Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

320 DEBT
It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements
that essentially force us to think this way. The structure of
the corporation is a telling case in point-and it is no coincidence that
the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English
and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same
combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors.
It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives
but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue--and regularly
do--that, if it were their own money, of course they would not
fire lifelong employees a week before retirement, or dump carcinogenic
waste next to schools. Yet they are morally bound to ignore such considerations,
because they are mere employees whose only responsibility
is to provide the maximum return on investment for the company's
stockholders. (The stockholders, of course, are not given any say.)
The figure of Cortes is instructive for another reason. We are
speaking of a man who, in 1521, had conquered a kingdom and was
sitting atop a vast pile of gold. Neither did he have any intention of
giving it away-even to his followers. Five years later, he was claiming
to be a penniless debtor. How was this possible
The obvious answer would be: Cortes was not a king, he was a
subject of the King of Spain, living within the legal structure of a kingdom
that insisted that, if he were not good at managing his money,
he would lose it. Yet as we've seen, the king's laws could be ignored
in other cases. What's more, even kings were not entirely free agents.
Charles V was continually in debt, and when his son Philip 11-his
armies fighting on three different fronts ar once--attempted the old
Medieval trick of defaulting, all his creditors, from the Genoese Bank
of St. George to the German Fuggers and Welsers, closed ranks to
insist that he would receive no further loans until he started honoring
his commitments.24
Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that
can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political power
to help one use one's money to make more money. Cortes was trying
to do exactly that: in classical Axial Age fashion, he was attempting
to use his conquests to acquire plunder, and slaves to work the mines,
with which he could pay his soldiers and suppliers cash to embark on
even further conquests. It was a tried-and-true formula. But for all the
other conquistadors, it provided a spectacular failure.
This would seem to mark the difference. In the Axial Age, money
was a tool of empire. It might have been convenient for rulers to promulgate
markets in which everyone would treat money as an end in
itself; at times, rulers might have even come to see the whole apparatus