‘If You Want to Take a Relation of Violent Extortion, Sheer Power, and Turn It Into Something Moral, and Most of All, Make It Seem Like the Victims Are to Blame, You Turn It Into a Relation of Debt’
Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.
Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.
And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.
What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber.
[...] this excellent interview with the social anthropologist David Graeber (already linked to by both Gerry Canavan and Aaron Bady). The whole interview is interesting, but I liked this bit in which he talks about [...]
Interview with David Graeber « stubborn people
August 28, 2011 at 3:37 pm
One of the most interesting things I’ve come across in a very long time. Thanks for linking. I’ve been surfing around and Graeber seems interesting on a number of topics. (Plus, bonus: early Buffy fan! (An essay from 1998 (!) is linked on his Wikipedia page.) I think I’m going to try and get my hands on a copy of his recent book DEBT.
Do you know much about his work?
Stepehn Frug
August 28, 2011 at 9:26 pm
I haven’t read Debt yet, but I’ve read a bunch of the essays as well as the long excerpt here. Everything I’ve read from Graeber has been great; he’s a top-flight thinker.
gerrycanavan
August 28, 2011 at 9:27 pm
His book on value is also excellent.
Alex
August 29, 2011 at 6:51 am