Studying money is very hard. I’ve looked at a few different attempts to define it and I have skimmed through Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money. His answer to the question implied in the book’s title is complex and I don’t grasp it well enough yet to explain it. One thing I do understand, however, is that he believes that the value of money is primarily determined by society. I agree with this wholeheartedly. But as far as the social mechanics of this interaction, I don’t know that I will find the answer laid out in Ingham’s work. I might find it elsewhere, or I might have skipped over it and I’ll find it when I make another pass through the work.
I say that by way of introducing this blog’s topic, which is finding (or creating) a distinction between monopoly, province, and fief as subdivisions of a state. What I’m interested in is how money works as part of the state-society’s machinery of coercion. To understand that better, I wanted to understand how the economy is broken up from the sense of power relations. The decision to subdivide territory and establish regional administrations, and the type of regional administrations established, are all questions that are deeply tied in with the economy, even though they are not classically economic concerns.
One of the secret keys to my political thinking is that the sum of all value in a sovereign state is 1, and this 1 is subdivided and distributed among the people within the state-society. This means that power-value-cogency is a zero-sum game. Even though the number of dollars available to capital seems to go up indefinitely, this doesn’t truly increase the value available to those within the state.
If I’m honest with myself, I should rewrite this intro and possibly even the exposition at the end, but I want to try to keep up my posting my momentum. It’s not that anything I’ve said is wrong, it’s that I’m quite aware that it’s not originally what I intended to say but I can’t remember exactly what that was. It was something like what I’ve said here (and later) but that’s not it exactly. I wrote the middle parts first, then the exposition, and this intro last; I usually write top to bottom but, ironically, I didn’t want to lose any of the middle details (job done, for what it’s worth).
So if this feels quite disjointed, that’s why. I could not post this but I don’t mind rambling on my own blog and, more importantly, I’m almost 100% sure that I will refer back to this at some point. I think this distinction is useful. I just feel like I had a slam dunk of an elaboration when I came up with the topic and I know I haven’t nailed it. So it goes.
Monopoly
In this conversation, “monopoly” refers to the unitary or single-pointed control of an aspect of society and/or economy. I think people in the 2020s are likely to see monopoly in purely capitalistic terms; as an American, I’m familiar with the trusts of the early 1900s and the effort to break them up, and as a person in his 30s I remember the federal threats to break up Microsoft in the 1990s. The ideal example for me, however, is found in the Elizabethan Era in England. Here we see monopolies established by royal (i.e. sovereign) decree and act, giving groups such as guilds the full right to exploit some trade. Local monopolies in wool cloth and trading monopolies for specific regions, such as the Baltic or India, became the basis for the accumulation of great wealth (or at least a steady profit) on behalf of those who had monopolies conferred on them.
The control given to the monopolist (holder of the monopoly) is very considerable but also quite limited. First, the control it establishes is rarely over people directly; a monopolist guild can, for instance, mandate that people join it in order to engage in its trade, but it cannot hear or settle general disputes, it can’t change a person’s overall legal status, and so on. Second, the power of a monopolist is never legal power, which means that monopolists are fully subject to the legal system rather than being actors in it.
One point that I think is important is that despite the ideology of capitalism and “private enterprise”, all monopolies should be thought of as government or government-granted monopolies. That is to say, even in a situation where one business outcompetes all its rivals and “organically” establishes a monopoly, we have to consider this monopoly as government-granted on the basis that the government could at any time destroy that monopoly. It’s only with at least the tolerance of the government that any single control over a part of the society can continue (assuming, of course, that we are still in a functioning state-society). Microsoft provides a good example here, with its turmoil through the 90s demonstrating that despite its economic and technological position, it still remained under the legal power of the government.
Province
Unlike the monopolist, the governor of a province does have some legal power. They derive this authority from the fact that they are part of the state government, with powers and privileges which are not only aimed at the management of the province as a unit but at the management of the province as part of the larger state. The archetype of this formation is the generic imperial Roman province (which is an ideal construction in the style of Weber). In this construction, the governor of a province is the high administrator, their main responsibility being to administer the two primary activities of government within their province, these activities being redistribution of resources (including taxation) and the settling of disputes. Importantly, governors are not empowered to make laws or policies even within their regions. They may rule by precedent, but such customs are always superseded by state law and state government policy. Another way to say this is that the government is fully empowered to remove provincial governors at will. While a governor is in place, however, it is understood that they act as an extension and member of the state government.
Fief
As most who have studied medieval Europe even casually in the past few decades are probably tired of hearing, feudalism is a widely-debated topic. I’m not going to help anything. I will make an attempt at defining “fief”, but this will be a definition specific to this context; how useful it will be outside is something I’m not going to guess at. One of the problems that I see with the study of feudalism and medieval Europe is the lack of specificity around the idea of a “fief”. In The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor, he lays out how the term shifted from benefice to fief, how vassalage and fief-holding were not always thought of as the same (and never completely, as there were always landless vassals/nobles), and how the extent of vassal autonomy varied widely across feudal contexts. For that reason, I’m going to adopt a specific definition which will not be able to hold for the entire European feudal period, and which was perhaps achieved only for a few centuries, but which should fit into the continuity of the study of feudalism well enough.
A fief for me is a grant given by a sovereign to a vassal which transfers nearly all powers of sovereignty to that vassal. The lord of a fief (or fief-holder) is not only responsible for the primary activities engaged in by the governor but also for the secondary internal functions of the state within their fief, these being the judicial function, the enforcement function, and the resource distribution function. Cantor calls lordship “the indispensable element in feudalism” and this seems correct to me. I would even say that feudalism is a social system of delegated and divided lordship. Whereas in the Roman Empire there was but one lord, the emperor, who ruled through governors, feudal Europe was flush with lords who organized themselves through bounds of allegiance and fealty.
Seen in this light, the United States is as feudal as Tudor England, with each separate state being ruled like a country except when explicitly overruled, and even then often with the ability to resist and demand concessions. And while a province is unquestionably under the state government, justified entirely by the government’s appointment, lords of fiefs come to acquire their own legitimacy via this continued autonomy. In the US, this state of affairs is baked in: every US governor (the title used for their state leaders, not “provincial governor” as above) is chosen by a separate popular election, they aren’t appointees of any federal body.
Another important point comes out of this construction of a fief as a sub-state. The subjects of a fief are to some degree no longer subjects of the over-state, due to the fact that quasi-sovereign power has been granted to the lord. Therefore, if the sovereign wants to manage the subjects within a vassal’s fief, they instead look to the vassal to levy their demands. For this reason, most medieval taxation and quasi-taxation (such as the scutage or land taxes) was aimed at the lords, and the lords would then levy resources from their subjects in order to meet those demands.
Exposition
I wanted to investigate the split between these concepts because I am trying to iron out my thoughts on how money works as a coercive force. I understand money as a coercive force but justifying this belief is what has proven difficult. I’m starting to work on a concept of financialized and non-financialized economy, and the way that power is devolved seems to be an important piece in this puzzle.
The idea of financialized and non-financialized economy is pretty simple. First we start with the economy, which is the total of all activity that has to do with resources and benefit-value. The non-financialized economy is not determined by the presence of money, while the financialized economy is determined by that presence. An example of a non-financialized economy is the household. In nearly all cases, activity, maintenance, and life within a household is not governed by exchange relationships but by gift and debt. People aren’t expected to receive wages from family members for doing chores or for planning a surprise, and they aren’t expected to pay up at each meal. The financialized economy surrounds households, especially under capitalism, but that does not mean that the household is usually a non-financialized space.
In a financialized space, money is the most obvious driver of behavior: I give you money, you give me my food (or whatever). In a non-financialized space, there is no currency available; everything is based on relationships and desires. In my view, the economy is naturally non-financialized, and over time it has become more and more financialized until now, with capitalism, nearly every space outside the household is financialized, and the household itself has likely not been financialized yet for two reasons: 1, it would be logistically challenging to force a breakdown of intra-family relations such that a mother would demand to be paid back for making their kid’s dinner; and 2, the nuclear family household as a unit is the basic assumption of our current economy, and its preservation is seen as tied to the continuation of this system.
The economy of a society can be viewed as a circle which is the non-financialized economy. As more things become financialized, another circle moves overtop the first one, covering over more and more of the first circle’s area; this second circle is the financialized economy, and this movement represents the rise of capitalism.
Having said that, I don’t believe that households are or were the only form of non-financialized space. Plus, the fact that the non-financialized space precedes the financialized does suggest something: that non-financialized coercion supersedes financialized coercion. In other words, money is superseded by some power in the non-financialized economy. There is an idea I could go into here called “death-coercion”, but I don’t want to go too far off track yet.
I wrote about these three forms of subordinate order – monopolies, provinces, and fiefs – as a way to investigate where and how power is being exercised in these political systems. Of particular interest to me was the extent to which a fief-holder could be considered a sovereign. While this is not a conclusion, my current belief is that fief-holders cannot be sovereigns (i.e., the dukes of Burgundy for instance were not also sovereigns despite whatever power they may have had; when the king of England held part of France, he was sovereign in England but not sovereign with regards to his French lands). The categorical reason for this is that fief-holders do not perform the external primary function of a state.
I’ve talked about functions and abilities some, so I will close out with a short intro. These are ideas that I am still working on and are very subject to change, but I lay them out both for discussion and to help make sense of the descriptions above. While I have developed this idea somewhat since the writing, I encourage you to check out The Theory of the General Crisis to understand what I mean when I call something a state. In brief, a state is a group composed of a sovereign and constituents and which we can assume has the collective goal of the state’s continued existence. Most (if not all) states throughout history and in the current day also control a population of non-state peoples called subjects. Including the subjects makes the state into the state-society. But the state is self-interested and is not interested in the subjects except to the extent to which it can exploit and control them.
Each government has two primary functions: the internal function, which is to mediate issues within the state; and the external function, which is to represent the state to outside entities. The internal function has three secondary functions: the judicial function, the enforcement function, and the resource distribution function; there are also two tertiary internal functions, the legislative function (part of judicial) and the finance function (part of resource distribution). From the external primary function there are two secondary functions: the diplomatic function and the military function. All of these functions must be present and operating properly for the government to be considered in working order.
This is the reason that fief-holders are not considered sovereigns: they leave their foreign policy (as it were) to the real sovereign. If the sovereign declares war, the best that an unsympathetic fief-holder can do is avoid service (or rebel, but this was not as common).