Recently, I was revisiting Fichte’s The Closed Commercial State in hopes of obtaining any other information that I might have overlooked when I read it for the first time from a while back. In a post I wrote from a year or two ago, I felt that I could not have been the first person to have conceptualized something like the Work-Standard. Somebody else from an earlier period in history must have arrived at similar, if not identical, conclusions as I did. Fichte was an interesting figure whose ideas pertaining to the Commercial State parallels those which resonate with the Work-Standard. I can totally see why Spengler in Prussianism and Socialism thought that Fichte should be recognized for his own contributions to the conceptualization of Pure Socialism.
For those who do not know, The Closed Commercial State was Fichte’s best and most influential works. It is a lengthy tome discussing Political Economy with the keen emphases on philosophy and theory. The book is probably best-recognized for the German-speaking world’s articulations of Protectionism and Autarkic trade policies at a time when the State of Total Mobilization was just beginning to manifest itself at the turn of the 19th century. There is a long section in the book where Fichte was describing a conception of Currency that bears close resemblance to my Work-Standard. Where I differ is that I articulate that conception of Currency into something tangible for contemporary conditions, arriving at comparable conclusions in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Today, Closed Commercial State and Fichte himself are obscure and not well-known, even in the German-speaking world. It is a shame because many of his ideas were later implemented in one form or another from the 20th century onwards. It is only now that it is starting to get what it little attention it deserves outside the German-speaking world.
There was an “Interpretative Essay” I came across earlier this week. Due to a number of interruptions to my schedule, I was never able to work on the Blog until today. I say this as the subject of today’s post pertains to an in-depth discussion that someone did on Closed Commercial State not too long ago. Entitled “Fichte’s Monetary History,” the author repeatedly insists that World History, according to Fichte, is monetary in nature. They described Fichte as having a Socratic legacy, which is to say that their obscurity was the result of not being well-understood at the time of his writing, which was the late 18th and early 19th centuries. One cannot understand Fichte’s other works without grasping the significance of Closed Commercial State as his magnum opus of sorts.
In an understanding of World History where everything revolves around Geld, “Economics” cannot be reduced to the question of distributing or redistributing scarce resources across vast swaths of any general population. That has been the mainstream understanding of economic life from Neoclassical Economics. For Fichte, World History unfolds at an intersection where Geld and Economics are so closely intertwined that one is eventually forced to entertain either Arbeit and Geld or Kapital and Schuld.
The former entails not only controlling the means of production but also living under the same limitations which govern the means of production. A Totality develops an attachment to the land, a desire to conserve resources, protect the environment, and the promotion of Solidarity as a genuine way of life and not mere rhetoric. The latter by contrast rejects this belief in favor of a constant race-to-the-bottom for ever-growing Quantities of Kapital, beginning with the rise of Market Economies and Fractional-Reserve Banking System and later culminating in the ratifications of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It matters very little whether the Kapital happens to be Gold and Silver, banknotes and coins or Cryptocurrencies and Commodities, the same mentality remains constant within Neoliberalism.
The concepts of the “Exchange-Value” and “Use-Value” are rejected by Fichte in Closed Commercial State in favor of an entirely different conceptualization of Values and Prices. Fichte posited that the Value of a given product should be determined based on how much is needed to sustain the production process. Something is guaranteed to fetch more Geld to someone else if it is needed for another production process because sustaining that production process yields more Arbeit, which in turn can be converted into additional Geld. Here, we find the antecedents to the Work-Standard’s “Reciprocal Theory of Value (RTV)” and “Work Theory of Money (WTM).” We also encounter the “Dasein Motive” at play as well.
It was through his own conceptualizations of Values and Prices that Fichte began to articulate his conception of Currency that bears some similarities to the Work-Standard. Of course, the author of the aforementioned essay does not realize this, so I am giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are approaching the subject with an open mind.
Currency as a concept operates on a “specifically temporal character” because of its “signifying function” to facilitate transactional sales of goods and services for Geld. In essence, people have to be made to believe that something like Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, US Dollars, or Euros are valuable. Think about the claims posited by proponents of the Work-Standard’s rivals:
- It has oftentimes been claimed by proponents of the Gold Standard that “Gold and Silver have been valued by various Civilizations for millennia.”
- Proponents of Bitcoin and Ethereum maintain that the Price of Cryptocurrencies can be sustained by their Blockchains, thereby negating the need for Central Bank to control their Value.
- The US Dollar is said to be valuable because developing countries tend to accumulate them to obtain Petroleum and other Commodities.
- The Euro is also said to be valuable as the combined economic strength of the EU/NATO member-states makes Europe more well-off than if it had not adopted the Euro.
What do each of those statements have in common? In Fichte’s view, these opposing conceptions of Currency are perceived as valuable because there are people in the Real World who believe in the validity of their Value, which in turns govern their Price. There are deeply-held “opinions” which compel people to save them for the “future.” This “future” is not guaranteed to be everlasting nor unchangeable, however. Prices of Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, US Dollars and Euros do in fact rise and fall. But when there is no threat to their “futures,” those rivals of the Work-Standard will try to amass economic power for those who wield them. As different versions of Kapital, they will try to commandeer Geld as they would with Technology, displacing Arbeit from its rightful place in economic life.
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