While there is a plenty of material one can use from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, most of it appears on the edges, in insights scattered here and there. These include, in random order: a market is not necessarily tied to profit, indeed, most markets in history have not had profit as their prime function, if at all (which leads one to the logical position that capitalism and markets are by no means synonymous and may be opposed to one another); debunking Adam Smith’s quaint founding myth of the origins of ‘the economy’; labour under capitalism has hardly ever been ‘free’; the reason why the treasures of the Americas were mined at all was due to Chinese need for bullion (90% of the total output) – most ships simply sailed straight there; redistributive economics is based on the violence and war of warrior aristocracies; markets always arose as a side product of the state’s activities, rather than state and economy being separate spheres; his redesignation of the Near East as the Near West, indeed that the West begins somewhere around Iran and Iraq, since from a global perspective there was little that distinguished Muslim, Christian and Jewish parts of the world.
Most of these points you can find elsewhere, but Graeber’s genius is to weave them into an intriguing narrative. But the problems are greater than these insights. To begin with, he is an ardent advocate of the superior role of anthropology, especially in response to economists. This may take the form of some great accounts (the Tiv from Africa is one example, which I read as an instance of the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction), but it usually ends up in a kind of primitivist argument: the true insight into human nature and interactions is to be found in these anthropological investigations into tribal peoples from Africa, Greenland, Asia, the Americas and – Graeber’s own field of research – Madagascar. The upshot is an assumption he shares with Adam Smith et al: human nature is the same wherever we look. The trick is to identify how we tick. All of which leads to a trans-historical assumption, embodied in the inadequate suggestion that all human societies operate on the basis of interwoven patterns of baseline communism, reciprocity and hierarchy.
Further, for a long book that deals with a central economic, social and political issue, there is no systematic economic theory that underpins his argument. For instance, he accepts the common position that the prime economic motor in some periods of history was plunder. The catch here, as Marx drily observed, is that you need something to plunder. Another example: despite his extended discussions of slavery and its crucial role in relation to coinage, one searches in vain for any theory of class. He has many opportunities, such as the ‘military-slavery-coinage’ complex as a way of relieving debt pressure in ancient Greece (228-30). This cries out for a class analysis, but none is forthcoming. And for my purposes, ancient Mesopotamia plays a crucial role in his discussion, for it provides the earliest evidence of what he calls a credit-based economy with far-flung international ‘trade’. Not only does he rely almost solely on the problematic Keynesian approach of Michael Hudson, but he provides no treatment of the crucial economic factor here, agriculture, let alone any effort at making sense of ancient economies.
He also buys into that intellectualist fantasy of the Axial Age, which he extends from 800 BCE to 600 CE. The Buddha, Confucius and Pythagoras were all alive at its beginning, thereby setting in train debate, intellectual schools, traditions of thought. But why is this an intellectualist fantasy? It imagines that the activity of intellectuals may determine a great stage of world history.
Ultimately, his criticism of capitalism is moral. I was taken with his proposal that the absolute thug, Hernan Cortes, is the quintessential image of the entrepreneur – ostentatious, debt-ridden, cunning, unbelievably brutal, with an unhealthily high opinion of himself. Despite this promising beginning, the argument boils down to morality. Self-interest, that key element of capitalism, is simply a derivation from theological notions of sin. That is, capitalism valorises and gives free reign to one of the basest motives of human beings, greed. That point might be worth making when scoring a cheap shot against some dull-witted economist, but it doesn’t get you very far.
A case in point is Graeber’s curious valorisation of village life in Europe before it was torn up by industrialisation and the ideology of self-interest. Despite the gossip, back-biting and scandals, above all people lived together in trust and communal ‘love’. They spent time with one another, valued friendships and family, extending credit to one another in a complex web without coinage. After all, since you know everyone and can trust them, such credit is not a problem. I hardly need to point out that this is a romantic ideal, a fantasy-land that never existed. But the stronger point is that production of such a life takes place under capitalism, that the ‘traditional’ is itself a product of the modern. Apart from that, I grew up in such places, small villages and towns in country Australia. The reality is that you can’t have bucolic bliss without village idiocy – the lantern jaw, the glazed eye of just a little too much inbreeding.
As a result, Graeber’s solution is quite lame (I only hope that his publisher wanted something more positive at the end). It’s a biblical-style Jubilee, a global cancellation of debt. Not only does this contradict his romanticised image of a community based on trust and mutual credit, but it fails to realise that a Jubilee is a system-restoring device, not one that leads to anything new.
http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/the-problems-with-david-graebers-debt/
im p sure graeber says the opposite - tho cortez was a scumbag, but it was debt that drove him to genocide etc
re: lame solution/lack of class analysis, in graebers online intervention in that libertarian forum (lol) he said he wanted the book accessible to all ie not make radical analysis explicit
dis might be handy to contrast grabe vs the marxist
https://vimeo.com/41997338
as i have argued before and a point that graeber also agrees on: all human progress has ultimately been derived from war and it is through war, that humanity will survive and flourish into the future
An incentive is defined as "A thing that motivates or encourages one to do something." It is therefore true by definition that "people respond to incentives", the fundamental tenet of economics.
Incentives can take many forms, such as: a feeling of community, safety, respect from parents, respect from children, respect from elders, the sacred feeling in a place of worship, and romantic love. It would be absurd to limit incentives to hard cash and assert that all society was built upon it.
Empathy posted:Incentives can take many forms, such as: a feeling of community, safety, respect from parents, respect from children, respect from elders, the sacred feeling in a place of worship, and romantic love. It would be absurd to limit incentives to hard cash and assert that all society was built upon it.
Hard cash can buy me all of these things. QED
Empathy posted:Incentives can take many forms, such as: a feeling of community, safety, respect from parents, respect from children, respect from elders, the sacred feeling in a place of worship, and romantic love. It would be absurd to limit incentives to hard cash and assert that all society was built upon it.
I hate you so much.
- Hasn't made a credit card payment since late 2008 because he thinks that the US government was responsible for the financial crisis and ought to pay his bills.
- Got a $20,000 loan to buy materials to renovate his house to put in a skylight, failed to tell bank he lived in a rented apartment and below someone else.
- Has $300,000 in student debt from the University of Chicago which he refuses to make a payment on due to a complicated conspiracy theory involving the late Milton Friedman.
- Owes a small community in Madagascar over 20,000 Ariary due to now-legendary consumption of grains and meat during his study there.
shennong posted:lots of books are problematic if you dont read them or profoundly misrepresent their argumetns
Further, for a long book that deals with a central economic, social and political issue, there is no systematic economic theory that underpins his argument. For instance, he accepts the common position that the prime economic motor in some periods of history was plunder. The catch here, as Marx drily observed, is that you need something to plunder. Another example: despite his extended discussions of slavery and its crucial role in relation to coinage, one searches in vain for any theory of class. He has many opportunities, such as the ‘military-slavery-coinage’ complex as a way of relieving debt pressure in ancient Greece (228-30). This cries out for a class analysis, but none is forthcoming
David Harvey: In his discussion of primitive accumulation, Marx writes about the national debt, the credit system, the bankocracy—in a way, the integration between finance and state that occurred during primitive accumulation—as being absolutely critical to the way in which a capitalist system evolves. But the analysis in Capital refuses to deal with the credit system until you get to Volume Three, because Marx doesn’t want to deal with interest, even though the credit system keeps on coming up as crucial to the centralization of capital, to the organization of fixed capital, and so on. This raises the question of how class struggle actually works around the finance–state nexus, which plays the vital role that you’re pointing to. There seems to be a gap in Marx’s analysis: on the one hand, saying the important dynamic is that between capital and labour; on the other hand, labour doesn’t seem to be crucial to the processes that you’re talking about—transferences of hegemony, jumping of scales. It’s understandable that The Long Twentieth Century had a hard time integrating labour into that story, because in a sense the capital–labour relation is not central to that aspect of the capitalist dynamic. Would you agree with that?
Giovanni Arrighi: Yes, I agree, with one qualification: the phenomenon I mentioned of the speeding up of social history. The worker struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were a major factor in the financialization of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the ways in which it evolved. The relationship between workers’ and subaltern struggles and financialization is something that changes over time, and has recently developed characteristics that it didn’t have before. But if you are trying to explain the recurrence of financial expansions, you cannot focus too much on labour, because then you will be talking only about the latest cycle; you are bound to make the mistake of taking labour as the cause of financial expansions, when earlier ones took off without the intervention of workers’ or subaltern struggles.
welp,
e:
if you were trying to bait me, you did well! you've got me for one last thread while i get underway with my irl shit. i've been meaning to deal more seriously with the stuff that went into the book anyways because it's really underappreciated.
k, so the elephant in the room here is Polanyi and institutions in general. this is directly related to the issue with finance and interest because you cannot deal with it without dealing with institutions. i know that this contradicts the rigid "materialist" tradition of Lenin, but:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm
Lenin posted:“Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers’ societies, and office employees unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible. /.../ our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. /.../ This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society."
and:
And for my purposes, ancient Mesopotamia plays a crucial role in his discussion, for it provides the earliest evidence of what he calls a credit-based economy with far-flung international ‘trade’. Not only does he rely almost solely on the problematic Keynesian approach of Michael Hudson, but he provides no treatment of the crucial economic factor here, agriculture, let alone any effort at making sense of ancient economies.
he relies more on Polanyi, Finley, and classicists. the agriculture is implicit: http://michael-hudson.com/1992/03/did-the-phoenicians-introduce-the-idea-of-interest-to-greece-and-italy-and-if-so-when/
No doubt the first native Greeks and Italians to owe debts to foreigners and extend interest‑bearing loans to their local compatriots would have been landed proprietors and chieftains. They alone were in an economic position to trade with the Phoenicians, to shift away from subsistence grain production to export crops, to establish handicraft workshops to produce export goods, and to act as patrons to cultivators who fell into various types of clientage culminating in debt servitude. The virtual identity between landed proprietors, exporters and importers and workshop owners (Bravo 1977b:65) would explain how the charging of interest spread from the sphere of commercial exchange to agriculture. In neither Greece nor Italy were commerce and agriculture compartmentalized from each other, or from the proliferating use of credit. It is true, as Sally Humphreys (1978:151f.) has pointed out, that “The nautikon daneion and the mortgage of land . . . were different institutions, transacted through different relationships, and belonging to different systems of thought and behavior, even though they could be described by the same general word, hypotheke .” But they had a common nexus in the emerging commercial/landed aristocracy. And if interest could be charged in commerce, why not also in agriculture?
etymologically, this is as "economic" as it gets!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikos
e2:
it seems like there's this tendency to think of "state" and "market" as sort of transcendent. it's like the secularized legacy of the liberal deist god. you've got "the market" vs. "the revolution" because it seems impossible to conceive of economic activity without first making an ontological appeal to the "state" and "market". both versions have been appealing to the same normative order while appearing to be in opposition to one another
Edited by dm ()
also as dm said the bibliography is a goldmine for further reading.
Scrree posted:Stalin's Mustache kind of misses the audience/point of the book. i mean if your already a classical Marxist than the lack of hard data/class analysis will be bothersome but if you're an average, literate jane/joe then the complete dissection of one of liberal societies founding presumptions will probably be fairly eye-opening! Debt is less about providing alternatives to capitalism as opening the path to see alternatives at all; it is a cordial shout that things were not always this way! this is not the human condition! the Graeb's suggestions are fairly tame, but have the advantage of being absolutely just. what debt encumbered soul could read the book and go 'hmm, truthfully i don't deserve a jubilee after all!'?
also as dm said the bibliography is a goldmine for further reading.
things were always "this" way tho
Scrree posted:also as dm said the bibliography is a goldmine for further reading.
yeah, it is! it was something that i was interested in before the book came out. i think the merit of the book itself is really mostly just bringing that stuff to light. there's so much of it that the book was necessarily flawed and incomplete, so it's kinda disappointing to see it being taken up as a definitive position or something.
i would definitely recommend reading these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_%28book%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_%28book%29
someday i want to read Braudel's Capitalism and Civilization, then Giovanni Arrighi again and then maybe Wallerstein, but that's a lot of reading!
