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Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.
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What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
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In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
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Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.
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One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.
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The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a "shilling" than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot.
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Everyone know how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power.... As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.
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We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.
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The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist. The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway.
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The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.
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Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.
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The right's approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves up as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.
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Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.
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Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the times and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, "Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself," then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: "Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant."
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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.
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Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.
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To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
David Graeber
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Born:
February 12, 1961
Died:
September 2, 2020
(aged 59)
Bio:
David Rolfe Graeber was a London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He was Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Known for:
Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011)
The Utopia of Rules (2015)
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)
Direct Action (2009)
Most used words:
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human
money
capitalism
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