updated 3d ago
Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded
Another way was to broaden the notion of debt, so that all social responsibilities become debts of one sort or another.
from Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded by David Graeber
Tara McMullin added 7d ago
For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve acce
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Tara McMullin added 7d ago
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
from Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded by David Graeber
Tara McMullin added 7d ago
Innes were arguing is that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situation would be essentially the same. A gold coin is a promise to pay something else of equivalent value to a gold coin. After all, a gold coin is not actually useful in itself. One only accepts it because one assumes other people will. In this sens
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Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
The core argument is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt i
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Tara McMullin added 7d ago
What’s more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to “scientific status”—“rational choice theory,” for instance—start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most
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Tara McMullin added 7d ago
Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction—even commerce.
from Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded by David Graeber
Tara McMullin added 7d ago
If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system—as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human fr
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Tara McMullin added 7d ago
It is only when certain people are placed above others, or where everyone is being ranked in relation to the king, or the high priest, or Founding Fathers, that one begins to speak of people bound by their essential nature: about fundamentally different kinds of human being.
from Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded by David Graeber
Tara McMullin added 7d ago