David Graeber Quotes
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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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It's true that most American citizens think of themselves as living in a democratic country. But when was the last time that any Americans actually sat down and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they are ordering pizzas, but basically never.
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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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In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.
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It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.
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Medieval corporations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense.
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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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If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism-or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman.
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© 2011 David Graeber
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At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run-and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either-and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.
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Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
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A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt.
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It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
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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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How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time? In the economic field, at least, the answer is obvious. All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one’s inability to say 'I quit' and feel no economic consequences.
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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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Honor is a zero sum game.
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If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.
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Money has always been a particular problem for revolutionaries and anti-capitalists. What will money look like 'after the revolution'? How will it function? Will it exist at all? It's hard to answer the question if you don't know what money actually is. Proposing to eliminate it entirely seems utopian and naive.
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It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say.
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The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
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One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him there is a man with a gun.
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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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If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.