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2a633ae
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Arguments about debt have been going on for at least five thousand years. For most of human history--at least, the history of states and empires--most human beings have been told that they are debtors.4 Historians, and particularly historians of ideas, have been oddly reluctant to consider the human consequences, especially since this situation--more than any other--has caused continual outrage and resentment. Tell people they are inferior,..
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David Graeber |
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d0dbac9
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money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic--and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The
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David Graeber |
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dc134cd
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the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition towards all that beside which we are small.58 * To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments that we value most, that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the philosophers and scientists who cre..
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David Graeber |
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7d961ba
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The problem is that for several hundred years now, it has simply been assumed that the guardian of that debt we owe for all of this, the legitimate representatives of that amorphous social totality that has allowed us to become individuals, must necessarily be the state. Almost all socialist or socialistic regimes end up appealing to some version of this argument. To take one notorious example, this was how the Soviet Union used to justify ..
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David Graeber |
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145eb38
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Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners?) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their ..
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David Graeber |
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69b7a74
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They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later--and this became a familiar pattern in China--when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves.
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David Graeber |
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f5e0dfc
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the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.
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David Graeber |
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9b78af9
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The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service.
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David Graeber |
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acf7da3
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It is a strange, repetitive feature of action movies that the infuriating go-by-the-rules boss of the maverick hero is almost invariably Black.)
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David Graeber |
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2025050
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Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor described in the first essay in this book, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you're dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having..
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David Graeber |
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9a24958
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In most important ways, this world is explicitly antibureaucratic: that is, it evinces an explicit rejection of virtually all the core values of bureaucracy.
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David Graeber |
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ee2e1cb
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one must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.
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David Graeber |
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2d1b09e
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Usury was seen above all as an assault on Christian charity, on Jesus's injunction to treat the poor as they would treat the Christ himself, giving without expectation of return and allowing the borrower to decide on recompense (Luke 6:34
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David Graeber |
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cc2b2aa
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it may be true that, if I could con- vince 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 was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics
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David Graeber |
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acd2312
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The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism. Around the time the philosophy became popular in the seventies, some conservative Christian theologians were actually thinking along very similar lines: seeing el..
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self-actualization
technology
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David Graeber |
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a729fd1
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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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0d8940d
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The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16"
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David Graeber |
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8e236c6
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Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men's spoil.
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David Graeber |
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d981b32
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For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it's always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around.
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David Graeber |
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dd86c97
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the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one's trust in other human beings.
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David Graeber |
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e542bb1
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The list of structures is pretty much the same list (racism, sexism, poverty, and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total absence of domestic violence or sexual assault, or a system of racism that was in no way backed up by government-enforced property rights--despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no example of either has ever been observed.50 Once again, it's puz..
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David Graeber |
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903e797
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Still, the introduction of numbers, the standardization of types of character, ability, monster, treasure, spell, the concept of ability scores and hit-points, had profound effects when one moved from the world of 6-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice to one of digital interfaces. Computer games could turn fantasy into an almost entirely bureaucratic procedure: accumulation of points, the raising of levels, and so on. There was a return to the comm..
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David Graeber |
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d796b37
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One of the popular fallacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been introduced called credit and that, before this device was known, all purchases were paid for in cash, in other words in coins. A careful investigation shows that the precise reverse is true. In olden days coins played a far smaller part in commerce than they do to-day. Indeed so small was the quantity of coins, that they did not ev..
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David Graeber |
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6b483e8
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For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money--and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.
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David Graeber |
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4e8a9a9
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Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a "thing" at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular tok..
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David Graeber |
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a1363f6
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In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption--again, coming from Smith's legacy--that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.
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David Graeber |
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0e13da3
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But the moment you turn it around, you realize that claiming one's own political positions are based on "rationality" is an extremely strong statement. In fact, it's extraordinarily arrogant, since it means that those who disagree with those positions are not just wrong, but crazy. Similarly, to say one wishes to create a "rational" social order implies that current social arrangements might as well have been designed by the inhabitants of ..
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David Graeber |
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6033a85
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This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.
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David Graeber |
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495ee58
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Frank Baum's book the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1990, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform- vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. As with the Greenbackers, one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly..
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David Graeber |
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3bd30b7
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For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter- none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith's time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was available in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of the six nations of the Iroquois, among others, we..
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David Graeber |
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1857084
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The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith's examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of the Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of these examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar with the use of money, and in fact, were using money- as a unit of account. Take the example of ..
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David Graeber |
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795ba2e
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How are workers supposed to find meaning and purpose in jobs where they are effectively being turned into robots? Where they are actually being told they are little better than robots, even as at the same time they are increasingly expected to organize their lives around their work? The obvious answer is to fall back on the old idea that work forms character; and this is precisely what seems to have happened. One could call it a revival of ..
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David Graeber |
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a608128
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He started showing up to work drunk and taking paid "business trips" for nonexistent meetings:"
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David Graeber |
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2768ab4
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For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. -- H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)
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David Graeber |
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7b930e2
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here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
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David Graeber |
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421350d
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As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64"
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David Graeber |
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01d17c0
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All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying "please" and "thank you" first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--among those very middle classes who were largely responsible for it. It is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five hundred years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one to..
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David Graeber |
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5a96cb7
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Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others --all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created und..
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work
millennials
jobs
pop-culture
job
culture
working
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David Graeber |
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bb7fc7c
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The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling ..
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David Graeber |
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d8adb82
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But everywhere, managerial feudalism ensures that thousands of hours of creative effort will literally come to nothing. Take the domain of scientific research, or higher education once again. If a grant agency funds only 10 percent of all applications, that means that 90 percent of the work that went into preparing applications was just as pointless as the work that went into making the promo video for Apollonia's doomed reality TV show Too..
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David Graeber |
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972f233
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There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation--and a handful is all it takes.
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David Graeber |
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3b21282
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The genealogy of the modern redistributive state--with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics--can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war."
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David Graeber |
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a05e297
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Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we ..
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David Graeber |
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5cc3d9b
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We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.
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David Graeber |