David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words In the final lines of his introduction to Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber writes that “[f]or a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions.” And as he put it in a guest post over at Savage Minds: The aim of the book was to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate…[T]he credit crisis —and near collapse of the global economy in 2008—afforded the perfect opportunity. Debt is a “big book,” in other words, because he wants to re-open a set of questions that had come to seem closed “for a very long time,” the questions of “what human beings and human society are or could be like—what we actually do owe each other, what it even means to ask that question.” It’s a hard book to review, though, because it’s doing several irreducibly different things at once (which I’ll try to lay out in as logical a fashion as I can manage).
To camp or not to camp? That is Occupy’s question Occupy Tampa has had a rough life. Born on a “Day of Rage” that drew 1,000 people to Tampa, Fla.’s downtown on Oct. 6, it put down roots three days later on a public sidewalk bordering Curtis Hixon Park. It soon blossomed into a community of more than 100 residents adorned with tents, medics, media, kitchen and library on a concrete patch less than 10 feet wide. From day one, the Tampa police were a fixture in their lives. Bowden claims the police stepped up harassment by riding motorcycles on the sidewalk next to sleeping occupiers and dispatching a helicopter every night to hover above the camp. Worn down by the harassment, arrests and negative publicity that resulted, the occupation at Curtis Hixon Park dwindled to a lone protester much of the time. “A social experiment” West Tampa is a blue-collar enclave that is African-American on one side and Cuban, Puerto Rican and Central American on the other. The conflict between the organizing and the camp has cropped up in many occupations.
When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil The Empire of Debt has only one end-point: a death spiral. It is evil and must be dismantled. Ethics has no place in the Empire of Debt. The financialized Status Quo is careful to limit the language used to describe the situation in Greece to the subtexts of "obligations" and "avoiding chaos." The reality being masked is that debt is now more important than people. 1. 2. This begs further investigation. The ethics of debt, at least in the officially sanctioned media, boils down to: nobody made them borrow all those euros, and so their suffering is just desserts. What's lost in this subtext is the responsibility of the lender. Consider an individual who is a visibly poor credit risk. Now a lender comes along who can create credit out of thin air (via fractional reserve banking) and offers this poor credit risk $100,000 in collateral-free debt at low rates of interest.
A local currency; Getting clear about its use Why introduce a new currency? What’s the point? How could it help us? Introducing a new currency can enable extremely important steps towards the new local economy we want, but only if we design it to have the effects we want. Money is strange stuff. In a normal, growing economy the amount of money in use, circulation, has to increase all the time. The way it is done in our economy is by the investment banks lending more money to borrowing corporations who want to set up new ventures. Now there is nothing wrong about the creation of money from nothing; it has to be created. The astounding fact is that after the banks have created the money they are allowed to own it, and, even worse, to lend it and get interest on the loans. Very few people understand this but there are many monetary reform groups around the world working to draw attention to the practice and to terminate it. In the present system capital is scarce. This point is crucial in the discussion of local currencies.
Seminar on Debt: The First 5000 Years – Reply Let me begin with an apology—for two things, actually. First, for the fact this response to the seminar on my debt book was so long in coming. It happening that at the time the seminar was going on I was desperately trying to finish a book with a very firm deadline (not to mention I was also struggling with a flu, which added all sorts of interesting complications. Sorry. Allow me also to remark as well how flattered I am by so much of this discussion. The stupid Apple thing. Impersonal relations. Another brief corrective while I’m at it: I’m also not saying that having lots of social relations are always inherently good and therefore the loss of social ties is always bad, violent, or oppressive. Human Economies. To be fair, though, on the latter point, on looking over some the responses, and rereading my own text, I realize some of the fault here is my own. The problem is that I use the term in three increasingly inclusive senses. I guess I should have made that a lot more explicit. 3.
The Long and the Quick of Revolution Author's note: I re-gave the lecture at the CSDS in Delhi on 14 December and the version that follows is slightly changed from the original. It’s an honour to be asked to give this Raymond Williams Annual lecture. And also the chance to write the foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of The Long Revolution, republished by Parthian. It has given me the opportunity to renew and deepen Raymond’s influence on my thinking. Today I want to set out some of the arguments I am developing about the potentially revolutionary events of this year. It is work in progress, which I’m looking to you to test and can certainly improve. I’m going to focus on the Occupy movement, the most important example of which for me was the immense, peaceful take over of central Madrid from 15 May to 12 June, when it disbanded of its own decision. Spain itself has this month voted in the right-wing to power while what remains of the 15 May movement has lost popularity. Is the system in Britain invulnerable? Why now?
What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It? 1. I'm generally skeptical of the singularity and of post-scarcity economics in general. 2. I think it's interesting to ponder why the singularity might not occur. 3. 4. 5. 6. David McWilliams Explains Why Austerity Is Doomed In Europe | EconProph A very interesting video by an Irish economist explaining how the current reduce government spending (“austerity”) approach to the Eurozone debt and currency crisis is doomed to fail. It is doomed because cutting government spending in a recession only makes the recession worse, which in turn, reduces tax collections which then makes the government deficits worse not better. But not only is the austerity approach all wrong to solving the debt crisis, it carries very significant risk of social upheaval. (hat tip to Philip Pilkington and New Economic Perspectives). Now I’ll offer one pre-emptive comment. Like this: Like Loading...
Debt The First 5,000 Years David Graeber “Brilliant … and unexpectedly funny.” —The Spectator (selected as a book of the year) Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. With the passage of time, however, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and silver coins—and the system as a whole began to decline. DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. “An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.” “Mr. “Debt [is] meticulously and deliciously detailed.” “Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt — where it came from and how it evolved.” “[A]n engaging book.
In a 325-Page SEC Letter, Occupy's Finance Gurus Take on Wall Street Lobbyists Yesterday, a group affiliated with Occupy Wall Street submitted an astounding comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Point by point, it methodically challenges the arguments of finance industry lobbyists who want to water down last year's historic Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. The lobbyists have been using the law's official public comment period to try to kneecap the reforms, and given how arcane financial regulation can be, they might get away with it. But Occupy the SEC is fighting fire with fire, and in so doing, defying stereotypes of the Occupy movement. Occupy the SEC is a group of concerned citizens, activists, and professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry. Proprietary trading by large-scale banks was a principal cause of the recent financial crisis, and, if left unchecked, it has the potential to cause even worse crises in the future. Occupy the SEC Comment Letter on the Volcker Rule