David Graeber, author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, died Wednesday.
His writings made me take anarchism seriously as a possible alternative to monopoly capitalism and state socialism
Click on the link below to read one of his best essays.
The Shock of Victory: An Essay by David Greaber–And a Short Eulogy for Him.
What would the U.S. unemployment rate be if all useless or harmful jobs were eliminated?
It would probably be equivalent to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Barack Obama, in an interview in 2006, stated the problem:
“I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have. … Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”
Source: The Nation
David Graeber, in his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, quoted public opinion polls that found 37 percent of UK employees and 40 percent in the Netherlands thought their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world.
Now maybe that is exaggerated. Maybe some of them think they make a contribution, but that it’s not “meaningful.”
Offsetting this, the inherent bias of people is to think we are accomplishing more than other people think we do or the objective facts indicate.
For example, public relations, advertising, lobbying, consulting and even speculation on financial and commodities markets have their uses. It is just that they play more of a role in the economy than they should.
I myself think the U.S. military and intelligence services are much greater than necessary to protect the homeland from attack. Of course, if the mission is to make the United States the world’s only superpower, no number could be great enough.
The question is: What would happen if all these people were thrown on the job market, all at once?
It would be a catastrophe, unless there were some sort of basic income guarantee (which Graeber advocates) or basic job guarantee.
David Graeber, in his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, describes the frustrations of people doing jobs that they know are useless or even harmful, because the meaningful jobs are either unavailable or low-paid.
He said that forcing people to engage on tedious activities that serve no useful purpose, or, worse still, pretending to work when they actually aren’t, constitutes a kind of spiritual violence.
Not all useless or harmful jobs are BS jobs. Graeber defines a BS job as one you know is useless, but you have to pretend is necessary.
I think many of the people who invent BS jobs, or invent useless tasks for the useful workers, are under the impression they are making a positive contribution. Graeber said his strongest critics are business owners who deny the possibility that they could be paying anybody to do anything useless.
A certain number of people think the world is divided into predators and prey, and pride themselves on being successful predators. An example would be the bankers and financiers who, prior to the 2008 financial crash, made subprime mortgage loans to suckers who could never pay them off, then collateralized the mortgages and sold them to other suckers.
What all these jobs—hedge fund managers, telemarketers, diversity consultants, receptionists who never get phone calls, consultants whose advice is never heeded, supervisors with nothing to supervise—is that, if they went on strike, nobody would notice.
What Graeber calls the sh•t jobs are just the opposite. Food service workers, health care workers, trash collectors, janitors and cleaners—all these workers labor under worse conditions and for lower pay than in BS jobs, and, contrary to reason and justice, they get less respect.
Coincidentally or not, the sh•t jobs are disproportionately done by black people, Hispanics and immigrants.
∞∞∞
Graeber said many of us have come to accept the idea that work consists of following somebody’s order to do something we dislike. It follows, then, that if you want good pay, job security and benefits, you are lacking in moral character. He calls this rights scolding.
It takes two forms. Among right-wingers, if you think you are entitled to anything that working people in the time of Charles Dickens didn’t have, you are a fragile snowflake. Among left-wingers, if you think you are entitled to anything that the most oppressed person alive today has, you are told to check your privilege.
It also follows that people whose jobs are fulfilling, such as school teachers, are not really working. The idea is: You get to do work that is pleasurable, useful and respected. How dare you want good pay and job security in addition? Graeber calls this moral envy.
BULLSHIT JOB: A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the condition of employment, the employee fells obliged to pretend that this is not the issue. [David Graeber]
∞∞∞
Huge numbers of people work in jobs that they themselves think are completely unnecessary. Many of them would prefer to do something useful, but useful jobs on average pay less. Sometimes they quit and take a lower-paying useful job anyway.
Some five years ago, David Graeber, an American who teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics, wrote an essay for an obscure left-wing magazine called Strike!, about the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
The article struck a nerve. It got more than a million hits on the Internet, crashed the Strike! web site several times and was translated into more than 10 languages.
A YouGov poll soon after found that 37 percent of full-time employees in the United Kingdom thought their work made no meaningful contribution to the world. A survey in the Netherlands put the number as high as 40 percent. I imagine a survey in the United States would be much different.
Graeber himself communicated with hundreds of unhappy, useless employees via e-mail.
The result is his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory.
He learned about a museum guard whose job was to report if a certain empty room ever caught on fire; a military sub-contractor who drove more than a hundred miles in order to give a German soldier permission to move a piece of equipment from one room to another; a receptionist who, to fill her time, was tasked with jobs such as sorting paperclips by color.
But most of his reports are about people who worked in offices—making studies that were never read, making proposals that were never acted on or not doing anything at all, but doing their best to look busy.
How can there be so many admittedly useless jobs? We live in a time of austerity and layoffs. Full-time jobs are being replaced by temporary jobs. That is true of government as well as the private sector.
One thing that free-enterprise advocates and Marxists agree on is that competitive capitalism produces economic efficiency. Free-marketers think everybody benefits and Marxists think that only the capitalists benefit, but they agree on the drive of business to maximize profit.
Maybe this is wrong. Maybe competitive capitalism is a myth. Maybe we live under what Graeber calls managerial feudalism.
Back in the days before the French Revolution, the peasants, who were the main producers of wealth, paid so much in taxes and rent they could barely live. They supported an aristocracy, who, in turn, supported an economic class of coachmen, door keepers, lace makers, dancing masters, gardeners and the like, who were generally better paid than the peasants.
Just like the aristocrats of old, the prestige of managers in organizations is based on the number of people they have working for them. Prestige is not based on whether they are useful or not. In fact, employees whose work is essential are a threat. They have the power to quit or go on strike or to unexpectedly reveal they know more than the boss.
So the incentive is to diminish the role and power of those who do necessary work while inventing new jobs whose existence depends on the discretion of the job creators.
A large number of new jobs are administrative staff. They are different from administrators who make actual decisions. Their job is collect quantitative information about the work of the useful employees on the principle that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
The old labor hymn, Solidarity Forever, written slightly over a century ago, celebrates the achievements and potential power of the working class.
The world depends on the labor of workers, the song goes. “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn.” That is a “power greater than their hoarded gold.” If workers unite and fight, they can free themselves from the parasitic owning class.
David Graeber
These stirring words quaint today, because all the driving forces in the economy are liberating the wealthy elite from dependence on workers. The driving force in technology is to eliminate jobs. The driving force in management is to make workers replaceable.
And there is another strange thing going on, which is the creation of what anthropologist David Graeber calls bullshit jobs. The definition of a BS job is that it is regarded as unnecessary even by those who do it.
For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world.
And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.
Generally speaking, we should trust people’s instincts in such matters. … If one includes the work of those who unwittingly perform real labor in support of all this — for instance, the cleaners, guards, and mechanics who maintain the office buildings where people perform bullshit jobs — it’s clear that 50 percent of all work could be eliminated with no downside. …
Even this estimate probably understates the extent of the problem, because it doesn’t address the creeping bullshitization of real jobs. According to a 2016 survey, American office workers reported that they spent four out of eight hours doing their actual jobs; the rest of the time was spent in email, useless meetings, and pointless administrative tasks.
The trend has much less effect on obviously useful occupations, like those of tailors, steamfitters, and chefs, or obviously beneficial ones, like designers and musicians, so one might argue that most of the jobs affected are largely pointless anyway; but the phenomenon has clearly damaged a number of indisputably useful fields of endeavor.
Nurses nowadays often have to spend at least half of their time on paperwork, and primary- and secondary-school teachers complain of galloping bureaucratization.
If the United States government were interested in promoting democracy and freedom, a simple, safe and cheap way to do it would be to stop giving military and economic aid to governments that practice rape, torture and murder.
This doesn’t require invasions, bombings or funding of foreign fighters. Nor economic sanctions. Just stop writing checks.
Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something.
But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
via Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit – The Baffler.
David Graeber, the brilliant anarchist-anthropologist, wrote about possible reasons why technological progress seems to be slowing down, and why the science fictional dreams of his boyhood did not come true like the dreams of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.
David Graeber
One is that American institutions are reshaping themselves on the model of the for-profit corporation, where everything has to be justified on its potential for short-term profit. If you have to show in advance what you intend to invent, and its guaranteed cash value, you’re not going to invent anything very new.
Another is that the government and corporate elite is not interested in radical new technologies that will disrupt the power structure. So research is focused on high-tech automated weapons, on surveillance technology, on psychiatric drugs to keep us calmed down, and on special effects, virtual reality and electronic gadgets to keep us distracted.
Yet another is that the payoff from technology, in terms of profits, is reaching a point of diminishing returns, which, by the way, is something Karl Marx predicted.
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing. Click on Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit to read it.
Soak the Rich: An exchange on capital, debt and the future by David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, translated and reprinted by The Baffler.
David Graeber is an anthropologist and radical anarchist known for his book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, which looks at the origins of money, taxes and debt. Thomas Piketty is a politically moderate economist known for his book, Capital in the 21st Century, which looks at the persistence of gross inequality during the past few centuries.
I admire them for their opposite virtues—Graeber for his bold and original speculation, Piketty for his research and his refusal to assert anything that can’t be backed up by data.
Graeber believes the capitalist system is doomed. Once it goes away, people will have a chance to create a new system without fear of bosses or police, and Graber does not see any point in trying to describe the specifics of what that new system will be.
Piketty says history indicates that capitalism has proved amazingly resilient in the face of change, and that there is no reason to think this time is different. Furthermore, he said, any society has a need for capital, the means to invest accumulated wealth into the means of creating new wealth. (This is a different definition of capital from the one in his book). His attitude toward capitalism is: Mend it, don’t end it.
One thing they do agree on is the centuries-old tendency for wealth to be concentrated in a few hands, and the danger this poses to a democratic society.
On the Causes of Investment Decline in the U.S. Economy by Dr. Jack Rasmus, the Green Party’s shadow Federal Reserve chair. Hat tip to Bill Harvey.
I have long thought that increasing the earning power of average Americans would make many things fall into place. If people had more money to buy stuff, merchants would sell more stuff and manufacturers would make more stuff, and this would be to everybody’s benefit.
Jack Rasmus suggests that maybe this isn’t so. Maybe getting people into debt and putting the squeeze on them is more profitable that creating useful goods and services. If that’s so, we can’t look to private enterprise to recreate a high-wage, full-employment economy.
His solution is a massive public works program, which I agree is needed, but doesn’t address the problem he describes.
Defending Trade Unions While the Justices Are Away by David Coates. Hat tip to Labor News in Rochester, NY.
Labor unions helped maintain American prosperity in the mid-20th century by fighting for good wages and job security. But the union movement is handicapped by laws and court decisions that increasingly restrict unions while freeing corporations of responsibility.
In Harris v. Quinn, the Supreme Court ruled that home health-care workers in Illinois could not be required to pay dues the Service Employees International Union, but they were still entitled the benefits of the SEIU contract and to SEIU representation. It is as if the Supreme Court ruled that I could not be required to pay my Rochester Gas and Electric bill, but RG&E is still obligated to supply me with gas and electricity.
Chris Dodd Warns of Coalition Between Populist Democrats and Republicans by Zach Carter for the Huffington Post.
Ex-Senator Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, gave a speech warning against trying to strengthen the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. He said in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center that opening up the bill to amendments would open a “Pandora’s box” that would be dangerous the financial services industry.
He said warned against right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats teaming up against Wall Street. He probably was thinking of a bill co-sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-Louisiana) to break up the “too big to fail” banks, an unacceptable type of bipartisanship. Dodd said breaking up big banks is unnecessary.
As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying the Price by Joseph Shapiro for National Public Radio.
The criminalization of poverty by Radley Balko for the Washington Post.
A majority of U.S. states have recreated the equivalent of debtors’ prisons. They are trying to make their criminal justice system self-financing by charging fees for public defenders, the cost of a jury trial, room and board for jail and prison time, and parole and probation costs. Poor people who can’t pay these fees go to jail, even though this has been ruled unconstitutional.
I have a lot of friends who grew up in the USSR, or Yugoslavia, who describe what it was like. You get up. You buy the paper. You go to work. You read the paper. Then maybe a little work, and a long lunch, including a visit to the public bath…
David Graeber
If you think about it in that light, it makes the achievements of the socialist bloc seem pretty impressive: a country like Russia managed to go from a backwater to a major world power with everyone working maybe on average four or five hours a day.
But the problem is they couldn’t take credit for it. They had to pretend it was a problem, “the problem of absenteeism,” or whatever, because of course work was considered the ultimate moral virtue. They couldn’t take credit for the great social benefit they actually provided.
Which is, incidentally, the reason that workers in socialist countries had no idea what they were getting into when they accepted the idea of introducing capitalist-style work discipline. “What, we have to ask permission to go to the bathroom?” It seemed just as totalitarian to them as accepting a Soviet-style police state would have been to us.
I recently finished reading David Graeber’s The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. Graeber gives a first-person account of the origins and fate of the Occupy Wall Street encampment, describes Occupy as a prototype of a future anarchist democracy and explains why he thinks the present-day American political and economic system cannot be reformed from within that system.
What his book shows is that there are other alternatives to the bipartisan Democratic-Republican establishment besides the radical reactionary Tea Party movement. Despite what so many politicians and commentators say, a better world is possible.
Anarchism is radical democracy, Greaber wrote. Anarchists want a society based on voluntary cooperation mutual aid. His capsule definition of anarchism is a society in which nobody has the right to give orders and then call on people with guns for backup if orders aren’t obeyed.
Occupy Wall Street was a prototype for such a society. It began with an article in a small, radical magazine called Adbusters, calling for activists to try gather in Wall Street on August 6, 2011. The whole movement might have taken a different course if one tiny group of radicals had taken charge rather than another.
When David Graeber and his anarchist friends showed up that day, members of an organization called the Workers World Party were acting as if they were in charge. The WWP, like the old Communist Party, represents what Graeber called “vertical” radicalism. “Vertical” radicals try to get themselves into positions of power and leadership in organizations, and leverage these positions to spread their influence.
“Horizontal” radicals, on the other hand, have a concept more like the Christian idea of the “servant leader.” Their goal is to empower people to articulate their own grievances, desires and ideas, and to move forward on that basis. While the “horizontals” may have their own ideas, they are willing to allow them to emerge in action.
The Occupy General Assemblies were organized with the stated goal of giving everybody a voice and preventing any individual from dominating the proceedings by virtue of articulateness or forceful personality. Within the anarchist community, Graeber wrote, there are trained facilitators who are expert at making the group process work well staying in the background. I would think this takes a lot of skill and self-restraint.
Setting up Working Groups to draft specific proposals helped with this. Nobody could be on more than one Working Group, so no single individual could dominate everything. The stack method of calling on people to speak gave everybody an equal chance to speak.
The People’s Microphone, used in lieu of forbidden actual microphones, had the audience amplify speakers’ words by repeating them, phrase by phrase, and this had the side benefit of ensuring speakers didn’t waste the group’s time by speaking without thought.
The most dubious part of the General Assembly procedure was the consensus decision-making. No decision could be made unless everybody, or at least an overwhelming majority, was willing to accept it. I think this can work well with people who are working toward the same goal and who are committed to restraint, but it leaves the General Assembly open to sabotage to those who oppose or misunderstand its goals, including agents provocateurs. Graeber acknowledged it sometimes is necessary to expel people from the group.
The decision-making process can be cumbersome. But once the decision is made, the fact that virtually everyone understands and accepts it evidently makes the Occupy movement more effective in action than a top-down organization would be.
The proof is that the Occupy Wall Street encampment, operating under circumstances of virtual military siege, was able to function, to provide food and shelter to newcomers and also to indigents which the police encouraged to go to their site, and to take concerted actions.
The following quotes are from the last chapter of David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, in which he outlines his vision of a future anarchist society. The bipartisan establishment in Washington does not offer hope and change, but an argument that our present plight is the best that we can hope for. Graeber and his friends show there are other alternatives to that thinking besides the reactionary right.
§§§
Since we are all unique individuals, it’s impossible to say which one of us is intrinsically better than any other, any more, for instance, than it wold be possible to say there are superior and inferior snowflakes.
If one is going to base egalitarian politics on that understanding, the logic would have to be: since there’s no basis for ranking such unique individuals on their merits, everyone deserves the same amount of those things that can be measured: an equal income, an equal amount of money, or an equal share of wealth.
§§§
We are already anarchists, or at least we act like anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require physical threats as a means of enforcement.
It’s not a question of building up an entirely new society whole cloth. It’s a question of building on what we are already doing, expanding the zones of freedom, until freedom becomes the ultimate organizing principle.
§§§
I’m sure that in practice any attempt to create a market economy without armies, police and prisons to back it up will end up looking nothing like capitalism very quickly.
§§§
There are many things in short supply in the world. One thing of which we have a well-nigh unlimited supply is intelligent, creative people … … The problem is not a lack of imagination. The problem is the stifling systems of debt and violence, created to ensure that these powers of imagination are not used—or are not used to create anything beyond financial derivatives, new weapons systems, or new Internet platforms for the filling out of forms.
§§§
… For the rest of us, having money, having an income, being free from debt, has come to mean having the power to pursue something other than money. Certainly we all want to ensure that our loved ones are taken care of. We all want to live in healthy and beautiful communities. But beyond that, the things we wish to pursue are likely to be wildly different. What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process?
Equality, then, would be simply a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there always will be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse of fade away.
§§§
Is such a vision possible? I don’t know. Or rather I don’t know to what degree it is possible.
The late Arthur C. Clarke said that the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to push a little bit into the impossible.
In the current government shutdown and bond default crisis, the extreme left-wing position, the one that House Speaker John Boehner says would amount to “unconditional surrender,” would be to allow the government to function normally and pay its bills under the “sequester” budget. This is the austerity budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan, which at the time a surrender to the priorities of the Republican right wing.
Candidate Barack Obama, writing in The Audacity of Hope, criticized liberal Democrats for failing to give Ronald Reagan credit for his good ideas. I should have paid more attention. What the Tea Party Republicans do is to give President Obama cover for protecting Wall Street and the military-intelligence complex.
I intend to post a review of David Graeber’s The Democracy Project sometime soon, but in the meantime, here is a good quote on what the word “conservative” has come to mean.
Nowadays in the United States at least, “conservative” has mainly come to be used for “right-wing radical,” while its long-standing literal meaning was “someone whose main political imperative is to conserve existing institutions, to protect the status quo.”
This is precisely what Obama has turned out to be. Almost all his greatest political efforts have been aimed at preserving some institutional structure under threat: the banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry.
Not to mention the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and their contractors.
In America today, “right” and “left” are ordinarily used to refer to Republicans and Democrats, two parties that basically represent different factions within the 1 percent—or perhaps, if one were to be extremely generous, the top 2 or 3 percent of the U.S. population [in income].
Wall Street, which owns both, seems equally divided between the two. Republicans, otherwise, represent the bulk of the remaining CEOs, particularly in the military and extractive industries (energy, mining, timber), and just about all the middle-rank businessmen; Democrats represent the upper echelons of what author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich once called “the professional-managerial class,” as well as pretty much everybody in academia and the entertainment industry.
Certainly this is where each party’s money is coming from—and, increasingly, raising and spending money is all these parties really do.
My Obamaphile friends rightly point out the delusions of the Tea Party Republicans, but they themselves are committed to the illusion that President Obama is a progressive who is on the side of the common people.
I’m reading David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, which is about the Occupy movement. I came across this passage which I like so much that I’m going to make a separate post about it. He started out by talking about how writers use phrases such as “human rights abuses” or “unsavory human rights records” when they mean “rape, torture and murder.” He went on to write:
… I find what I call the “rape, torture and murder” test very useful. It’s quite simple. When presented with a political entity of some sort or another, whether a government, a social movement, a guerrilla army or, really, any other organized group and trying to decide whether they deserve condemnation or support, first ask “Do they commit, or do they order others to commit, acts of rape, torture or murder?”
It seems like a self-evident question, but again, it’s suprising how rarely—or, better, how selectively—it is applied. Or, perhaps, it might seem surprising, until one starts applying it and discovers conventional wisdom on many issues of world politics is instantly turned upside down.
In 2006, for example, most people in the United States read about the Mexican government sending federal troops to quell a popular revolt, initiated by a teachers’ union, against a notoriously corrupt governor in the southern state of Oaxaca. In the U.S. media, this was universally presented as a good thing, a restoration of order; the rebels, after all, were “violent,” having thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails …
No one to my knowledge has ever suggested the rebels had raped, tortured or murdered anyone; neither has anyone who knows anything about the events in question seriously contested the fact that forces loyal to the Mexican government had raped, tortured and murdered quite a number of people in suppressing the rebellion.
Yet somehow such acts, unlike the rebels stone throwing, cannot be described as “violent” at all, let alone as rape, torture or murder, but only appear, if at all, as “accusations of human rights violations,” or in some other similarly bloodless legalistic language.
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years is a brilliant work that reinterprets history in a new way and shows how payment of interest-bearing debt has come to be regarded as the obligation that overrides all moral obligations.
Here is a set of links to articles that explain what Graeber is all about. The first is an article in the New Yorker about who Graeber is.
David Graeber and the Anarchist Revival by Kalefa Sanneh for the New Yorker.
Next some links to Graeber explaining his ideas in his own words.
What Is Debt?: an Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber
Debt: the First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber. This is his outline of the basic idea of the book for the Anarchist Library.
And some links to critiques and reviews.
The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay by Robert Kuttner for the New York Review of Books.
David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words by Aaron Bady for The New Inquirer.
The Very Last David Graeber Post by Brad DeLong. A scathing critique of the concluding chapter of Debt by a professor of economics.
Debt: the First 500 Pages by Mike Beggs for Jacobin magazine. Why he found Graeber’s main arguments “wholly unconvincing.”
In Defense of David Graeber’s Debt by J.W. Mason for Jacobin magazine.
And the full text of the book.
Full text of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ [added 4/29/2015]
If debt through compound interest is an obligation with no upper limit, and if it is in law an obligation which transcends all other obligation, then the idea of debt is like a religion—the sacrifice of all other values to Mammon. Or so it has long seemed to me.
People today world are still sold into slavery to pay their debts. Nations are required by international organizations to sacrifice the welfare of their people in order to pay debts to international banks, even debts incurred by previous rulers to acquire the means to keep their people down. Overhanging debt holds back our economy, yet a write-down of debt seems unthinkable.
David Graeber is an American who teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London; he also is an anarchist who was one of the originators of the Occupy Wall Street protest. In his book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, he attempted to explain the origins of the moral, religious and social meaning of debt.
Debt: the First 5,000 Years is profound, interesting, difficult and, at times, sometimes questionable. Graeber clarified and expanded my own insight about the nature of debt. He made me see world history in a new light. I wonder about some of his assertions, but do not have the knowledge to refute. I would willingly take a semester course with this as a textbook.
You can click on the title above to get Graeber’s outline of his idea for the book. In what follows I’ll try to explain what I got out of it.
The following passages are from DEBT: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
We owe our existence above all:
- To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual becoming an act of respect and recognition to all that beside we are small.
- 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 created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since-forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread. We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.
- To our parents, and their parents—our ancestors. We repay them by becoming ancestors.
- To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence human life, possible.
… … These are nothing like commercial debts. After all, one might repay one’s parents by having children, but one is not generally thought to have repaid one’s creditors if one lends the cash to someone else.
Myself, I wonder: Couldn’t that really be the point? Perhaps what the authors of the Brahamanas were really demonstrating was that, in the final analysis, our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be. That is because commercial transactions imply both equality and separation. These examples are all about overcoming separation: you are free from your debt to your ancestors when you become an ancestor; you are free from your debt to the sages when you become a sage; you are free from your debt to humanity when you act with humanity.
All the more so if one is speaking of the universe. If you cannot bargain with the gods because the gods already have everything, then you certainly cannot bargain with the universe because the universe already is everything—and that everything necessarily includes yourself.
One could interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of “freeing oneself” from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate, autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start.
§§§
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities 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.
§§§
… the Church had been … uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry.
Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation.
Exactly so!
Economic anthropologist David Graeber was one of the early participants in Occupy Wall Street. He wrote an interesting article in the current issue of The Baffler in which he argued that the power of the political and economic elite is based on their ability to convince the rest of us that there is no alternative to the status quo. He said that is why they have such fear of dissent and protest.
One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years.
David Graeber
It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.
The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives.
And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
I think this is true. The reason the United States government is moving heaven and earth to capture Julian Assange and punish Bradley Manning is the fear of letting the American public know what the government really is doing. Fear is the reason for the massive police response to the Occupy movement and to protests generally is so out of proportion to what is actually being done.
Urban police departments have military equipment and are encouraged to use military tactics, as if they were an occupation force in a hostile foreign country. It is as if the powers that be are preparing to suppress an uprising among the citizenry.
The United States government has, for more than 30 years, been dismantling government regulation of corporations and Wall Street banks, dismantling the social safety net and reducing taxes on rich people, with the promise of economic growth and prosperity for all, and that this promise has not been fulfilled. It also is true that the optimism and hope for a better future, which has characterized American life since before the United States was an independent nation, is vanishing. And historically, disappointed hopes were what inspired revolutions. So it is no wonder that the elite are fearful.
Click on A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse for Graeber’s complete article, which is well worth reading in full. The article was taken from Graeber’s new book, The Democracy Project (which I haven’t read). Click on A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility for Graeber’s discussion of the book with Lynn Parramore of Alternet.
Julian Assange is under house arrest in Britain and can’t get out and about to interview people for his The World Tomorrow TV program, but an interesting array of people come to him.
In Episode 7, he interviewed members of Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street, including David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist and political theorist, who was one of the original Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Click on Digital Journal for a summary of Episode 7 and links to previous episodes.
Click on David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street for a Business Week article about Graeber.
Click on “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe” for reasons why David Graeber should not be considered the leader or intellectual mentor of the Occupy Wall Street movement. [Added 6/5/12]
Click on Davod Graeber: anarchist, anthropologist, financial analyst for an article about Graeber and many links to his short writings.
Update [5/30/12] Julian Assange lost his appeal to Britain’s supreme court against being extradited to Sweden to face chargesallegations of rape and sexual molestationmisconduct. However, inasmuch as the ruling was based on an interpretation of international law not argued in court, Assange’s lawyers will have until June 13 to make an argument against the ruling. Assange’s lawyers also are appealing to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.
If there is good evidence to support the charges, Julian Assange should be put on trial just like anybody else. The problem is the possibility that Sweden’s current conservative government will hand him over to U.S. authorities, where he could be tried and sent to prison for revealing secret information about U.S. government misconduct.
Click on Julian Assange loses appeal against extradition for a report in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
Click on Julian Assange Loses Extradition Appeal for Time magazine’s account.
[Added 5/31/12] Click on Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview for background to the case.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 