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80d9a09
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To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.
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David Graeber |
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d93f3c6
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if we're going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power--one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break..
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David Graeber |
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dd298d1
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Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we're wrong, we might well get a lot closer.
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David Graeber |
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1ee689e
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In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.
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David Graeber |
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c0fb844
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Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this ..
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David Graeber |
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aba3da1
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The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released."
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David Graeber |
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03bd8bd
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One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests--actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash programs that provide their families with heating oil, who savage their schools and privatize their Medicare. To some degree the reason is simply that the scraps the Democratic Party is now willing to throw its "base" at this point are so pal..
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David Graeber |
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ee862d5
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If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fees, and penalties, or even debts we owe to specific individuals who we have wronged in some way, and thus to whom we stand in a relation of "sin" or"
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David Graeber |
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dded53b
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A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threads--financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private--knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.
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David Graeber |
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ecae61e
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Insofar as there is a politics, here, it seems a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capitalism. Ultimately, it's sociality itself that's treated as abusive, criminal, demonic. To this, most ordinary Americans--including Black and Latino Americans, recent immigrants, and others who were formerly excluded from credit--have responded with a stubborn insistence on continuing to love one another.
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David Graeber |
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b1290e4
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Esli vzglianut' na istoriiu dolga, to v pervuiu ochered' obnaruzhivaetsia, chto rech' idet o polnoi nravstvennoi putanitse. Naibolee iavno ona proiavliaetsia v tom, chto povsiudu bol'shinstvo liudei polagaet, chto (1) vyplata deneg, vziatykh v dolg, -- eto vopros elementarnoi poriadochnosti i chto (2) vsiakii, kto imeet obyknovenie davat' den'gi vzaimy, est' voploshchennoe zlo.
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David Graeber |
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59f4444
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Pravitel'stva trebuiut uplaty nalogov, potomu chto khotiat nalozhit' ruku na den'gi liudei. No esli Smit byl prav i zoloto i serebro stali den'gami blagodaria estestvennomu funktsionirovaniiu rynka, kotoryi nikak ne zavisel ot pravitel'stv, to ne bylo by dlia nikh estestvennym zakhvatit' kontrol' nad zolotymi i serebrianymi rudnikami? Togda koroli smogli by chekanit' stol'ko deneg, skol'ko im bylo by nuzhno. Sobstvenno, eto koroli obychno i..
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David Graeber |
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a93d9d6
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wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves--a
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David Graeber |
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3c72aee
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It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing--because surely, if they do, it's not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.
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David Graeber |
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9f132b1
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In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object's current identity--whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some..
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David Graeber |
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3fd8384
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Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form -- this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that's not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we're all already communists when working on a common projects,..
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revolution
communism
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David Graeber |
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9feed30
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In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage..
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David Graeber |
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f939779
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Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about.
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David Graeber |
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e5f78d6
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the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.
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David Graeber |
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b0e866a
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Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?
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David Graeber |
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b152290
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End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)
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David Graeber |
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99b4816
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Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem.
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David Graeber |
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9c8e961
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Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the Buddha (563-483 BC), and Confucius (551-479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others' existence.
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David Graeber |
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6a90307
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asked. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal.
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David Graeber |
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ce1ca91
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Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.
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David Graeber |
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e4e3079
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There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price-fixing. One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegious, since, in a free-market situation, "prices depend on the will of God."82 Most legal scholars interpreted Mohammed's decision to mean that any government interference in market..
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David Graeber |
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98e22f8
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They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, this political, magical element became a genuine problem, because it meant that even those actors--the brokers, stock-jobbers, traders--who effectively made the system run had no convincing loyalty to anything, even to the..
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David Graeber |
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5f2dfd2
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ON AUGUST 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold--thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard.1 This was the end of a policy that had been effective since 1931, and confirmed by the Bretton Woods accords at the end of World War II: that while United States citizens might no longer be allowed to cash in their dollars for gol..
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David Graeber |
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94543bf
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In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to act on the principle of "from each according to their abilities," at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere and the other knows the way. We so take this for granted, in fact, that the exceptions are themselves revealing. E...
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David Graeber |
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28fce36
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sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.
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David Graeber |
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c1c7c4c
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This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.
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violence
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David Graeber |
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421ed91
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Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look ..
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David Graeber |
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62f5092
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Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.
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responsibility
structural-violence
privilege
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David Graeber |
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faf3599
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It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here--and it's not clear that there is--society is our debts."
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David Graeber |
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73b64c0
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True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the mid-nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely in the business of trying to demonstrate that, despite appearances, the banking system really was profoundly democratic.
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David Graeber |
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9fe48c2
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Markets aren't real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaged in the same self-interested calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon.
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David Graeber |
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03633f9
|
There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committ..
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committees
university
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David Graeber |
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509dc7d
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When an economist attempts to prove that it is "irrational" to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say "irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, of the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage."
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economist
rationality
values
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David Graeber |
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00609df
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impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium ("to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman")."
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David Graeber |
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cd236a8
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if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.
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David Graeber |
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f36eb7e
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top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become.
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David Graeber |
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d04ef5c
|
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.
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David Graeber |
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ec14ac6
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This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
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David Graeber |
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b6bc2ef
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What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of "protection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan"? In" --
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David Graeber |