请将“There is here a significant continuity between the Owenites and the old advocates of “civic or Machiavellian moralism,” like William Godwin, who wags his finger at the commercial producer for studying “the passions of his customers, not to correct but to pamper them.”52 Thus, William Thompson wrote that, “consequent on the over-anxious pursuit of wealth, are the servility and corruption to which excessive wealth gives rise throughout the community in which it exists.”53 Similar sentiments could be found in all of Owen’s premier followers.54 Hence, John Gray has this to say on the subject of “Shopkeepers and Tradesmen retailing goods”:

Certain it is, that these men are not unproductive, for never, upon the face of the earth, was there any thing half so productive of deception and falsehood, folly and extravagance, slavery of the corporeal, and prostitution of the intellectual faculties of man, as the present system of retail trade. In these particulars certainly, tradesmen are productive enough.55

Nor was Owen averse to using a similar rhetoric of civic moralism. The same man who never tired of proclaiming his necessitarian doctrine that “the character of man is formed for him, and not by him,” could also characterize his detractors thus:

Vociferators for freedom while subjected to the lowest mental slavery—chained to the earth by the most violent and injurious passions—bound hand and foot by the worst habits and most degrading ignorance—and existing amidst intellectual and physical wretchedness, cry out to their deliverers not to touch their bonds, and beseech them to leave them in possession of all the liberty they enjoy! Mistaken hapless beings! They must not, they shall not, be left thus! Their deliverance is near at hand, and they shall enjoy true liberty, both of body and mind.56

It would not be hard to read into these condemnations of servility, prostitution, and mental slavery an aristocratic contempt for the akrasia of the modern denizens of the market. Indeed, one could read the Owenite movement’s many failures to establish working cooperative communities and labor exchanges as the tale of an akratic at odds with itself. Owen would be the higher self of the movement, possessed of a rational grasp of the good, but incapable of controlling the movement’s lower self, the thousands who signed on to move to New Harmony or Orbiston, or who set up shop in a labor bazaar. These members, each actuated by his or her own desires, pushed the movement this way and that and frustrated everyone’s stated desire to establish a new moral world. All that was lacking, as Gray said, was “the will of the people.”57

Nonetheless, this aristocratic reading would have to set aside a crucial element of the Owenite analysis.58 For, as Gray also says, “as society is now constituted, man is trained to be anything but a rational creature,” for, “as all exist in bondage, each in his brother sees a fellow slave, and cries, alas! ‘it is the lot of man.’”59 The difficulty is that the members of commercial society cannot see what is being done to them. We are not slavish by nature but have been rendered so by our position in society, whereby we are subject to powers we cannot check or oversee. The “occupations” of everyone dependent upon the market “are perfect slavery,” for “their minds are in a state of continual anxiety”; they are so “tortured by fears” of losing to their competitors or their debtors that “every effort of body and mind must be exclusively devoted to the laudable, admirable, and glorious pursuit of getting money.”60 There is something compulsory about the monetary system, according to the Owenites, and this compulsion explains the corruption and servility we find all around us. It is this system, and its operations, that came to occupy more and more of the Owenites’ attention, for they sought to explain how the opaque and mysterious workings of the monetary system could subjugate the multitude, and how this subjugation could explain the mass slavishness of modern society.


The Money Mystery

Scholars of Marx often presume that his frequent recourse to the language of “mysteries” and “secrets” is a stylistic peculiarity, however significant.61 Whatever this language may reveal about Marx, however, it is far from unprecedented. Precisely in the arena in which Marx most famously tried to lay bare the mysteries of the social world—the arena of exchange and money—many had come before, seeking to do the same. For instance, in 1818, William Cobbett had inveighed in his Political Register against the Bank of England as the “great tool of tyrants” and “a sort of partner with them in cruelty and plunder.” He continued:

This thing was . . . a mystery as complete and almost as sacred, as any other of those mysteries, by the means of which artful and impudent knaves have contrived to rob the laboring part of mankind. This paper-money mystery is now laid as bare as were the miracles of the monks, when . . . their pegs, wires and wheels were exposed at Charing Cross.62

Cobbett thought of the bank and its paper money in much the way that Patrick Henry had thought of the “intricate and complicated nature” of the American Constitution, as a thicket in which it was nearly impossible to determine what was really going on. As a potential or actual hiding place for conspiracy, the bank ran counter to the republican concern “that citizens be able to determine where the responsibility for a bad outcome actually lies.”63

Worries about currency manipulation and financial conspiracy were probably as prevalent among Owenites and other early socialists as they had been among older radicals. Thompson, for example, seems to be channeling Cobbett when he argues that, “there is not one of the old expedients of force and fraud practiced on the Industrious Classes, not even the iniquities of human wholesale butchery under the name of wars, that has produced, and is at every moment liable to produce, more extensive misery to those classes, than arbitrary alterations in the currency by the portion of the Idle who form the governing classes.”64 But there is also a shift underway, for the mystery of money is no longer sought only, or even primarily, in central bank machinations, but in the “occult operations” of money itself, as it circulates in society.65 Gray reports that when he arrived as a young man in bustling, commercial London, the city presented itself to him as “a puzzle”; although “some enormous error” seemed to pervade “this moving mass of flesh and blood,” Gray admits that he was “unable to penetrate the unfathomable mystery with which everything seemed to be invested.”66 The puzzle is well articulated by Thompson’s disciple William Pare, who asks, in 1850, “How comes it that the fruits of labor of the industrious, after years of incessant and successful exertion, are mysteriously—and without imputation of fault to them, without any convulsion of nature—swept away?”67 This is the “strange anomaly of human affairs” that exercises not only the Owenites but also Proudhon and many other early socialists.

The facts that seemed, to the Owenites, to reveal the inner workings of this strange anomaly were two: there is a class of people who, by their know-how and hard work, make all of the good things enjoyed as wealth, and there is also a class of people who, by their possession of the medium of exchange, are empowered to buy up and enjoy the vast majority of those good things. It is the misfortune of the former class that they do not possess the medium of exchange, and cannot buy what they need directly with their own products. They are therefore dependent upon selling their products to the money owners. The money owners, for their part, make nothing, but still possess the means of obtaining whatever they want. How do they come to possess these means? Let Bray explain:

The present circulating medium, . . . as the economists confess, is made by a class of capitalists called bankers—some of them acting independently, and others in connection with the established government—and for this medium of exchange, or money, it is acknowledged that the bankers receive commodities of certain parties. These second parties, in turn, exchange the money for other commodities from some third party; and upon the same principle, of giving value for value, the exchange goes on among all succeeding parties. Thus real value is rendered in exchange for real value in every case except the first transaction—that between the banker and the person who receives his medium—and in this first negotiation, according to the showing even of the economists, there is a vile and cunning robbery committed upon the productive classes; . . . Thus the productive classes give to the banking and trading capitalists their labor—their very sweat and blood—and the latter give to them in exchange—what? They give them a shadow—a rag—a “bank-note!”68

This is what Bray means when he says that money is “the secret of the almost omnipotent might of the capitalist.”69 Despite his much more subtle grasp of many subjects, it is also what Thompson means when he calls commercial society an “empire of force and fraud.” The near monopoly of the wealthy over the means of exchange is a self-perpetuating engine of unequal exchanges. The bargaining power it gives to the wealthy ensures that the poor producers are never able to exact a fair price for their products, leaving them in the same penury and need of purchasers as before.
”翻译为中文