In 1968 American comedian Pat Paulsen ran for president. In one of his best-known campaign speeches he tried to explain different political systems by using a series of glib examples like the ones found in economics textbooks. Paulsen’s examples all started with the same premise: “You have two cows.” What subsequently happened to those two cows quickly revealed the advantages, but mostly the disadvantages, of different political ideologies.
SOCIALISM: You have two cows; you give one to your neighbor.
COMMUNISM: You have two cows; the government takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows; the government takes both and sells you the milk.
NAZISM: You have two cows; the government takes both and shoots you.
NEW DEALISM: You have two cows; the government takes both, shoots one, milks the other and throws part of the milk down the sink.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows; you sell one and buy a bull.
Since the underlying principle of this sketch can be expanded almost arbitrarily, dozens of different versions of Paulsen’s economic cow allegory are now in circulation. These versions may well vary substantially from each other, but they all share the same punch line: only the capitalist is unencumbered by half-baked ideologies and does the obvious. He makes sure that the number of his milk- and value-add-producing cattle increases. By purchasing a mate for the cow, he creates the foundations of what Jeremy Rifkin calls an “imperium of cattle.” Considering all the stupid and cruel things that socialists, communists, and other political fanatics are supposedly doing to their cows, the actions of the capitalist seem soothingly pragmatic, even natural.
It’s hardly surprising that capitalism wins out in this joke. After all, the cow is the capitalist animal par excellence. It’s no accident that in colloquial German the word Kuhhandel (cow trade) describes a type of murky barter in the course of which one party, usually the buyer, is cheated. The cow is ideally suited for such dodgy deals, as it takes a long time to find out how well she really performs. You can take a horse for a sample ride. It’s easy to tell whether a pig is meaty if you give its haunch a good pinch. It’s a lot harder, especially for amateurs, to determine how much milk a cow will yield and whether she’ll be suitable as a draft animal in the long run. In the Brothers Grimm fairytale “Hans in Luck,” the protagonist learns this the hard way when he sells his cow and trades down repeatedly until he is finally without any possessions whatsoever. In this case, the seller is the one who comes to grief for a change:
“Your cow will give you no milk: don’t you see she is an old beast, good for nothing but the slaughter-house? . . . To please you I will change, and give you my fine fat pig for the cow.”
“Heaven reward you for your kindness and self-denial!” said Hans, as he gave the butcher the cow; and taking the pig off the wheel-barrow, drove it away, holding it by the string that was tied to its leg.
The cow is of course worth far more than the puny piglet. But “lucky” Hans, who has no clue about animals or commercial transactions, naively trusts the cunning butcher’s judgment. It would seem that the cattle trade does indeed lend itself to leaving one’s trading partner in the dark about the commodity’s exact value and to making a maximum profit. In other words, cattle trading is the epitome of market-based trading. One could even say that our predominant form of economy would be inconceivable without cows.
Because of their tremendous importance as draft animals and producers of milk, meat, and leather, cows have been synonymous with wealth in large parts of the Western world for thousands of years. If you owned cows, you were considered affluent. If you could afford only one cow, you at least didn’t have to live in fear of starvation. As an old German saying goes, “a cloak and a cow cover up a lot of poverty.” In many European languages, expressions relating to private property and the world of finance are often deeply rooted in the world of cattle trading. The Old High German word feo refers to both “Vieh” (cattle) and “väterliches Gut” (paternal property); the second meaning still exists in today’s English as the word “fee.” The adjective “pecuniary,” as well as the vernacular German “Penunze” (money) are derived from the Latin word for money, pecunia, which in turn goes back to the word for cattle, pecus. Much more frequently used and so fundamental for the market economy, the word “capital” has the same root as the word “cattle”: both are derived from the Latin caput, “head.” In Roman times, someone who could call many heads his own—who, in other words, owned a large number of cows—was, in the original sense of the word, a capitalist.
Although owning many heads of cattle is nowadays by no means equivalent to being rich, the appreciation of the cow as a special asset lives on in our late-capitalist society. In the field of business economics, for example, the expression “cash cow” denotes an established product that yields stable earnings. It sits quietly in the homey company shed, requiring but modest investment, and can therefore be milked with profit. When the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung announced the expansion of its business section at the beginning of 2008, the ad didn’t feature a bull, the traditional symbol for a rising stock market, but a cow. The image of the bronze bull statue seen at all big stock exchanges worldwide had been digitally altered to include an udder, with a milk bucket at the ready underneath. The image seems to suggest that for clever investors the important question is not whether it’s a bull market or whether the shares are rising. What’s crucial is to have enough cash cows. Dairy cows may not be as strong and profitable as bulls, but they are far more predictable.
The cow, however, symbolizes more than stable profits. It also stands for the employees who generate these earnings. In 1998, a popular guide to business management published in the U.S. featured a punctiliously dressed cow in a suit and tie on its cover. The title read, Contended Cows Give Better Milk. The basic message of the book is that managers should treat their employees as well as farmers treat their dairy cattle—and not just for some ridiculous ethical reason but because only then will the employees develop to their full potential. The book spawned a sequel less than ten years later, Contended Cows Moove Faster, a title that implies that happy “human resources” not only produce better-quality work but also work more efficiently. The author didn’t seem to mind that the consistent bovinization of two-legged employees carries unhuman undertones.
The cover of Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden’s book Contented Cows Give Better Milk (1998).
Another reason cows have played such a vital role in the evolution of capitalism is their mobility. Not only were cows extremely valuable, but they also constituted one of the first forms of movable property, a chattel that could be herded from A to B and then offered for barter in many cultures. As a generally known and relatively constant economic entity, cows were used as a point of reference for barter. Otto Schrader writes: “Herd animals, and dairy cows in particular, are the oldest value indicator among Indo-Germanic peoples.” So cows were a predecessor of the concept of currency. They could be used as a means of payment.
According to accounts in Greek mythology, for example, the god Mercury buys the silence of the only witness to his cattle theft, the aged Battus, with “a gleaming heifer.” The practice seems to have been so common in those days that Old Greek had an idiom for it: “A cow has been put onto my tongue,” meaning, more or less, “I’ve been bribed with a cow and so can’t speak freely.”
As Sir Walter Scott relates in his novel Waverley, cows were held as pawn in eighteenth-century Scotland to push claims for outstanding cash settlements:
He that steals a cow from a poor widow, or a stirk from a cottar, is a thief; he that lifts a drove from a Sassenach laird is a gentleman-rover.
Even today, cows serve as a symbolic currency in many African cultures. When South African president Thabo Mbeki failed to make an appearance at the wedding of the king of Lesotho, he was “fined” by the king and promptly paid up: the following spring he presented the king with a magnificent Holstein cow.
In these cases, cows constitute a natural currency, the original form of money per se. What makes natural currencies special is that, unlike shells, coins, banknotes, or credit cards, they have a practical and a symbolic value. As Karl Marx put it, they have a use value as well as an exchange value. In contrast to a thousand-dollar bill, a cow can be milked, slaughtered, and skinned; that’s her use value. However—assuming you live in a society that accepts cows as a currency—you can also use a cow as an intermediate means of barter, a placeholder and symbolic equivalent for another service or commodity; that’s her exchange value.
According to Marx, the exchange value subsequently assumes an increasingly independent existence. It is indeed more powerful than the practical use of the commodity. As a result the commodity takes on a so-called fetish character. It’s no longer judged on whether we really need it, but it appears as a magical object, the graven image of a primitive natural religion. It turns into the proverbial golden calf to whom human sacrifices must be offered if needed. In this case, the purpose of work is no longer to produce use value but, above all, to earn an increase in exchange value—that is, to make a profit.
According to the Roman writer Tacitus, people began turning the natural currency cow into a commodity fetish very early on. In his first-century CE treatise Germania, he gives an account of the barbaric two- and four-legged inhabitants north of the Alps:
It is well provided with live-stock; but the animals are mostly undersized, and even the cattle lack the handsome heads that are their natural glory. It is the mere number of them that the Germans take pride in; for these are the only form of wealth they have and are much prized. Silver and gold have been denied them—whether of divine favor or of divine wrath, I cannot say . . . The natives take less pleasure than most people in possessing and handling these metals.
To the Romans, who used precious metals such as silver and gold as symbolic means of barter, it seemed incomprehensible that the Teutons were so devoted to their cows, seeing as the animals were slight and ugly and didn’t even show the pretty forehead skin pattern that the inhabitants of the Apennine Peninsula valued so much. And yet, the Teutons just couldn’t get enough of them; “mere numbers” made them happy. And considering that cows constitute walking, grazing money (while silver and gold, as Tacitus remarked, played only a minor role in barter north of the Alps), the German forefathers’ way of trading seems, at least from a late-capitalist perspective, quite consistent. Money doesn’t have to be pretty, as long as there is plenty of it.
And if, as is the custom with cows who share a pasture with a bull, it even multiplies automatically—that is, if it generates “interest”—all the better. As interest-bearing capital, the cow reaches, to quote Marx again, its “most fetishist form.” It develops a life of its own in which its practical use value recedes into the background. The cow is now reduced to its function of creating ever more natural currency; it is, as Marx would say, “money which begets money,” or, rather, a cow-bearing cow. And, as such, cows have time and again managed to stimulate the kind of irrational desire that normally only “filthy lucre” can evoke.
Old Battus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, could easily retire with his bribe, the cow that Mercury gave him. But no: owning the cow actually arouses his greed. When Mercury returns shortly after the cattle theft, looking different and disguising his voice in order to put the old man’s silence to the test, Battus immediately divulges the whereabouts of the stolen cattle. After all, the supposed stranger offers to pay him with “a heifer—and a bull” for the confidential information. Battus can’t resist the prospect of a “double bribe,” especially since it may well multiply in the coming years without his doing anything. Unfortunately he is not allowed to enjoy the interest of his betrayal: to punish him for his breach of promise, Mercury turns Battus into stone.
In the novella Die Kuh (The cow) by the German poet Friedrich Hebbel, the greed for cattle also leads to catastrophe. The novella is set in an early-nineteenth-century smallholding. After years of hard work, the miserly but ambitious farmer Andreas, the story’s tragic hero, has finally saved enough money to buy a cow. His wife and the farmhand, Hans, have gone to fetch the animal from the seller and close the deal. The farmer and his three-year-old son await their return in happy anticipation. His dream is about to come true. In just a few moments he will be the proud owner of a cow.
“Can you hear it bellow yet?” He jumped up and rushed to the window. “Not so,” he said returning, “that came from the neighbor’s shed! Well now, tomorrow the reply will come from my own shed! Well, my boy . . . Your father has finally made it, the cow is already on its way! You have to get yourself a horse when you are grown up! You hear me?!”
To while away the waiting time, Andreas smugly looks at the money he has saved up for the purchase of this cow in the light of the tallow lamp, telling himself once more in detail the story of how he has earned it. He seems to be more devoted to the bills on the table in front of him than to his son, who is playing next to him.
When night slowly falls and neither his wife nor his farmhand have arrived with the cow, the farmer steps out to smoke his Sunday pipe in front of the door, leaving his son alone inside together with the burning lamp. A fatal error, as it turns out. The little boy doesn’t yet understand the “true nature” of money. Through childish eyes he judges his father’s bills by their practical value—as fuel for a fun spectacle when lit with the tallow lamp. When the farmer returns to the room, the last bill has just burned up.
In a blind rage, the farmer grasps his little son by the hair and hurls him against the wall, so that he lies “on the floor with his skull cracked and his brains spluttered about.” He then takes the rope with which the cow was meant to be tethered, climbs up into the attic of the house and hangs himself. A few seconds later, his wife and the farmhand finally arrive with the eagerly anticipated cow. They, too, meet their death shortly. The farmer’s wife faints at the sight of her slain son. The farmhand climbs up into the attic with the tallow lamp in his hand, runs into the farmer’s dead body, falls backwards off the ladder, and breaks his neck. The lamp sets the straw on fire, whereupon the whole house, including the unconscious farmer’s wife, burns down until there is nothing left of the family but “shrunken skeletons.” Not even the cow survives the catastrophe. “That much is sure,” Hebbel concludes, “that the cow, following the ill-fated instinct of her kind, ran into the fire and burned to death with the rest of them.”
The destructive consequences of capitalism have hardly ever been described more drastically and, in a narrative sense, “economically” than in this story—the whole tragedy is less than five pages long. The very moment the farmer gets the chance to move up in life and literally become a capitalist—that is, the owner of a head of cattle—catastrophe befalls him. The farmer is so blinded by the prospect of finally becoming his neighbor’s equal through the purchase of such a prestigious and profitable animal that it totally warps his perspective. The life of his son seems, if only for a short-tempered moment, worth less than owning a cow. And when, after his son’s death, he hears the “longed-for bellow” of the animal that he will never own, he decides that his own life too has become worthless. The cow’s mooing “gives him the strength to make a sudden decision”—to commit suicide.
Everything that was meant for the cow has become an instrument of death. The bills for her purchase are the child’s undoing. The rope intended to tether her is coiled around the farmer’s neck. The ladder leading to the straw storage proves fatal for the farmhand. The straw on which the animal was supposed to have lain burns the farmer’s wife to death. And the cow itself, the much desired fetish around which the whole tragedy revolves, destroys itself in the end. Every commodity is dependent on whether there is a market for it. If nobody is left to appreciate its value, it loses, from the market economy point of view, its right to exist.
It’s significant that the flashback to the actual bargain, the negotiations over the price for the fatal cloven-hoofed animal, constitutes one of the few comical moments of this otherwise somber and pessimistic story. When his wife stays away longer than anticipated, it’s not so much the worry that something could have happened to her that bothers the farmer. What he’s concerned about is that the seller of the cow might have made so much money in the bargain that he may have decided to invite his wife to dinner. Moments later, he speculates that his wife may have started haggling over the cow’s price again. The farmer can, however, not fathom that anybody could possibly be a tougher negotiating partner than he himself. “Good luck, but hats off to he who manages to pinch off another penny where I struck a bargain!”
In moments like that, the farmer Andreas resembles less the tragic figure he is at the end of the day but more a character out of a comedy of errors: the miser; the disagreeable penny pincher; the pathological tightwad, who knows he’s obsessed with money but is strangely proud of his obsession. Apart from Hebbel’s story, the cattle trade is not usually the chosen topic of great tragedies but rather the stuff comedies are made from. In the first half of the twentieth century alone, at least half a dozen humorous popular plays and comedies emerged that mentioned cattle trading in the title.
On the one hand, this may have to do with the way that the dogged bargaining for cattle appeals more to the “lower” instincts like greed and deviousness rather than to the noble, heroic emotions that tragedy is traditionally devoted to. On the other hand, the people involved in the cattle trade can hardly be considered tragedy material. According to classic definitions of drama, the protagonists of comedies are more likely to belong to the lower classes, while the heroes of tragedies are members of the highest social strata. A cow is of course completely out of place in such an illustrious milieu. If, however, she happens to stray into that kind of scenario, the effect is inevitably comical.
The English-language version of Kurt Weill and Robert Vambery’s operetta Der Kuhhandel, for example, is entitled A Kingdom for a Cow. The sentence is a play on words from the famous scene in Shakespeare’s dark royal drama Richard iii. The last words of the murderous eponymous hero, who has lost his horse in battle and senses that his own life and kingdom will soon come to an end, are: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” By replacing the noble horse, the animal with which medieval English kings rode into battle, with a mundane peasant cow, the English translators of the Weill operetta hint at the fact that the operetta will turn out to be a lot less woeful and bloody than Shakespeare’s tragedy. A general who, booted and spurred, sword at the ready, rides into battle on the back of a cow is, as the playbill of the London Savoy Theatre illustrates, not a sight that would inspire fear in a military opponent.
Playbill from the Savoy Theatre’s production of A Kingdom for a Cow by Kurt Weill (1935).
Although A Kingdom for a Cow does involve political intrigue, war, treason, and the mother country, the wedding plans of sweethearts Juan and Juanita are at the center of the action. Their plan fails repeatedly because their cow—the lovers’ only livelihood and dowry—gets taken away from them. On the very evening before the planned wedding, the president of the fictitious banana republic Santa Maria, where they live, suddenly enacts a so-called welfare tax in order to increase the military prowess of his country. Since Juan can’t pay the tax, the bailiff confiscates his cow. Juan, however, doesn’t give up but persistently works long hours until he has enough money for a new cow. He and Juanita are already kneeling at the altar, when the bailiff makes a second appearance and takes away the new cow as the next welfare tax installment. To make matters worse, Juan is drafted, and a murderous automatic weapon takes the place of the peaceful cow that promised affluence and marital bliss:
I used to have a splendid cow,
The cow is long since dead,
And now I have, oh help me Lord,
A hefty gun instead.
It’s only when the arms race with the neighboring country ends and the American capitalist who delivered weapons to the two enemy states has been exposed as a war-monger that Juan and Juanita can buy back the cow and the three exchange marriage vows: “I am yours and you are mine,” they sing, “and the cow belongs to us both.”
Nowadays it’s hard to imagine that the happiness of two lovers should depend on the possession of a cow. In the old days, however, owning dairy cattle used to be seen as a sign of economic independence and could well be a prerequisite for starting a household. The ancient Greeks gave their daughters names that hinted at a rich four-legged inheritance and were meant to lure potential spouses or sons-in-law—for example, Polyboea, “she who has many cows,” or Phereboia, “she who will bring many cows into the marriage.” And even in early-twentieth-century rural Germany the broad back of a cow often smoothed the way into the marital bed. At least that’s what Swabian playwright Hermann Essig suggests in his play Die Glückskuh (The lucky cow), which premiered in 1911.
The female hero of the comedy, Rebekkle Palmer, is attractive, funny, smart (or shrewd, at any rate)—and pregnant. Before her disgrace shows and becomes common knowledge in the village, she quickly has to find a bridegroom, and that’s the problem. Although Rebekkle has many suitors, none of them is willing to marry her without dowry. Helm, her lover and the father of the child, stoically remarks that “it just isn’t the done thing to marry one who has nothing.” Manuel, a rich farmer’s son, who is caught in her bedroom one night, is not allowed to lead the girl to the registry office either. “He has to find one who brings a cow into the marriage,” Manuel’s mother says at the beginning of the play. Later on, she remarks that a cow plainly and simply is the kind of dowry that “every farmer demands.”
So Rebekkle knows what to do. She sneaks out of the family house, steals a cow in the neighboring village and triumphantly returns just as the village starts gossiping about her alleged lewd behavior. In view of the dowry she has in tow, the villagers’ attitudes change abruptly. “Rebekkle with a real cow,” the bystanders marvel. “Why don’t you stay here with your cow?” “Put her into our cowshed for now.” “Do you know how to handle a cow by yourself?” When Rebekkle announces that the cow at her side is really a “double cow”—that is, a cow that will soon calve—the greedy mouths of Manuel’s family immediately start watering. Manuel is told to marry Rebekkle right away.
It doesn’t seem to bother him or his parents that he will get “the cow with the calf” not only in the literal but also in the proverbial sense of the old German expression—that is, he’s marrying a pregnant woman. A veritable race begins: Manuel simply has to be the first to get the bride into the marital bed and the cow into the family shed. “You are taking too much time, and then someone else will take a liking to the cow,” the mayor reprimands the newly engaged couple, as they run toward the village hall to tie the knot. “Can’t the cow run a bit more quickly?” It almost seems as if Manuel is to marry the cow, not the woman.
Rebekkle, too, knows that her attractiveness as a bride waxes and wanes with the cow as a dowry. So she kisses first the cow, then the groom, when Manuel proposes to her. “Oh my dear little cow! . . . Oh my good Manuel.” The happiness that the cow brings about is indeed short-lived. When it becomes apparent that the “double cow” was stolen and therefore can’t be considered dowry, Manuel’s family insists that the marriage be promptly annulled. One shady bargain follows another until Rebekkle’s marriage deal is finally signed, sealed, and delivered. And, as is customary for a comedy, a wedding can take place—this time with Helm, the child’s father.
The bitter irony of it all is of course that the potential husbands scramble to get their hands on the cow in calf, while nobody really wants to have the pregnant bride. The male characters in “The Lucky Cow” view female sexuality mostly through an economic lens. Although they are familiar with the bovine life cycle, the gentlemen actually have no idea about female biology. “You know all about your cow,” Re-bekkle reproaches the guileless Helm, when he totally fails to understand what is happening to her, “but you look at me as if this were a wonder.” Little wonder, in fact, as a calf brings money; an out-of-wedlock child, by contrast, brings disgrace and costs alimony. Up until now, Helm has obviously been dealing mostly with breeding cows.
As in many other comedies, the central motif in “The Lucky Cow” is the corrupting influence of money, or, in this case, of cows. Under the spell of the natural currency, the villagers are capable of unpredictable depravity as well as surprising affirmations of love. All of their social interactions, even their seemingly authentic feelings, are driven entirely by greed and have been perverted by the sudden appearance of the cow. “Money,” writes Karl Marx, “transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, . . . reason into nonsense.” In view of all the trials and tribulations that the new capital has brought to the village, Helm states in act four that he is fed up with cows: “What is a cow after all? It makes you disloyal.” It may well be an important status symbol and a precious dowry, but the fact remains: a cow can’t buy happiness.