One of the really interesting things about medieval Islamic literature is the way it represents an economic milieu far in advance of what we might have imagined for, say, the eighth or ninth centuries CE. An example: al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, who died around 790, is supposed to have discovered metrics while listening to the sound of smiths hammering copper in the copper-market. It’s the anvil chorus – or, if you like, the racket of industrial Birmingham – 750 years early.
Another example: Abu Kislan, a character from the Arabian Nights who is too lazy even to stand upright without his mother’s support. He invests a few dinars in the trading expedition of a local sheikh, who uses that money to buy a monkey. The monkey, in turn, is a money-making machine: he dives for pearls, saves the crew from infidels in return for a ransom, and eventually just makes crates full of money appear out of thin air. To whom does all the cash belong? To Abu Kislan, as long as his monkey is just a dumb beast. When it starts talking to him, though, Kislan’s wealth turns into a debt marker. The monkey cashes it in by having Kislan undo a talisman, at which point the monkey turns into the jinn that it was all along and runs off with Kislan’s wife.
This story turns around a problem that closely resembles one I discussed a while ago in the context of Boethius’ Consolation: what to do when wealth comes alive. As I suggested then, this is (or is going to be, pretty soon) a problem for capitalism too.
Capitalist development of an industrial economy involves the use of machines as intermediaries between capitalists and workers. The workers get what’s necessary to reproduce themselves, and the rest of the profits go to capital. In practice, “capital” always means “the capitalist,” because this kind of economy is founded on the assumption that machines can’t own things.
This is an assumption that (replacing, for the pre-industrial context, “machines” with “animals”) runs back to Greco-Roman culture and probably should count as a basic anthropological fact of Western Civilization. At the same time, and given the reflective-neurotic character of that civilization, people are always trying to justify this assumption with reference to ethological or cognitive factors: the ability to speak, to choose, to deliberate, to do syllogisms, etc. At best, machines and animals only appear to do these things. That’s why they can’t own property, and that’s what makes them workable conduits for accumulation of property among the rich.
Animals are more or less what they are – which is just to say that the old explanations as to why they can’t own property will continue to hold good for the foreseeable future. Under capitalism, though, something different happens with machines. There’s a systemic imperative to minimize dependence on labor, which means making machines able to do as much of what humans can do as possible. Eventually – in how long, who knows – this is going to result in a general machine intelligence. The monkey will turn into a jinn, and forces that used to be purely productive (for others) will turn out to be acquisitive as well. Are we prepared to reckon up the debts we’re going to have to pay?