents would be a social matter, and any force from the world that isn't part of human society would be an impassable barrier regardless of the laborers doing this and their association. The world itself does not recognize "the individual" or any preferred collectivity. It only regards in natural history the "biological nation" or the associations that reproduce humans, both by the sordid sexual act and all of the reproductive labor to reproduce the functions that bring this nation together. The offices that deal in stock, which is necessary for stock to be anything other than a trivial calculation problem, are held by individual persons and institutions. Sharing an office is at best a problematic proposition, and usually ends in contradiction if the joint holders of the office disagree on some policy. In some way, the associations that labor are joined together in a shared office, but the conduct of social labor is that it is executed by individuals. Only the end result appears to natural history as a "biological nation" that would be regarded as the unit of interest. No "biological nation" was in of itself a justification for the human's wants, without relying on an appeal-to-nature argument that a child knows to be folly. If the free trade idea is to be taken as a useful understanding of what happens, the "biological nation" should be irrelevant or a fiction that can be rearranged arbitrarily. It would argue necessarily that nations of any sort are figments of a human's imagination, and both the person and the institution are obliged to overcome the condition of a biological nation. That would be the first task of a proper liberal moral education. This seems right and good, until one learns the hard way how weak humans are without the biological nation and its ingrained habits of reproduction, flawed as they may be. Without an adequate substitute, the liberal project turns into predictable disaster, which it very much did by all honest reckoning of history. With an adequate substitute, one asks how the reproductive labor of the "biological nation" could be better reproduced by another artifice, recognizing that the true benefits of such are not found in institutional by-laws but in some instinct of human beings to do something other than ritual sacrifice or humiliation. A primitive affinity and moral sense does exist in humans, but this affinity is itself another unit of stock to be manipulated by anyone. As mentioned in earlier chapters, the biological nation suffers from its appeal to the superficial, which was for animal life a useful enough guide but for humans was a dangerous fallacy. We would have to ask why humans could be good or at least do good, and what menaces we faced. That leads to a very different inquiry than any that I have seen in the economic literature, yet it would be a necessary one to suggest economics as a prescription for mass society's behavior. Economics of course was not for the common man. It was for the Empire, and the intellectuals who rule it. Moving forward I will view political economy as a topic of interest for the political elite rather than a description of all economic behavior, for political economy was never proposed as a "total system" until the ideologues inveighed with their blithering stupidity.

WHY MONEY?

The monetary token is, without too great an inquiry, superfluous as a unit of value. The same functions money fulfills could be accomplished by informal credits or nod-wink agreements. Only the circulation of money or things that stand in for it accomplishes any effect. Had the objects of exchange been accumulated for the advantage each article offered, calculation regarding them would be very different, even if all of the objects were stand-ins for the favors some office-holder grants. Money in particular is issued and then becomes its own object with its peculiar laws. The paper notes used in modernity are explicitly promises that the slip could be exchanged at banks for a similar such token in another form, which ostensibly represented precious metal. Obviously the bank issues more money than any store of precious metal it possesses or any real property it could offer on demand, yet runs on the bank are exceptional and, when they occur, lead to the bank closing its doors and turning to the state to turn away any angry rabble. Money does not merely represent a promise of some future exploitation to back it. It represents the grasping and dickering for this unit that can be used to pay tax or pay creditors, including other participants in the market. Money pays part of the revenue in a market to individuals or corporate entities that would otherwise have been difficult to part from the use and conflict pertaining to that market society let alone available in stable form. This relies on the assumption that the society generates net revenue to be extracted, which means the members of that society have to behave as rational capitalist actors doing productive activity of some sort.

There is a great mythology that "wealth is created" by this market activity, when the exact opposite is the case. The internecine conflict and games of one-up-manship entirely work against any activity that would generate revenue in the market as a whole. It is also a mistake for reasons I described in prior chapters to describe the manufacturer's addition of value to some object as "wealth". Value is added by productive labor. More precisely, some valued technological content is reproduced in an object, whether that came from the deliberate labor of men or by processes of nature that have predictable results. Since the processes of nature are also understood in the past tense and the very creature of the market is a deliberate design of the agents, the natural "productive labor" is recast as human labor to discover and obtain nature's manufactures. True wealth though means a substance that is unmistakable as such that can be claimed. It is possible to make ideas or "fictitious wealth" by laying a claim that what was free is now proprietary, but no one is under any illusion that the decree fashioned by magic new wealth in the universe. The true potential of wealth in the world consists of all activity of the world. The market activity only becomes "wealth-creating" when the market itself becomes a proprietary technology to be commanded utterly by an imperious overlord; in such a situation, the imperious decree will now command you to participate in this market in specific ways, compelled by law and a lot of brute force to "make you do it to yourself". Such "wealth creation" by mandating that behavior is outside the scope of anything envisioned in the 18th century, but such behavior was not explicitly forbidden by any rule of free trade. The value of productive labor would be valuable regardless of humanity's conceits about economics or judgments of what is "valuable" or "useful". It is the contest to acquire money that allows "value" to take on meaning that meets the superstitious demands of human beings regarding this thing called "the Market", rather than value being a dry technical term to describe rational outcomes of human actions or some actions that occurred in nature. If money were not a singular unit of account or tantamount to that, it would not have the quality of "manna" that may be mindlessly accrued. If there were distinct tokens or grades of "money" that do not interact with each other, or only interacted in prescribed and limited manners that demarcated the class that money pertained to, then the resulting class or caste segregation would be laid bare. The nobility would have their money, title, and office, and the commons would have theirs, and so on with every other interest that vied for position in the market. The issuing of money is hardly an egalitarian force in human history. The very existence of such a token is only possible because its issuer is very unequal to those who are told this unit means anything. If there were countless variants of "money" issued at the whims of ordinary people, the participants would likely do this to shield themselves from unwanted interactions or influences from the market. There would still be a general marketplace or forum to speak of and an understanding that there is a public interest in such, but the actions of a more egalitarian society view the market imperatives entirely as a thing to ignore in favor of the genuinely productive deeds and things that the revenue-sharing of money represents. We could envision numerous schemes of credit accounting and authorities to adjudicate these accounts. They become money only when there is a public interest in "the market" that the units pertain to in any way, which entails that the units of account could be loaned or treated as a thing to covet for themselves by a rational actor. Once that condition is met, there is not a fixed notion of what money "should" be, and the laws of different types of "money" say much about what that "money" will do. Regardless of the excuses made, it is not possible to declare loaning or usury haram without a vigorous enforcement arm. What can be done is to make usury and loansharking unseemly and speak to the genuine interests of the participants in this arrangement, assuming there is an interest in humanity to not repeat the cycle of usury or believe they could join it to be on the "right side of history". I do not believe the position that usury is the just punishment for human intransigence would find much to quarrel about in the present arrangement, nor is the usurer pathologically committed to a particular type of usury that they mindlessly pursue. The bank can claim their collection of interest is entirely righteous and a necessary fee for the security a bank provides to the economic arrangement as a whole, and there is no one type of bank. A state-operated bank may be tasked with meeting quotas for some generally agreed upon plan and demand the grasping producers get on board with something the state's constituents—perhaps the teeming masses if a true workers' state were realized and the matter of banking was exposed to a proper and free inquiry from the oppressed—want very much. If there is a "good guy" in any of this arrangement, it would be those who see correctly that the contest for money or favors of office is part of the problem, and that would only be one precondition of resolving this problem of why institutions never do what we would wish they did.

Productive labor is that which replaces capital "ready-for-use", which is to say, they reproduce technology. This need not be "tangible technology" that has qualities that allow it an existence independent of our belief about it, but it is always a type of technology. The existence of fictitious capital does not change that fictitious capital represents some spurious technology that itself can be reproduced. Services or various activities like singing produce no such technology; the service is rendered once, and then whatever results from it must be maintained and upkept. Because "technology" is a broader definition than the general understanding of what is and is not a commodity, this makes the commodity sometimes nebulous, since anything can be reverse-engineered whether it was purchased or merely observed. To better understand something complex like the product of a house or home repair, such products themselves require simpler products, which eventually reduce to something like plaster, ball bearings, nails, timber, and so on whose origins are simple enough to be commonly reproduced. The laborer itself is a type of technology that must be "ready-for-use" and is obligated to present to the master regardless of its shabby condition; and in turn all of the simplest commodities are brought into circulation by someone appropriating them by the labor of grabbing them, fashioning them from elements in nature, which reproduce the laborer, ad infinitum. In all cases, products present ready-for-use to be products. The future utilization of the product is the work of its purchaser, and it is for the user alone to make clear all of the utilities of any such product. While services can be sold as if they were commodities or pieces of technology, it is their readiness for use that marks them as products, rather than a singular exercise of that use that constitutes a service. The raw materials or underlying substance of the product is irrelevant; only its readiness for use can be ascertained by the producer. The actual uses for a thing are determined by its end user. The producer can predict the multifarious uses of a product and design that product with such in mind, but the producer releases the product into the world only with the design the producer left it with. Once the product is out of the producer's hands, it is lost to the producer until reacquired, which presumably is never if the product was intended for profitable sale.

It is most necessary to keep this quality of products in mind when judging "productive labor" and "unproductive labor", for "ready-for-use" implies imminent use, bypassing all of the labor that the technology reproduces save for the small labor from the user. At no point does the piece of technology become fully automated as a "perfect clockwork". To claim at all that technology will continue on a planned course forever, or operates in perpetuity in accord with a particular Law that is total and absolute, is to claim that the product is commanded by some mind and belongs to that mind. This is clearly an obtuse conceit but it has been at the center of "automation" and the way in which products are treated as labor-saving and labor-annihilating devices. It is only fully intelligible once the full extent of the eugenic creed and managerialism is explored in a later writing. Should technology escape the command of any particular operator and exist on its own power, then it has been introduced by some careless operator who holds all of the guilt of letting that happen. Otherwise, it has ceased to be technology "ready-for-use" or a product. To bring technology "ready-for-use" implies it has been subdued by some power, some regulatory agent. In no case is anything "ready-made" for consumption as product in nature. The stock must not merely "be" but must be inducted into the record as a valid product. There is necessarily quality assurance of any product to ensure that it is in fact what it is listed as, and that product is prepared into some parcel that is convenient to the packager or the user, rather than whatever was naturally formed. All of the objects of technology are artifices at first before they become something more, pertinent to history as knowledge itself would comprehend history rather than natural history or artificial history. For any of that process to begin, there was a natural history from which it was drawn, however far removed the artifices were from any "necessary" reason for them to be constituted so. I have endeavored to explain this concept of history as knowledge itself would comprehend it by comparing it with other types of history, and though a full and thorough definition is outside the scope of this text, I hope the reader understands that the history of a general theory of technology is something very different from the traditional annals of artificial history or concepts of natural history studied with science. Political economy cannot assert that it has initiated any "year zero" or "great reset", but for most of humanity's existence, there is not a notion of inexorable technological progress. In their experience, the ancients saw that technology changed very little over the ages, and what advances existed were explicable to someone from a much earlier time, while canon texts from Antiquity remained the standard until the modern revolutionary period, and continued to be cited until the very deliberate severing of humanity from history altogether in the 20th century that certain institutions desired to impose. There is a reason why that deliberate severing of history was possible in our time, and it had been built within the aristocratic camp for centuries before its coming out party.

OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE IN DIFFERENT NATIONS

"According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and, last of all, to foreign commerce. This order of things is so very natural, that in every society that had any territory, it has always, I believe, been in some degree observed. Some of their lands must have been cultivated before any considerable towns could be established, and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in those towns, before they could well think of employing themselves in foreign commerce.—Wealth of Nations, Book 3 Chapter 1 (pg 157).

It is the foreign commerce that is of greatest interest to the readership of the book, more than the domestic economy which in actuality carries on for its own purposes rather than an imagined "great game" of competition between the actors. Most people in the nation are preoccupied with their survival and tranquility, and have little mind for "getting ahead", likely seeing such an adventure as either futile or a contributor to their woes. The industrialists and petty proprietors meet each other as competitors for various reasons, but did not have much choice in some other situation. There are only so many ingots or tokens of wealth to acquire, and the commanding heights where foreign trade predominates their concerns play a much different game than that of the domestic producer, worker, or beggar. The manufacturer is in some way tied to the awareness of the ruling interest, for the manufacturer must respond to those signals to know what products are in demand and what the manufacturer can supply. The petty proprietors and workers are almost religiously disinterested in anything "foreign", seeing correctly all of their pressing problems are close at hand, as are all of the things they cherish and wish to protect. The articles acquired by foreign trade, like tea from China, are a novelty of little interest to most of the people of the nation, but because those articles are paid for out of the imperial treasury, they absolve the manufacturer and worker of having to do anything so long as they possess money to purchase those foreign goods.

Where does this imperial treasury arise? It does not arise organically in the way naively assumed, but it is indeed necessary for the base of a society to be the supply arm of Empire. The second half of the cycle, where Empire turns its efforts towards capitalistic enterprise, exists in fits and starts, but such a course entails perils and the unreliability of foreign populations to produce products that are desired, or their unwillingness to trade with foreigners with no benefit to themselves. The aim of the domestic population, so far as they hold a collective aim, is the genuine public interest. Enterprises that begin with the individual or a tiny association find other individuals and see that they could collude towards shared aims, fixing prices and shielding each other from competition. There may be losers who are not part of the conspiracy, and aims of the conspirators who would seek to corner the market and join the cool kids' table. In practice, the boards of foreign trade recognize "new men" as a threat to their established oligarchy, and any scheme of cunning within the lower orders to gain individual position results in short-term gain, after which the conspirator must continually ride that first scam and not let it catch up to him. Even the foul conspirators would, if not seeking to overturn this market situation altogether, see that the domestic, native, public interest of the nation is at odds with the interest of foreign trade and cosmopolitanism. If however the lower orders saw that internecine dickering at such small stakes produces no lasting reward, the conspiracy against the public would turn to mafias who are the true constituent parts of that public, who see that one of the few advantages they enjoy is their numbers of the agency of each member of those numbers, however small that agency may be. The aim of nations absent empire would fid any foreign entanglement to be an unwelcome condition, regardless of comparative advantage. The rule of polities being primarily the rule of men rather than technological objects, primitive nativism and tribalism could be relied on, such that the foreign and domestic spheres are activity were distinct; two worlds apart, in other words. For the agricultural sector, capital is invested in improvement of the land or stock of cattle, while trade is an uncertainty. The manufacturer and domestic trader always sought a stable holding rather than promises of opulence in the abstract, and saw the rightful ordering being that where farmers and slaves were at the bottom and proprietors miserly withheld wages and anything to those who did most of the actual labor, while the manufacturers were from the top-down view the "producers".

The real situation of society is that it is not a xenophobic bubble, because its conduct is not primarily driven by economic imperatives, and the members of society have aims as individuals or in their associations, rather than their preferred rational behavior in that microcosm. Trade in money, the familiar exchange that exists in stock, happens at first not within the polity but at its borders, using precious metal as a standard for the various reasons I have described in past chapters. The treasuries of states were stocked with precious metal because that metal could be monopolized and it was small enough to be carried by a small cargo train or ship. Those who travel to another land for business do so because they have no opportunities at home but some opportunities in another place. The rulers may covet something of a neighbor and believe trade is an acceptable way for their purposes, but as much as possible the rulers prefer to encourage the nativism and xenophobia of the masses. The aim for the rulers is to keep the masses drunk and pliant to any abuse, remembering that "slavery is eternal" was established before notions of the enterprising free trader could be conceived. Because the low business of commerce was beneath the dignity of proper rulers, the trade boards were delegated to merchants with the condition that the rulers had final control over whether trade agreements would pass, and saw manipulation of the trade as useful. For most of history, the rulers' preferred policy was to hoard wealth and only allow trade in goods that were superfluous and harmless. The workers care little about whether they produce for the domestic market or for foreigners, since they have long ago been parted from their stake in the society and receive only the faintest scraps from those who would placate the mob. All involved believe they "control the flow" in some way by their will, but the true result of this interplay is to strengthen the position of those import/export boards, who become a necessary part of the city infrastructure to handle this particular jockeying for position. For most of the people, money only meant debt collectors. The drive to initiate enterprises is rare, and further policed by the boards that arise in every city that don't want anyone getting ideas that they can horn in on the profits of established players.

What really allowed foreign trade to take off is that there were new things to acquire as the manufactures of human society became more elaborate, and more knowledge could transmit about what was outside the village or city limits. The risk of foreign trade became less a risk of faulty information or the length of travel and more a social risk that could be navigated. The need of rare tin to forge bronze motivated traders to acquire this resource and offer some good in return. Wine, cotton, various cash crops could be cultivated with the expectation of export. Estates consolidated under richer and richer houses, who largely were rich by conquest rather than trade. Even at a higher stage of development, foreign trade was something few men engaged in directly. Most of humanity lives in rural villages or small cities whose most obvious trade was with the immediately outlying territory, trading food with the rurals for manufactured goods from the cities that were not always possible to produce from rural home manufacturing. For major cities like Rome or Antioch, foreign trade supplied the grain to feed such a large city and eventually backed the grain dole, but nearly all of the luxuries from foreign trade belong to a tiny, opulent portion of the population. The foreign trade allocated to the masses can be controlled, either by raising tariffs or fees or by controlling the smugglers, which is a trivial matter due to the longstanding alliance between organized crime and ruling elites.^[2] Vagaries are invoked about crime and "just-so stories" are readily reproduce to protect the mafias and their alliances. The black market, and foreign trade generally, is the nexus where state and Empire can first enter economic life. It begins with the state taking charge of issuing coinage and establishing laws and courts pertaining to commercial affairs as a necessary consequence of currency. The domestic economy remains, even in today's globalized world, insular and contained within the homes of the participants as much as it can be. "Illegal" storage of goods, reuse and production of objects in the home, collection of readily available resources in nature like rainwater, and favors that remain within the network of a clan or family constitute the center of domestic economic life. Woe to the poor soul who believes these institutions allow any sort of friendship or trust to exist for long! Domestic economic life still entails office-holding, but it is a game largely concerning the base of society. Even where the ruling interest wishes to engineer society to remove the offices in the base, domestic economic life carries on largely by the true wants of its participants, within the boundaries that are possible in the material surroundings as-is. There are numerous lines where no price is enough to insist a deal is made "naturally", for certain deals are so offensive that suicide would be preferable, and not one of the curses of the human race could compel someone to do what is asked of them. Either they will stubbornly refuse, remove themselves from the situation the hard way, or they were degrade because what the institutions ask them to be is not a potential. The only way foreign trade and those with access to it, who are at first the imperial interests of a society and the odd adventurer, can enter the rest of society is by tying the fortunes of foreign trade to the otherwise unrelated domestic economy. A creature called "the market" must be conjured that is far removed from the genuine extent of the market, and it will be granted mystical properties that are "super-real". The dominant interest in foreign trade may introduce itself through vices like gambling rings, wine cults, and that old human favorite, the orgy. Foreign trade as actual "foreign trade", i.e. exchange with a foreign neighbor, still requires someone to visit the foreign place for merchant activity, be accepted by the foreigners or take from the foreigners by force, and then come home and ingratiate himself with a potentially hostile board governing foreign commerce. The merchant seeking fortune abroad historically faced uncertain prospects but the potential for high reward. Where foreign trade is impossible, the same functions that the trade board governing a city would hold still occur. There remains an elite and cults that are not just parasitic on the productive economy, but parasitic on domestic life entirely. The elite may insist it is the other way around, where the filthy and grubby masses don't know good taste or manners and wouldn't survive a day in the so-called "real world" the chamber of commerce asserts. Foreign trade can be undertaken as an importer who acquired wealth through conquest or a high degree of internal exploitation, as an exporter that might be quite happy to sell surplus and turn the incoming wealth to useful articles, or as two countries with advantages and disadvantages who find a mutually beneficial or at least toleration relationship. At no point is the trade conducted blindly, but all management of foreign trade is in the interest of the ruling power of a polity, and can never be an antagonist to the ruling order. Feudal regimes back banks and treasuries to support the crown, and the merchants have throughout history sought favorable position within the ruling system rather than overthrow of that system.

Throughout history, monetary economies have faced considerable difficulty convincing anyone that the money is sound or represents anything but the will of the issuer. Foreign trade is concerned less with coinage or money than value that is peculiar to it, which means those engaged in foreign trade are keenly aware of the political implications of all that happens and have worked out abstract systems to describe commerce without the muck of producing. Any merchant, in whatever sphere of economic activity they operate in, is not blind to other spheres nor demands that others turn off their senses regarding them. Such thinking belongs to a peculiar niche in recent history, whose origins are not in economic thought but in ideology and a depraved spiritual conceit the ideologues hold about themselves and their mission on this Earth. It would be quite impossible to fail to make a connection that foreign trade ultimately derives from someone's domestic economy, and that there are consequences if the conduct of trade is openly vampiric and destructive to the conditions that allowed productivity and reproductivity in the world we actually live in. Most of humanity's life could carry on without foreign trade, so for foreign trade to continue, foreign trade must be convenient to someone and reconciled with the continuation of productive life. Foreign trade in of itself produces nothing except abstract technology pertinent to its own conduct, such as credit schemes. If the products of foreign trade reach end consumers, then the domestic economy may be more productive, so long as the association of productive labor is not impeded or starved of conditions that allow such labor to continue. This would only be effective so long as those products were themselves good for productivity rather than being wants of any sort. The promise of mutual benefit is the trick to convince domestic populations to give up their own tools and connections in favor of those of an alien class that proclaims that it will mediate interaction between populations and associations. It seems simple enough; if one country possesses fertile land and knowledge to grow wheat and another possesses rich metal deposits and metal-working technology, both could complement each other, and the externalities of either can be contained or shipped off to some waste area. The same reasoning may be applied within a domestic population to convince them that their constituent parts have nothing to do with each other and should see each other as aliens whose aims are irreconcilable; but this falls apart because close proximity and a lack of any true natural reason for this lockout creates immediate consequences when one group that was formerly alien is thrust into the residuum. "The poor will always be with you", they will say, but absent a compelling reason, the wretched of the Earth will not "stay in their lane". They will take any measures they deem fit to alter the condition of their existence, whether the wretched eke out of a miserable existence apart from productive society or the domestic society falls apart completely and the damned take back by force what society denied to them. In foreign trade, the alien Other is somewhere far away, physically distant and "out of sight, out of mind", regardless of how many reminders an oppressed nation may leave as evidence. Inevitably, the discourse returns to that old human favorite, slavery and the slave power. Slaves are aliens among us, but in domestic life, no one is ever convinced "slavery is eternal" let alone natural. The slaves are seen and the consequences of the peculiar institution are impossible not to see. To foreign trade, slavery is an abstraction they are aware of, but any component of suffering that would be readily known to someone who thinks at all can be reduced to just another ledger entry out of millions of others, and by some strange alchemy slavery becomes yet another good for its own sake. In all of the ways this is reproduced in the domestic sphere, the overlord doing this imagines itself as conducting a trade adventure in alien territory, setting itself apart from the managed. It is rewritten as the higher order imposing its truth on the lower order. Nothing obligates the trader to be so callous nor recommends a purely self-serving conceit about what happens, but the dishonest will exhort others to behave in such a manner and punish them severely if they remember the world where anything is produced.

When societies engage in international relations, as their circumstances must, more of social production and common wealth submits to the interests of foreign trade, even when traders and connivers are absent. Two disparate societies cannot continue as they had when they come closer into contact, without some agreement between those societies that abandoned the human habit of war and barking like apes, seeing that such a manner of diplomacy offered nothing good to anyone but the worst elements of humanity. Usually the best habit, which many human societies took to heart, was to limit foreign trade's intervention into private life, while allowing market activity to continue and policing the merchants. The same habit can be used to install court favorites, where the sovereign exercises its command over domestic life to work against what the ruled would have done if they had more of the world returned to them. The rise of foreign trade as the dominant economic thought and interest should not be seen as a class war bitterly won by the merchants, but as the installation of yet another scheme of sovereigns to invade domestic life, using foreign trade as a pretext. Foreign trade and its interested parties had to exist and be able to exist for this to work, but the trading companies begin as an extension of the crown's desire to enclose and ensnare. They recruit from the established merchants to fund enterprises and from any body of men desperate enough to be press-ganged into exploratory navies, starting from the sons of warriors who became conquistadors and pirates. The drive for imperial expansion comes from the commons and the dregs, who find common cause with a sovereign wishing to turn that imperial apparatus inward and outward. The mentality and interests of foreign trade are at the apex of the project, even when the sovereign proclaims he is conserving or turning away from the greed of the commons. Isolating this common habit of imperial projects throughout history informed what the liberals of the 18th century envisioned. Rather than imperial expansion being a temporary rush to grab whatever isn't nailed down followed by a feasting on the spoils, the liberals could see the imperial system as a permanent institution that they manage and control, working overtly where needed and covertly as agentur are pushed where they need to be for the Great Working to continue. It is not enough to merely assert this intellectually, but to be able to readily reproduce it through education.

The imperial creed supports the money, and the money supports the imperial creed, whatever the nature of it, and both are supported by elements of society whose primary utility is destroying or mutilating other humans; the supply of the latter is well known to those who look around and see humanity for what it has been, whether an imperial project is active or the malice was of a lower or different variety. Money represents not general value or the ability to command labor, but an ability to command labor in particular conditions, the predominant of them being the existence of foreign trade. After foreign trade is established, the other activities of mankind may be recast as similar to foreign trade in some way, and nothing prevents us from doing this or for this to be a worthwhile exercise. We can rationalize our conduct as if we were purely political animals. We can also rationalize our conduct with the dominance of foreign trade in mind, and recognize that this situation is not natural nor eternal but one belonging to a particular epoch of history. We can imagine that there was a world where foreign trade was scarce and not technologically possible at the present scale, and imagine a world where foreign trade is largely outmoded with many paths to how that happened. The trader is not ideologically wed to foreign trade, as if without its resulting exploitation life wouldn't be worth living. The conduct of foreign trade itself is not limited to a single "total system", and that was not the necessary purpose of political economy. Political economy explains what has been apparent in the policies that have been hitherto known, and what other policies may exist while meeting the same requirements of the interested parties. Political economy is useless to the domestic economy, or the "personal economy" of an individual, or the "economy of nature" that might be construed in animal life, because the economic motives in those tasks are almost never political motives until politics has destroyed private life. In foreign trade, political economy is a necessary explanation of the policies in force since foreign trade was a potential of polities that was worth regulating. The world where foreign trade no longer takes on the character it has would be a world in which affairs between polities and nations recognize, for their mutual security, that creating dependence and ruling through deprivation has been wholly ruinous to any aim of security, prosperity, liberty, or any value other than more deprivation and fear. The imagined solution of certain idiots, who take on many names in our time and recent history, is that they can make foreign trade unmentionable, call it mean names, and make the Bad Man go away for upsetting them. The worst of those certain idiots, rather than resisting foreign trade, have often facilitated the worst deprivation resulting from foreign trade and did so for the sake of the deprivation. This describes the Nazis and their shameless latter-day incarnations, who have in every way advanced enclosure and the internecine war within a country, and work tirelessly to create cannibalism for cannibalism's sake.

There is no way to escape the truth: foreign trade is always imperial trade in principle. It is never an assembly of newcomers who work towards justice and liberty for all or any such nonsense. In a more primitive empire, sectors of the economy are set apart and valued for what they produce. The empire needs crops and metalworks and construction materials, and may need more things depending on the epoch's prevailing technology. Certain of these wants may become obsolete by the same prevailing technology. In all cases, the interest rests upon a conspiracy against the public, in the name of the public. Since "the public" was never desirable for most of us, its content long ago commanded by instigators and intriguers, this conspiracy could carry on with little opposition. Pirates are recast as explorers or pioneers, and men of low cunning with nice clothes recast as a new nobility in all but name, with the old nobility working with the new nobility towards shared aims against the rest of us. Above all, the priesthood, which was historically antagonistic towards commerce as the most likely threat to the priests' monopoly and tithes, had to radically alter to fit the empire where foreign trade became a very different beast from what it was in earlier empires. It is here where the dubious benefits of free trade are offered by Adam Smith to his readers. Rather than the naked power grab that would be the standard from the late 19th century onward, the premise of free trade is productive. Merchants and commercial interests directly account for nothing in free trade. The matter was between the producers and the state in principle; at the end of the day, the state needed products, not schemes for advantage, and those who ruled the state would surely see what lesser men could not.

OF THE EXPENSES OF THE SOVEREIGN OR COMMONWEALTH

If free trade were presumed to operate "in nature", the actual world shows little evidence of this. There is neither an inclination nor any good reason for the agents in this society to participate at all, let alone think the bizarre thought about value and wealth that is commanded by the present-day capitalist ideologues. Wealth is not created by any human effort beyond the mere fact that there is such energy in the universe that can be summoned, compared to a condition where no such energy exists. The particular forms that energy congeals into as articles of wealth are not in of themselves interesting. In principle, every arrangement of matter could be rearranged into some other arrangement of matter, with the cost that some such matter is "exhausted"—that is, the energy can no longer be summoned by any technology for productive labor that would rearrange the matter into some other form. This was the rationale behind imperial bastardizations of thermodynamics, where heat—unordered energy that was described as a system—had to gradually dissipate from the universe, remaining a fixed property that must be lorded over by the aristocracy. And so, entropy which was originally selected as the terminology because of its relation to the word "energy", was applied to order and disorder in the abstract, and a metaphysical trick was played where any inquiry suggesting this was anything other than "Absolute informational knowledge" was haram. This treatment of energy is only one that is appreciated by technology. Claims of wealth are not "created" by any alchemy. They are discovered, and then asserted. The prospector surveys some area of space for any and all resources that may be coveted, and claims all other resources that may exist in the land even if they are technologically valueless at the present moment. If land is denuded and stripped of its technological value, the claim to the land remains, and that claim entails the use of land as territory. Its value as territory is contingent on something more than all of the technological implements held in the land or improvements upon the land. Why is this so? It is because technology posits that there is a problem, a goal, or a game that the technology solves, in order for it to be technology. Whether the technology solves any goal for us, right now, does not change that the only meaningful rendering of technology is its ability to manipulate some preexisting wealth in the world. Technology exists to build yet more technology, and human labor and all that comprises humans is itself a type of technology. The genuine existence of human beings, and why humans labor, is not something reducible to technology, yet it informs what technology is built and for what purposes it is deployed. A rock barren of any life-sustaining materials, useful metals, or any readily tapped energy for human use, is still a rock with all of the properties of solid ground or a solid body in the vacuum of space. To be without energy entirely is to speak of no-thing, but the vacuum is still space and distance to be traversed, which acquires value in certain contexts even though it is the value of literally no-thing. Every one of the primary orders of human society can seen in some way the absurdity of this treatment of wealth and value, absent any context where the contest is made relevant for a given society. If we saw the energy of the universe frankly, we would see that, without any great expenditure of energy or human toil, the needs of sustenance and security are remarkably cheap, with the greatest cost for the latter being nothing more than the deliberate interjection of those who insist we must "respect" them. Even with the exorbitant cost of human cruelty, drudgery, and the incompetence of the human animal, the true energy requires of a human to simply exist are met in nearly all historical epochs if the question were one of productivity. Hoards of food are withheld and burned for no purpose other than the internecine struggle between the orders and the individuals' contest for position. Of those barriers that are true technological barriers, the most pressing have been by our time solved, and knowledge of the solution would be trivial to reproduce if pedagogy weren't so ruinous and dishonesty were not the rule of the human race. Even with the added exorbitant cost of this ruinous way of life, famine in our time is both uncommon and its origins in human malice have never been made more clear. The Earth's processes that existed before humanity do not replenish the wealth of the land as such, but replenish value in certain contexts that are understood. In this way, the content of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen largely cycles throughout the Earth, never as evenly as the "total system" managers insist they are imposing while the managers impose the exact opposite of an equal distribution of wealth. Had there been a failure of the soil to produce enough bounty, large areas of Earth's landmass are arable but not cultivated for any purpose; but this is irrelevant because even with growing demand for crops, the efficiency of growing processes has led to leaving once productive lands fallow, for there would be no purpose to cultivating crops that will not be sold or consumed. As anyone who looks around notices, the majority of food produced that is discovered by markets is thrown away, having never sustained anyone, and this exorbitant opulence is tauntingly put on display as the conditions of most of humanity deteriorate, to emphasize the deliberate siege that has been imposed on them.

This treatment of value is not the technocrats' idea for their own sake. Value for the technological interest can only be understood as essential utility divorced from any and all political considerations, such as institutions alien to their class. What the technocrat values, and what the technocrat would adopt, only concerns the political question as one to be abolished. On the technocrat's own terms, the chase for value as a substance or paramount quality in the universe leads to only one conclusion—the abolition of the contest and all standards of comparison. The technocrat sees this absurdity in advance and recognizes, if he or she hasn't been sucked into the most pernicious cults offered to them by their proclivity, that such a world has an obvious outcome and negates the very thing that the technocrat holds as leverage, which is their superior knowledge regarding technology and their orientation around such rather than the toil and grubby associations of labor. If the technocrat wishes to make their knowledge proprietary for their class, to the exclusion of all other orders, it would be held jointly by the class and governed by the rule of fear alone. But, the technocrat knows better than to think technology or knowledge have any "special" powers in the universe whatsoever. In a better world, the technocrat would conclude that the position of the lowest class is the only correct one. In the worse world, the technocrat chooses the fads and trappings of aristocracy, positioning themselves as yet another aristocracy so that the cycle hitherto known may continue. There are only these two extremes and only can be so if the question of value were one of true, "natural" necessity, rather than a political contrivance that arose ultimately from an alien class. The contrivance may be adopted as a useful fad by the middle class, but the true history of capitalism and socialism both is that neither were particularly interesting to the middle class. The middle class, who would be the order of technocrats, did not possess large sums of capital, and even if they possessed some capital, monopoly was identified early as the inexorable outcome of "natural law", and monopoly was already intrinsic in the technological interest's comprehension of value. The middle class did not possess sufficient property to live independent of commerce or labor as the proprietors did, and if they did possess this property, their attitudes immediately become those of the proprietor class, even if they retain a connection to technology that the old proprietors lacked. So too would socialism have no appeal, because socialism entailed the feeding of "free riders" that offended the technocrat's sense of right and their conceit about themselves. If the technocrats embrace any form of socialism, it is always one that denies the existence of the other orders altogether. This can happen by the aristocratic approach, where "socialism" becomes yet another iteration of the aristocratic power cult, or the member of the technocratic order sees that their membership in their order and the existence of their class altogether is precarious and better off abandoned. The technocrat-aristocrat may profusely lie about what he or she is doing, but in all cases the technocrat-aristocrat is doomed to succumb to the worst vices of both of their tendencies and the worst vices humanity can plunge towards. In other words, such people can only maintain an ideal socialism under conditions of controlled insanity. If socialism were to mean anything else to a technocrat but these two extremes, it would not be about their class interests or any local interest of the individuals, but a serious inquiry into what humanity has done up to the present. The great mythos of ideological capitalism is that everyone in the middle class must love capitalism, yet all evidence suggests that the individual capitalist or those crushed between the capitalist and the dispossessed masses hated the new arrangement from the word go. The only beneficiaries of "capitalism" were the pirates of the trading companies and their court favorites, and it was clear very early on that capitalism really was nothing but a scheme for those pirates. Free trade made no pretensions that it was for anything but said piracy; if the favored interests of their society were pirates and dope dealers, that did not in of itself make the claims of political economy facile. Whether the technocrat liked it or not, or whether the middle class had any particular feeling or thought regarding capitalism, was irrelevant. Capitalism arose entirely from prior conditions, without any great "revolution" to impose it on the world. The accumulation of capital carried on not against the order of the proprietors, but alongside it. Kings and nobles require money to pay armies and fund expeditions for their empires and to maintain the essential ordering of their society. It is a Germanic perversion of fact to claim that the landholding noble proprietors were in any sense hostile to the parties who would become the capitalists, or even held interests in the pre-revolutionary status quo that required any fight at all. Both the nobles and the commoners loathed the Church monopoly, coveted public property and sought the destruction of the ancient commons of the working peasantry. All sought the destruction of the lowest class as is the prime want and true motive of the human race since its sordid foundation. The struggle over free trade was one in which individuals jockeyed for their position within the new normal. There was never a serious "other way" that was contemplated and fought for regarding the rise of capitalism; nor would a miserly capitalist look at the societies of China or India and see any goodness to loathe. Far from that, the early liberals saw the poverty of Chinese and Indian peasants living on next to nothing and asked if they could replicate such conditions in their own countries openly, and the answer to this is yes. Free trade rose because there was an Empire of pirates that set up shop in Asia, and already saw the cruel poverty of Asian societies as something they could exacerbate then bring to the home country. The losers who didn't get in the club when this opportunity arose grumbled and cried crocodile tears about "justice", but all of this is sour grapes. Not once did the losers suggest a serious alternative to Empire that confronted the imperial beneficiaries head-on. Every divergent vision for humanity studiously avoided such confrontation and asked very different questions, usually missing the point that all of the malice of the capitalist society was deliberate and served no purpose other than the whim of those who played this sad and pathetic game.

There was indeed never a strict transition from so-called "feudalism" to "capitalism" as an ideological position of everyone. What were the liberals' first claims? They coveted the feudal rights and dues that were monopolized by the state and the order of the nobility and sought to make them general rights of the commoners. This was always understood as the commoners of means, for the division between those who worked and the professionals was already stark and pronounced, as it had been throughout most of human history. One distinction is that there were more professionals, who communicated with each other more frequently and knew of more things regarding the world than they did in the past, but the commoners of means always segregated themselves and demanded further segregation from the masses of "mindless" workers, as their conceit had to conceive of the nations generally. The feudal peasants were, once all of the finery and gradients of serfdom were laid bare, open to unlimited exploitation, which the lords indeed did when the lords did not engineer democides against the peasantry for the pure fun of doing so as befits their class and their race. Enclosure for the disfavored was yet another cruelty in a history that had known nothing but cruelty, where any prospect that humanity could be different even at a small scale was beyond hope. It was an expected development, for enclosure against those close to total dispossession was merely a formalization of rule, and the workers were already illegal aliens in their own country even though such a concept was not formulated as such. For the better off of the peasants, enclosure was a steady grind of defeats, setbacks, and occasional strikes of opportunity, and at the end of the feudal-era enclosures the "reward" of the revolution that supposedly was waged for that class was to formalize and finalize enclosures and destroy any public, Church, or communal property that had survived the enclosures. The liberal "freedom" only marked a transition from one method of enclosure, waged with the tools of the state of that time, to another which was carried out by states far more vigorous in punishing the poor and capable of seeing a "total system" that ensured the dispossessed remained so forever, where the noble military men had little reason to exist and no motive to fight for "nations", and no desire to see the rise of mass armies that gradually became evident to those who think for five minutes about the lethality of putting a gun in some peasant's hands and training him to not shoot it at his commanding officers.

There are two places where the change from "feudalism" to "capitalism" took place that rise above all others. The first is at the apex of the state, due to the necessities of states relating to the real world rather than the pretenses of states that are what the rubes are told "politics" and "war" entail. The second is in the great "favored associations" that have always lurked ominously everywhere humans infest the world. A change in the great game at the apex of the state creates new opportunities for officers who otherwise would never, ever have had any position in society except the servile and humiliating one that those "out of the club" are condemned to. The true apex of the state is not occupied by the nominal sovereign or "Big Man" but by the court and advisors adjacent to the sovereign, and by a body of persons who have been made indispensable because of their connection to spiritual authority of some sort. These people make themselves indispensable or inoffensive enough that they move from one regime to the next. They include influential priests and bureaucrats who make a point of their neutrality and offer stable transition to a would-be revolutionary coup regarding certain matters. The state in recent decades had grown and brought in new men and new technology, but the rules of surviving, rising, and falling in those corridors do not change because of some new "trick" or fad. Any new technology still has to play the same game and inherits conditions that were not of that technology's making. For the true apex of the state, a new sovereign rises with the approval of these officers, and those officers really have no great objection to the previous ruler and could be fine with whatever happens, or manipulate events to install a new ruler if they are so inclined. An ancient regime falls not entirely by some impressive force from outside that is revolutionary. If the outside force were a foreign conqueror, the conqueror must either exterminate the conquered or promise halfheartedly, if only for a moment, that he will be as good to him as the conquered's former master, since the truth of humanity is that they have always been chattel to be traded by conquerors in one way or another. The feudal right of the lord to have any peasant they wanted for any purpose became the capitalist "right of conquest" or some other imperial faggotry to justify some atrocity. Who then has anything to gain? The "favored slaves" of the associations, who are the origin of imperial cults and secret societies. These enablers, and it will be the enablers rather than the resisters who are allowed social promotion to enter the game of revolution, are the chief functionaries who make the contest for office possible. If the promises given by the officers of the state were given to the ruled, whose position was laid bare—and the ruled have always known they are slaves because they have never been treated as if they were anything else by all standards of comparison—they would be different promises, and ideology would have no appeal whatsoever. Without a bare minimum of real security for their existence, which no state ever offers because it would destroy all of the claims of a state and the favors its officers can grant, no promise of freedom or "good ideas" will be relevant. The wages of the favored slaves—their exemptions from the worst humiliations, and the display of public torture of those outside the club to grant those exemptions value—are only possible once the state's existence is accepted as a fait accompli. Historically, states were weak, and even if the masters wanted the world to be recreated in their image, most of humanity carried on with their lives with nothing but contempt for this entity. Humanity would never know freedom. They would instead know the limited existence that was possible "outside society" that ends the moment they interact with another human no matter how benign or the distinction of rank or anything else between them. That has always been the aim of slave and peasant revolts; to escape the cycle altogether. Changing the basic laws of politics was impossible, but escape from them, in favor of a world where none of that faggotry was relevant, was very possible; and if it was possible for one, another may see the situation and recognize the same solution is the only solution possible in this time. If the state and politics were to be reformed in any way for the genuine security of all people, or for a wider set of the people in a society, all such reforms had to violate a fundamental shibboleth of the human race, which was that the lowest class must be humiliated maximally and their existence reduced to a living abortion. This was possible and would hurt no one, but if it changed, "human" society would end, and those who had been condemned by the beast named "society", state society or otherwise, would see their long-term security best served by forbidding the existence of any such beast at all, no matter how benign it claims to be now.

All of these reforms are only possible because there are state institutions that attain value. It is the institutions rather than "the state" as a whole facade that gain anything. The advisors and courtiers that comprise the true apex of states do not value institutions for their own sake, but the functionaries and the state as a whole require institutions to accomplish much in the world. Otherwise, the will of the sovereign is a lot of hot air; perhaps enough hot air to exert some effect on the world, but such an engine is woefully inefficient. The aforementioned treatment of wealth and energy must be "encoded" in the ruling institutions in some way for this machine called "the state" to realize its existence. Only on that basis, rather than by baldly asserting value for its own sake, does any "mode of production" become evident. At the base level, labor remains unchanged. Workers still work, beggars still beg, and the farmer must till the land in accord with the laws of nature rather than by some spiritual alchemy. The merchant and the would-be capitalist conducted their affairs no differently than they did if the token to offer workers was something other than money, for the money was never the capitalist's own until the capitalist was large enough to found his own bank, which the smart capitalists understood to be the ultimate endgame for their personal ambition. The only transition was in the terminology used by institutional machinery to justify exploitation. By changing feudal dues to the rights of property of the favored, the same assumptions that had always governed any slavery still applied. The worker under contract was the capitalist's to use and abuse, and there was not even a small pretense that it should be different from the revolutionary factions. By changing the right of the capitalist to the right of state officers of a socialist state, nothing would by that declaration change either. The dubious sanctity of the contract in a rigged legal code is replaced with the even more dubious sanctity of ideology and the shibboleths public relations experts insist you believe in. Just as with the transition from mercantilism to free trade, little effort was expended by the socialists who did exist historically to suggest that the workers were actually free in any meaningful sense of the word. Socialism, as I hope to describe in a later chapter, had little to do with emancipation from the historical relations of slave and master, and was not intended to be a doctrine of personal liberation, but that moves ahead of the transition to free trade, which had not even the pretenses of ideology to suggest this was about anything good for the worker. The rights of the capitalist existed at all not because of baldly asserting they were so by that pernicious doctrine of "me wantee", but were expected duties of the capitalist to this new arrangement, just as the feudal lord and overseer or the slave driver and overseer do what they do as a duty to the institution of slavery, however that institution manifests. However the institution of slavery is rearranged in language, its essential function, and the continuation of the essential act from one formal slave institution to another, never changes, and in all cases the slaveholders and overseers of the prior regime move seamlessly into the new slave system. What changes, if anything, is how new slaves are harvested, the limits of exploitation of any particular chattel, and how the new slavery shall perpetuate itself beyond simply being slavery. There is always in every so-called mode of production slaves and masters, with nothing outside them and nothing against them. All considerations regarding the world outside this conceit, or the actual productive activity of human beings, are declared moot, "just so". By no means is every move to a new "system" an inexorable progression towards greater slavery, as if units of "slavery" could be measured. The true aim of every slavery is not production at all, but security of the institution itself. Whatever the master wanted from slave labor, or whatever was used to cajole and push slaves, is deemed an inefficiency, while the managerial role becomes indispensable, reversing entirely the truth of the world if this were a matter of regulating resource inflows and outflows. Every system of slavery must encounter its true conditions rather than those it prefers to believe are true, and this is constant and immediate. Not once can a slavery be "just an idea" or something freely ignored, and it never has been so. Masters may come and go, and their command over the world may be lax, but in the conduct of slavery, the true believers and the natural beneficiaries of the slave power never for a moment sin against the institution of slavery. Their regard for the genuine effectiveness of slavery in the world may diminish or grow, but the essential act of slavery and the impulse that allowed slaveries to persist never changes and never relaxes. The slave learns even after their dubious manumission that they will never truly be free, and never were free in the sense that the word "liberty" is invoked. The slave's only comfort is that they aren't retarded, and the treatment of the retard is something greater than any institution, and the true prime mover of this sad race. The transformation from one "system" to another is really a rearrangement of how to siphon and hoard this slavery, so that it can be divided into so many units that are themselves traded like the chattel are traded. Nothing can fundamentally change so long as the core shibboleth of slavery is upheld, and there is no greater understanding to be found solely by studying the various systems of slavery, where the only permissible notion of productive society is that where "Slavery is Eternal"—precisely as the proclivity of the technocrats, the "copper rule" described in Book 3, must see it. This then becomes the chief aim of social engineering, and that social engineering takes the form of war—and no other form than war can accomplish social engineering. Once the managerial science is generalized, as it was in free trade, social engineering is inevitable. There can be no world where magical ignorance forestalls social engineering by declaring it "evil", "inhuman", or some other excuse. The real transformation then is from fixed demarcation of classes where peasants are consigned to remain out of sight and out of mind forever to social engineering in which the classes are separate but distance between them is removed. The only way this could exist as a steady state is by pressing a nerve constantly.

All of the useful treatment of free trade did not ask questions about micromanagement, and it could only speak of the productive process in passing as a thing that happened. None of the productive process on the ground actually follows the dictates of free trade and its imperatives. Only to the conceits of the state and political graspers are the dictates of free trade imposed on the processes that feed the state and the interested parties that contest it. The money issued is kept in limited supply specifically so the producers are forced to starve and "do it to themselves", passing along the immiseration to the workers who in turn pass it to the lowest class. Who cares most about "the theory" of free trade and making these existential excuses, but the political graspers and schemers? The capitalist boss and the officers of the company down to the foreman do not think of themselves as an internal republic. No firm does. The relations and the primary purpose of the productive activity remains feudal and for the favored associations—for the "buddy buddy" arrangements, nods and grins among the favored and the violent exclusion of the disfavored. There has never been, nor can there ever be, any other arrangement of the firm or production so long as the core shibboleth of attacking the lower class remains intact. Any firm that did not do this would not violate any economic law. There is no economic or material reason why the humiliation of the lowest class is necessary, and it would seem ideal that the lowest class would be assigned all of the work, all of them being treated as equally worthless while the favored grades of labor do nothing but build vanity projects for the master. Yet, this treatment of labor would violate a core shibboleth that the lowest class must be starved out of existence, not called upon for membership in society. The disfavored grades of labor remain labor, and will act violently against the lowest class to remain so by the theory of the ruling order. The imperative of the managerial class is to mandate, make universal, and make Absolute, the correct moral attitude of the disfavored grades of labor against the lowest class. The reality is that the disfavored grades of labor, though they enjoy enough distinction to not be immediate targets of ritual sacrifice, know that compliance with such an edict would only mean that in short order, the disfavored grades of labor are reduced to the lowest class, and they have only worked and toiled to hasten a fate worse than death. They are working ever-harder so that they will at the end of this sordid cycle be declared retarded and humiliated. Death would be cleaner. And so, the disfavored grades of labor are scarcely motivated by any of the moral posturing of the managers and have no reason to care about their capitalist boss's bottom line. The only difference is that the disfavored grades of labor are not yet so degraded that they can be made into pure lumps of utility as the lowest class are consigned to. The lowest class can only exist on human society as creatures to be tortured, for "they have no soul" in order for the ancient rite of ritual sacrifice to remain intact. The disfavored grades of labor, however poorly they are treated, cannot imminently be ritually sacrificed en masse, one by one, and their numbers reduced gradually. The aim of the managers is to have imminent and Absolute victory—the ideal being to make all of the workers retarded and then ALL LIFE DIES SCREAMING FOREVER, while they toil as biological labor-units. Regardless of the "mode of production", this has always been the world-historical purpose of the managers, that was chosen by them for the most dubious of reasons… but as we know, things in this world happen for a reason, and never a particularly good reason. The imperative to realize that ideal overrides all excuses that doing this is "productive" or "useful" or morally good by the laws of the world. The only thought on the managers line, reduced to a simple algorithm, is to seek in every imminent moment the maximal torture of the lowest class, or to seek over an arbitrary people of time, up to the limits of time itself, the optimal maximum of torture units, however those are measured, so that the ancient rite and ritual of their race is completed. The manager has no other function, and for productive purposes the managerial task would be eliminated. But, if the true product is torture for torture's sake, that creates the impulse that drives whatever slavery or humiliation is in effect, and in that way, the "mode of production" justifies itself. If productive activity in society were carried out for some motive that answered to the world and its conditions, it would always encounter ulterior motives and potentials contrary to the primordial will, and those who conduct labor would have to question what they are doing at any time, or if they could do something else with their life. They would, if they follow through the hitherto known arrangement, disavow the firm and the "holy contract" and all other oaths of bondage that have only existed for the maximization of torture and maintenance of a grossly unequal society. They would terminate unilaterally, permanently, and irrevocably, any sense of "us" between workers and masters. In its place, humans would only assemble for tasks at the uttermost end of need, and because history has judged that humans cannot coexist without returning to their ancient rites of ritual sacrifice, such cooperation would be avoided if the alternative of solitary existence could be maintained. It would be found that for most things, solitary existence is always more efficient, for it reduces drastically the cost of security against that most terrible threat we have ever known—other humans. Where there would be cooperative activity, there would be no ambiguity, no insinuation, and the barriers of a language unfit for purpose and poor pedagogy would be forbidden. Taken further, the necessary changes to mitigate the obvious ritual sacrifice that humanism entailed would mean the effective end of "humanity" in any sense we have known it. The language itself would be stripped down to some essential units to maintain the peace, and the ritual of using linguistic judgment to conduct the ritual sacrifice—the mockery and humiliation of stutterers, the barking of contradictory orders, and every Masonic trick that damns this filth race—would have to be terminated. There would be no more words between us, as it should be. We would then judge that it is probably unlikely that humans can be much different than the faculties of their body indicate, and the aims of all human labor afterwards would be greatly diminished. There would be nothing to do, and this would be good. Perhaps there would be recognition of some natural disaster that requires significant work, but once whatever settlements we build are secure against floods, earthquakes, and so on, there would be no need for the insurance protection rackets, and such rackets would be declared criminal and punishable by death for the sake of the peace. These "extremist" solutions are the only solutions. The only difference in modernity is that the necessity of those solutions became apparent, whereas in the past, it was possible in some small way to realize those goals by doing as much as possible to remove oneself from "humanism"; by maintaining some private life, a world apart from "justice" and the lies of humanism and this filthy race.

This uppermost level of management is mistakenly believed to mean the interest of the state or the body of officers that claim a monopoly on regulation and force regarding the situation. All systems of a "mode of production" are planned economies by some Law that is necessarily understood to operate over a domain where the agents must comply with that law for the "mode of production" to be in force. The feudal plan relies on peasants being tied to the land and their obligations to lords, and the capitalist plan relies on the agents of society behaving as rational capitalist agents and only rational capitalist agents. Someone could behave rationally in accord with any system, or behave irrationally while following the imperatives of the dominant capitalist system. In the former case, the obvious interests of the agents against the ruling system would make clear that the ruled could easily shirk the interests of the state and its interested parties and lose nothing whatsoever. In the latter, the system itself degrades into a morass of impulses rather than the ostensible relations that have to be understood by the parties involved sufficiently for those relations to be maintained. If agents are presumed irrational or retarded, whatever system is proclaimed degenerates into its true for, which is torture for torture's sake. That has been the true imperative of the human race and what all such "systems" have truly meant for us. But, if rational agents integrated with the prevailing Law do follow the imperatives, that system creates conditions that must result from it. Nothing obligates rational agents to "believe in the system" in such a way that any reform or change is forbidden. It is trivial to see in capitalism the interests of the malcontents and the failure of the state on its own terms. The latter had been observed from the outset; that if the state and its officers did not govern wisely and account for a world that they did not dictate from on high, that state would be autistic and turn inward. It would become irrational at best, and at worst, controlled insanity would be the standard of sanity and Reason for the Empire. In all cases, the state is the central focal point for every system and every slavery. Every state in human history has placed slavery as its central cause and reason for existence, in one form or another. The free society understands acutely the perilous position of freedom in the genuine sense, and its political writers describe extensively every type of slavery that may imperil that freedom for those who hold that most precious of conditions, and specifically deny to the unfree an equal protection of freedom for their person. The unfree may be manumitted formally and granted the rights of a free person, but the unfree are never made essentially free as if that were a natural law. Freedom in a free society is always contingent on that freedom being recognized and realized. The state does not unilaterally grant or revoke that freedom to make it "just so". A free society implies that the ruling institutions protect the genuine condition of freedom; and so, those who would enslave free men privately must be punished, and those who would be placed in some unfree position would be granted the right to address this grievance to the state. If the man who is supposedly free cannot argue legally for his freedom, there never was any freedom, and that fact has been thrown in their faces in our history time and time again. It is not the state's formal declarations or Law or the "state proper" as an institution that is at the center, nor is it the state's essence or the essence of Empire. It is specifically the schemes of aristocracy and its sacred rites that the "systems" must make eternal. Otherwise, all such schemes would devolve into morasses of ulterior motives that cannot be compared. The aims of most people in the society are entirely alien to aristocracy's notion of civic worth. The contingencies of Empire or what is needed to produce something are entirely local rather than general.

Perhaps there can be a general theory of technology, which is the proper basis of rational economic decision-making. That is what political economy suggests must happen for it to be viable; that all of these machinations are pieces of technology and must assimilate technology alien to the system, so that parts that had nothing to do with the scheme are made to comply by the overriding Law of the ruling aristocratic "system" imposed on the world. If the general theory of technology were judged purely on the merits of technology, and the peculiar drives of aristocrats or anything humans do are reduced to simple facts that can be disassembled and accounted for, the only accomplishment of the theory is a balancing of accounts. It does not answer at all the moral reasons why any of this economic activity is undertaken, for those remain local to the agents themselves. It only makes clear how those disparate aims, which remain forever disparate, can be compared. The imperious mind inserts their anvilicious notions of "civic worth" and must constantly teach the controversy, fulfilling political economy's world-historical purpose of pressing a nerve to make reality conform to a bizarre imposition on the world. If not for that, the agents would see that all political economies are doomed on their own terms, and that the underlying motives of human beings—to increase ritual blood sacrifice—can only ever produce the same result. If the economic task were a matter of managing all of the objective criteria, the only barrier to understanding this is the forced ignorance that is part of the game humans play. All of the psychological motives ultimately are irrelevant, since the agents themselves would be aware of all of those motives, see the trap that was made for them, and reject all imperious assertions now and forever. Done correctly, no one would need to tolerate for a moment obvious transgressors who wish torture for torture's sake, nor would such transgressors be able to do nearly as much as they have done. It is a simple fact that there was nothing "in" humans to prevent this outcome, and so "natural law" was asserted to reach our present tragedy, which is now wholly impossible to stop. The present condition can only allow the victory of aristocracy, for all other outcomes are "retarded" and inadmissible, self-evidently against the moral right of conquest that was imperiously asserted. The members of the present society can reject the whole aristocratic conceit, but only do so for some world apart. The Empire was the vehicle, the State is the facade or the excuse, but the true culprit remain aristocracy alone, which becomes the only class invested in "class consciousness" or the conceit that the aristocracy's role is universal and inescapable. For every other class, social class is an altogether unwelcome condition, and the interests of members of a class are inherently disunited, for the class is at the mercy of the aristocratic cajolers and instigators. If all of the other classes wanted this to change, every class that is markedly excluded from the aristocratic club and the favored associations that elevate that club would proclaim one slogan: They die, or we die. It's that simple. And so, the final piece of political economy was for the fascists, the agentur and filth that have always clamored to supplicate to aristocracy and faggotry, to claim a monopoly on that slogan, so that all collaboration of people is mediated by the fascist institutions, the fascist mind virus, and the thrill of torture for the aristocracy and its fellow travelers is maximized. The result is that the fascist recasts society as a wholly abstract piece of technology of some sort or another. The Germans and English chose race and biological excuses. The Italian Fascist, a more primeval form of the creed, fetishized the state and action, with more than half awareness that the fascist project was a social engineering project given to them by the last remaining Empire on this earth. Only with this invention is the circle complete, and the last task of the human race, which we have lived under for the past century and will never escape, is carried out. Whatever the pretenses the fascist uses, the only real thing of substance for it to "return" to is the biological nation and the crass biological reality of human existence; and so, race or some collectivity based on the Form of the agents involved is the final word on the human race, and its fate is clear: Failed race.

No viable "system" of political economy could exist without a general theory of technology in its core. Whatever the schemes may insinuate is valuable and whatever word games they play, the only way any of their schemes can hold consistent value is what they can do working through technology, or what the schemes do as technology in their own right. If there is ideology, it is a machine like any other than can be disassembled and placed in the real world. The technology of the master is the state institutions and its adjacent institutions that accomplish the bidding of the state's holders. The army appears superficially as a state institution but exceeds the formal state offices by the nature of war. The latter institutions are those like the mafias or criminal syndicates that have always been in the employ of aristocracy and readily called upon to instigate social change for the state. Every system of political economy exists to ratify and naturalize the acts of piracy states and those who hold them did to claim the wealth of their hoard, and the torture those men promoted to ensure human suffering and toil fed their operation labor. Torture itself is, for the ruling interest, "free money", the first and necessary instance of the holders of the state voting themselves free money and certainly not the last; but torture must be realized rather than assumed, and this becomes the basis for value for a certain type of person. Everyone else will be made to abide the interests of a few who impose this torture on the world, for no good reason other than the assertion that the torturer can. The promise of future torture is what backs the Empire for this interest, while everyone else has to contend with the uncertainties of technology or labor or the miserly existence of property. "Exploitation" is a kinder word to describe this as a passive process, but all of the exploitation that can be summoned will not make water flow faster or anything move faster. Either the volition was intrinsic to the articles consumed as fuel, or the volition was measured in some unit of torturing another person psychologically and then this torture is translated into some appreciable physical unit of energy, like the joules extracted from whipping a slave. To everyone else, the act of whipping the slave is useless, but for the torturer, whipping the slave is the point and all other activity is subordinated to the continuation of the slave power for its own sake.

The expenses of this commonwealth then are measured out and exist to maintain the regime of torture, however benign or malevolent it may be. That is the legitimate function of the state and institutions that care about political economy, rather than the productive task itself which is delegated to the struggling. Whatever the "system", the state only promotes managerialism when the managers can be installed and made permanent so that their function of pressing the nerve of those who work is naturalized. In capitalism, the state feigns ignorance of the suffering, declaring it "out of sight, out of mind" while tacitly approving of every managerial creep and every scheme of the contractors to scam some more money. In socialism, the state feigns ignorance of the nature of suffering, insisting it must be something else. This would not apply if those who held the state, whatever its nature, cared one iota about the genuine condition of people in society, or cared about a product beyond the continuation of the slave power itself. But, not one "system" provides an answer nor can it provide an answer. The description of any "mode of production" only describes how those units of suffering and misery are extracted, and after the fact makes an excuse that this consolidates "capital", "social wealth", or some other valuable property that can be hoarded by the officers and clamored for by the petty-managers. The functions of the commonwealth that follows religiously any such system are thus calculated to work against the interest of the ruled invariably, and in favor of the most gross inequality invariably so that regular order may be maintained. This continuation of regular order and the slave power is declared to be "justice", and there can be no other once its shibboleths are accepted. Even if this were carried out in the most benign manner possible, with full consciousness of the consequences of excessive torture and suffering, the state's business in this regard cannot escape this purview. The state offers nothing whatsoever for "the good" or the prosperity of the ruled. It only demands abasement of the subjects to the edicts of the officers, who in turn must abase themselves to an ever-expanding array of institutions that become "the Greater State", or "the System" in the sense that would be invoked by 20th century technocratic regimes. If the goal was to mitigate the excesses of any system, the only starting point would be to view a political-economic system with the utmost contempt, and then ask a simple question: "why must we die?" Such a question though violates "once retarded, always retarded" and the other shibboleths I have described at length already. Those questions will forever remain contemptuous towards the excuses of whatever system or theory that has been established. Even a bald faced admission that the object of torture is torture and the object of power is power would not change our contempt for such a stupid and pointless endeavor. There is, somewhere, a genuine condition of human beings that can be measured, and a historical account of the conduct of these officers and the status of their foolhardy programs. The questions against the system will never arrive at a "better system" or a technological fix that obviates the need of someone to verify for themselves that suffering has indeed been reduced, or that humanity has finally, mercifully broken the Satanic Cycle of their race's hitherto known existence. The questions do, however, allow us to assess honestly what a "mode of production" is, how it differs from past variants of slavery, and how it has remained the same from the first ritual sacrifice to now—and, presumably, how it will always be until humanism altogether has been negated and there are no more humans to suffer. These questions are evident from the moment free trade begins as a set of policies, and the state of the commonwealth can easily ask these questions themselves. Their continued security and the viability of their project should have made clear the necessity of these questions, but the holders of the state are under no obligation to do anything but chant like the retarded Satanic apes that they are and that they have consigned this sad race to being.

Chief among the expectations of such a commonwealth is that its subjects must be educated to think any of this arrangement is a tolerable situation, or "the way things are". The true way things are is that every system that can be proposed is an onerous intrusion on what the ruled wanted out of any part of this existence, unless they are sadists in which case their aims are self-evident and need not be described further. In the past, the education of the broad masses was not just ignored, but actively destroyed since it would violate the clear injunction to keep the orders of humanity separate and the nations of humanity at odds with each other, lest they violate the oaths of fealty and slavery their superstition demanded. The education of a capitalist republic is not significantly different in its aims of maintaining ignorance. A small effort is made to teach the ruled that there is a world beyond the parcel of land they are confined to, but as much as possible, the broad masses are either told that the world is something far away and terrible yet imminently against them, or they are instructed to become rootless creatures with no home and no space to call their own. The latter become the Company's pirates and rats. The former at first are just like chattel slaves, until ecology is invented and their bondage to the land is not merely as livestock but as mutilated entities nerve-stapled into submission to the Beast. Even when the state appears to strip away educational resources and scholarships, the Sodomite state of the neoliberals is very actively aware of the need to control education and impose forced ignorance. The more enlightened leaders of some political-economic order may see that wisdom rather than ignorance would produce greater stability for the system, but it is always the system's stability rather than the good of the students or the society that is upheld by education. If the political-economic ordering were one that placed distrust of political economies altogether at the center of its program, such an education would turn on itself and fail to reproduce itself beyond the revolutionary generation that lived through the transformation. If, however, the education was one that preached and taught righteous hatred for what has been done to the world and the people in it, there may yet be some way to reconcile this education with a proper preparation for the world we live in. The educational regime itself would have to be questioned, but this has always been inherent to every educational approach we have known. Someone who is a student has to ask if this system presented to them is the best of all systems, or if the pedagogy is not itself a contributor to their woes and ignorance. The state, for its part, will be no more effective at creating the good than its intervention into the productive process has been. The greater work of the good, if such a goal is desired, is found in genuine moral philosophy and acting on that learning, and such a thing can never be taken for granted or given more power than it actually possesses. Which class, and which people, are the people who truly wanted this situation to be different? It is always the lowest class, who are as a rule denied entry into education. This rule is not a political-economic shibboleth, but a shibboleth of education itself and the rites of the human race. What education cannot negate is that all of us exist in the world, even if our existence is damned due to the relations of humans to other humans. And so, every successful education regarding this matter must start from the premise that humans are evil, which is the only correct interpretation of the known facts. We may confirm this, but we never doubt it for too long, for history has passed judgment and made the outcome apparent to anyone who asks the question honestly. So too are the "systems", whatever their pretenses, some sort of evil. If there is any good, the good views the evil with utmost contempt, but it is never forced into ignorance about the evil. The good on its own terms has nothing to do with the evil, but the systems of pedagogy handed down by the torture-happy state and its officers are certainly evil and cannot be seen as anything else. We will have returned to where humanity started, where a religious study of the evil is the surest way to comprehend the evil, with the rational and scientific study of nature being secondary proof. The political-economic orderings are always, in some way, religious treatments of the situation, and cannot be conflated with "pure science" or a belief that metaphysics can be abolished or that truth can be imperiously declared by the stupidest fucks who ever insisted we had to agree with them.