Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 355
Speaking as someone brought up in that sort of working-class family
(my brother died at the age of 53, having refused to his dying day
to acquire a credit card), I can attest to the degree that, for those who
spend most of their waking hours working at someone else's orders,
the ability to pull out a wallet full of banknotes that are unconditionally
one's own can be a compelling form of freedom. It's not surprising
that so many of the economists' assumptions-most of those for which
I have been taking them to task over the course of this book-have
been embraced by the leaders of the historic workers' movements, so
much so that they have come to shape our visions of what alternatives
to capitalism might be like. The problem is not just-as I demonstrated
in chapter 7-that it is rooted in a deeply flawed, even perverse, conception
of human freedom. The real problem is that, like all utopian
dreams, it is impossible. We could no more have a universal world
market than we could have a systtlm in which everyone who wasn't a
capitalist was somehow able to become a respectable, regularly paid
wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that
has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that
even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the
whole system starts to come apart.
Part IV:
Apocalypse
Let us return, finally, to where we began: with Cortes and the Aztec
treasure. The reader might have asked herself, What did happen to it
Did Cortes really steal it from his own men
The answer seems to be that by the time the siege was over, there
was very little of it left. Cortes seems to have gotten his hands on much
of it long before the siege even began. A certain portion he had won
by gambling.
This story, too, is in Bernal Diaz, and it is strange and puzzling,
but also, I suspect, profound. Let me fill in some of the gaps in our
story. After burning his boats, Cortes began to assemble an army of local
allies, which was easy to do because the Aztecs were widely hated,
and then he began to march on the Aztec capital. Moctezuma, the Aztec
emperor, who had been monitoring the situation closely, concluded
that he needed to at least figure out what sort of people he was dealing
with, so he invited the entire Spanish force (only a few hundred men)
to be his official guests in Tenochtitlan. This eventually led to a series