Free your mind of the idea of deserving,
of the idea of earning,
and you will begin to be able to think.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed [as quoted on page 361]
 |
DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS
by David Graeber
[332 Gr]
this book is a library loaner
so this is what i do [combined w/below pic] when i need to take a lot of notes
but the book is not mine to mark up
*yawn*
|
of all the things that i love about the bodybuddy/lifemate, the single, greatest one (the one that just gets me so hot) is his big brain, and his big brain loves to read; it reads a lot and fast. i would consider him to be a better reader than i, in both speed and comprehension, and so, when he picks out his books on our jaunts to the library, i oftentimes end up reading one of the books that he chooses, cause, as i'm explaining, rn, his big brain is so attractive.
anyway, this book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, is a the bodybuddy/lifemate pick and a highly-recommended read, especially if you're a woman.
i was also introduced to two words with which i was pastly unfamiliar:
dragooning [p 314] and
prestidigitation [p 343], and they'll be presented below with their respective usage.
also, this is a book about debt over the course of a somewhat knowable human history, and the book works chronologically from past to present, so read the page numbers to understand the lateness or newness of the actual timeline of human history from which the quote was pulled.
also, keep in mind that this is a book of history, which means that a lot of these quotes are from someone who has written something, but since i cannot transcribe the entire book, here (as much as i wish i could), the quotes are completely out of context, and the context is an anthropological study of human societies not an economics theory from economists who largely do not understand human history.
[begin quotes]
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."
p 29
L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900,
is often held 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, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy's,
who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s.
According to the Populist reading,
the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers ...
the Scarecrow represented the farmers
(who didn't have the brains to avoid the debt trap),
the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat
(who didn't have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers),
the Cowardly Lion represented the political class
(who didn't' have the courage to intervene).
The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard
presumably speak for themselves.
"Oz" is of course the standard abbreviation for "ounce."
pp 52-53
[in-book quote]
"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter.
"And since we are human we help each other.
We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that.
What I get today you may get tomorrow.
Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."
[new para]
The last line is something of an anthropological classic,
and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits
can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies.
p 79
[in-book quote]
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.
p 125
The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman;
in the meantime, all one can do is acknowledge the outstanding debt.
...
Only a human could ever be considered equivalent to another human.
All the more so since, in the case of marriage,
we are speaking of something even more valuable than one human life:
we are speaking of a human life that also has the capacity to generate new lives.
[emphasis mine]
...
Money, then, begins, as Rospabe ́ himself puts it, "as a substitute for life."
One might call it the recognition of a life-debt.
p 132 & 133
This is the profound truth of the blood-feud.
No one can ever really forgive the man who killed his brother because every brother is unique.
Nothing could substitute—
not even some other man given the same name and status as your brother,
or a concubine who will bear a son who will be named after your brother,
or a ghost-wife who will bear a child pledged to some day avenge his death.
[new para]
In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value,
because each is a nexus [emphasis mine] of relations with others.
...
The Lele example gave us a hint:
to make a human being an object of exchange,
one woman equivalent for another, for example,
requires first of all ripping her from her context;
that is, tearing her away from that web of relations
that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is,
and thus,
into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt.
This requires a certain violence.
p 158 & 159
First-year Roman law students, for instance,
were made to memorize the following definition:
slavery
is an institution according to the law of nations
whereby one person falls under the property rights of another,
contrary to nature.
p 167
We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire.
Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance.
But even more:
increasingly, they did not just want money.
They needed it.
This was a profound change.
In the Homeric world, as in most human economies,
we hear almost no discussion of those things considered necessary to human life
(food, shelter, clothing)
because it is simply assumed that everybody has them.
A man with no possessions could, at the very least, become a retainer in some rich man's household.
Even slaves had enough to eat.
p 190
Rulers are like shepherds.
We like to think of them as benevolently tending their flocks,
but what do shepherds ultimately do with sheep?
They kill and eat them,
or sell the meat for money.
...
It's only the existence of money, Socrates suggests,
that allows us to imagine that words like "power" and "interest" refer to universal realities
that can be pursued in their own right,
let alone that all pursuits are really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage, or self-interest.
The question, he said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office
will do so not for gain,
but rather for honor.
p 196
As for dominium, the word is derived from dominus, meaning "master" or "slave-owner,"
but ultimately from domus, meaning "house" or "household."
It's of course related to the English term "domestic,"
which even now can be used either to mean "pertaining to private life"
or to refer to a servant who cleans the house.
Domus overlaps somewhat in meaning with familia, "family"—
but, as proponents of "family values" might be interested to know,
familia itself ultimately derives from the word famulus, meaning "slave."
A family was originally all those people under the domestic authority of a paterfamilias,
and that authority was, in early Roman law at least,
conceived as absolute.
A man did not have total power over his wife,
since she was still to some degree under the protection of her own father,
but his children, slaves and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted—
at least in early Roman law, he was perfectly free to whip, torture, or sell them.
A father could even execute his children, provided he found them to have committed capital crimes.
With his slaves, he didn't even need that excuse.
pp 200-201
We are so used to the idea of "having" rights—
that rights are something one can possess—
that we rarely think about what this might actually mean.
In fact (as Medieval jurists were well aware), one man's right is simply another's obligation.
My right to free speech is others' obligation not to punish me for speaking;
my right to a trial by jury of my peers is the responsibility of others to maintain a system of jury duty.
p 205
This is why I developed the concept of human economies:
ones in which what is considered really important about human beings
is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others—
therefore, that no one could ever be considered an exact equivalent to anything or anyone else.
In a human economy,
money is not a way of buying or trading human beings,
but a way of expressing just how much one cannot do so.
p 208
As many an African proverb emphasizes:
a proper king has no relatives either, or at least,
he acts as if he does not.
In other words,
king and slave are mirror images,
in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others,
they are defined only by relations of power.
They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become.
p 209
Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, took that first approach.
He turned the concept of li, profit, into something more like "social utility,"
and then he attempted to demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable activity.
p 241
How do you compare two things with no common qualities?
His [Ghazali's] conclusion:
it can only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at all.
...
From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be illegitimate,
since it means using money as an end in itself:
"Money is not created to earn money."
In fact, he says,
"in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence,"
words that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other words,
but can only do so because they have no meaning in themselves.
Money is thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods,
but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion.
To enter into monetary transactions in order to obtain even more money, ... would be,
according to Ghazali,
the equivalent of kidnapping the postman.
p 281
When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions,
the term he used was symbolon—
from which our own word "symbol" is derived.
Symbolon was originally the Greek word for "tally"—
an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt.
So our word "symbol"
traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another.
This is striking enough.
What's really remarkable though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for "symbol,"
fu, or fu hao,
has almost exactly the same origin.
p 298
While we are used to assuming
that the Mexican population was devastated simply as an effect of newly introduced European diseases,
contemporary observers felt that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives
to work in the mines was at least equally responsible.
p 314
The story of the origins of capitalism, then,
is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities
by the impersonal power of the market.
It is, rather,
the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest;
of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—
and often vindictive—
power of the state.
p 332
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community,
everyone normally was both lender and borrower.
p 334
The reader will recall
that the Bank of England was created
when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants—
mostly already creditors to the crown—
offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France.
In doing so,
they also convinced him to allow them to return to form a corporation
with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes—
which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the kind now owed them.
This was the first independent national central bank,
and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks;
the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency.
pp 339-340
In Goethe's Faust (1808),
he actually has his hero ... pay a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Emperor is sinking under the weight of endless debts
that he has piled up paying for the extravagant pleasure of his court.
Faust and his assistant, Mephistopheles,
convince him that he can pay off his creditors by creating paper money.
It's represented as an act of pure prestidigitation.
p 343
[in-book quote]
The root of the whole evil was the so called patron or "peonage" system ...
by which the employee, forced to buy all his supplies at the employer's store,
is kept hopelessly in debt,
while by law he is unable to leave his employment until his debt is paid ...
The peon is thus, as often as not, a de facto slave;
and since in remoter regions of the vast continent there is no effective government,
he is wholly at the mercy of his master.
p 349
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement,
then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and "indentured service"—
that is, the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance
and were thus bound for five-, seven-, or ten-year terms to pay it back.
p 350
Marxists have questioned whether wage labor is ultimately free in any sense
(since someone with nothing to sell but his or her body
cannot in any sense be considered a genuinely free agent),
but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capitalism.
Our dominant image of the origins of capitalism
continues to be the English workingman toiling in the factories of the industrial revolution,
and it is assumed this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley,
with a straight line in between.
All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear,
or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road.
...
In most of medieval northern Europe,
wage labor had been mainly a lifestyle phenomenon.
p 351
Speaking as someone brought up in that sort of working-class family, ...
I can attest to the degree that,
for those who spend most of their waking hours working at someone else's orders,
the ability to pull out a wallet full of banknotes
that are unconditionally one's own
can be a compelling form of freedom.
pp 354-355
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.
p 361
For instance, while technically,
the Fed cannot lend money directly to the government by buying Treasury Bonds,
everyone knows that doing so indirectly is one of its primary reasons for being.
And insofar as the government issues T-bonds,
it actually is, in one sense, printing money;
circulating debt tokens that—
as one apparently paradoxical effect of Nixon's floating the dollar—
have now themselves come to replace gold as the world's reserve currency;
that is, as the ultimate store of value in the world,
yielding the United States enormous economic advantages.
[new para]
Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt:
the United States continues to spend more on its military
than do all other nations on earth put together ...
p 365
The U.S. military, unlike any other,
maintains a doctrine of global power projection:
that it should have the ability,
through roughly 800 overseas military bases,
to intervene with deadly force absolutely anywhere on the planet.
...
Again, we are talking about symbolic power.
p 366
How much did Hussein's decision to buck the dollar
really weigh into the U.S. decision to depose him?
p 368
If history holds true,
an age of virtual money
should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery and debt peonage
(waged or otherwise),
and toward the creation of some sort of overarching institutions,
global in scale,
to protect debtors.
What we have seen so far is the opposite.
p 368
"debt imperialism"
p 369
It is no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperialism
has also been accompanied by the rise of the evangelical right, who—
in defiance of almost all previously existing Christian theology—
have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of "supply-side economics,"
that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich
is the most Biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity.
p 377
Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle,
it's still largely up to us to determine how it's going to turn out.
p 383
As I pointed out in the very beginning:
the difference between owing someone a favor and owing someone a debt
is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated.
Calculation demands equivalence.
p 386
This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact
that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom:
that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.
p 386
What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous,
than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one's existence?
p 387
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.
It introduces moral perversions on almost every level.
p 390
[end quotes]
