graeber gang gang 8 31 25
ch 4 – [of debt (book)] cruelty and redemption
via tweet [https://x.com/AJAlkaline/status/1959219916768227389]:
Debt the First 5000 Years Part 4 Cruelty and Redemption will be Sunday (8/31)! Money and Debt are two sides of the same coin. Does money itself make slaves of us? Listen, learn, and discuss!
notes/quotes (from podcast broadcasted on twitter):
@AJAlkaline reads ch 4 (took 45 min to read)
bobby: all this just wrapped up in a diff pkg.. but same thing.. all the same system.. lose house.. health ins.. it’s cyclical
yeah.. same song ness et al
aj: have to reset the system.. only way to keep from perpetuated
yeah.. re\set
aj: why we have harder time getting the political momentum to do something about it.. they’ve made it so complex.. hard to understand for avg person.. can’t even understand why things are happening to us.. all these tricks to keep us from seeing all the underlyings.. and see.. that obviously this is unsustainable.. book in general keeps coming back to how moral arguments based on one’s own responsibility.. i think today that’s majorly in play and why people unwilling to fight for right to have fair situation as far as debt/usury are concerned
bobby: keep you in weeds.. throw all id things in.. if recognized it’s an indebted slave system.. but if arguing about t swift or trans.. then don’t tackle that..
aj: graeber gang does political/anthropological discussions..
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my notes from ch 4 debt (book):
ch 4: cruelty and redemption
there is an unresolved debate between money as commodity and as iou.. it’s both keith hart: ”heads’ symbol of political authority ‘tails’ specific amount/worth for exchange’
money not invented to overcome inconveniences of barter between neighbors.. credit needed trust but also made it a scarcity
1552
thus money almost always something hovering between commodity and debt token
the battle between state/market, between govts/merchants.. is not inherent (essential) to the human condition
either is any form of measuring/accounting
1564
it’s only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt..
nietzsche 1877 – step further than smith.. that barter/buying/selling precede any other form of human relationship.. on the feeling of personal obligation he observes: ‘oldest relationship.. an individual measured himself against another.. we have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible.. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things—that preoccupied man’s very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it’s what thinking itself is.. here too.. the beginning of both astuteness and pride.. pre eminence over other animals: the human being describes himself as a being which assess values, which values and measures, as the ‘inherently calculating animal’.. selling buying older than any form of social orgs/groupings.. *out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights.. the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures.. along w the habit of comparing power w power of measuring, of calculating’
*rights ness.. all the red flags
literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
1569
smith too saw the origins of language and hence of human thought – as lying in our propensity to ‘exchange one thing for another’.. in which he also saw the origins of the market.. the urge to trade, to compare values, is *the very thing that makes us intelligent beings and diff from other animals.. society come later.. which means our ideas about responsibilities to other people first take shape in strictly commercial terms.
intellect ness et al not even
unlike smith, nietzsche never thought you could have world where all such transactions immediately cancel out.. he believed it as from this very fact that morality emerge… he says.. germans word schuld means both debt and guilt.. at first to be in debt was simply to be guilty.. repay was humiliation and torture..
1621
what nietzsche is doing here is starting out from the standard, common sense assumptions about the nature of human beings prevalent in his day ( and to a large extent still prevalent) that w are rational calculating machines, that commercial self interest comes before society, that society itself is just a way of putting kind of temp lid on the resulting conflict.. that is.. he is starting out from ordinary bourgeois assumptions.. a worthy game.. and no one has ever played it better.. but a game played entirely w/in boundaries of bourgeois thought.. it has nothing to say to anything that lies beyond it..
total black science of people/whales law..
like monopoly ie: jordan on jubilee ness
1622
from peter freuchen’s book of the eskimo:
He thanked him. The man objected indignantly: “Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
huge.. thank you ness
the last line is something of an anthropological classic.. and similar statement about the refusal to calculate credits/debits can be found throughout the anthropological lit on egalitarian hunting societies..
Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt..t
huge
what we need is a means to org us sans any form of measuring/accounting/enslavement
ie: cure ios city with 2 convers as infra
it’s not the he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate.. if he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did.. of course we have a propensity to calculate
i don’t know.. i think whales in sea world have that propensity.. not legit free people.. of math and men et al
we have all sorts of propensities.. that drive us in several diff contradictory direction simultaneously.. no one is more real than any other.. the real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity and therefore, make the basis of our civilization
i’d say propensity to love one another.. nicht civ ness
1647
good of nietzsches’ anal – shows if we start w assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calc.. then relationship w cosmos.. in terms of debt
nietzsche helps us in another way as well: to understand concept of redemption.. his description of christianity.. how sense of debt transformed into abiding sense of guilt to self loathing to self torture.. all this does ring very true.. it does seem rather striking that christian message of salvation.. should be framed in language of a financial transaction.. indeed.. all the major religions did
lit & num as colonialism et al
1686
nehemiah – 444 bc – cupbearer to persian emperor.. then gov of judaea – on crisis of impoverished peasants – the law of jubilee – all debts cancelled in 7th year
1698
in bible as in meso ‘freedom’ came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt.. in this light, the adoption of the term by christians is hardly surprising.. redemption was a release from one’s burden os sin/guilt.. end of history wen all slates wiped clean and debts lifted..
if so ‘redemption’ is no longer about buying something back. it’s really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting
if only.. still talking in terms of transaction/measure.. not heaven/garden ness
this leads to another problem: what is possible in the meantime, before that final redemption comes
ie: a nother way
still even more striking (after ie of king servant being forgiven debt then he doesn’t forgive his servants debt) is tacit suggestion that forgiveness, in this world, is ultimately impossible.. christians practically say as much every time they recite the lord’ s prayer ‘forgive our debts as we forever our debtors’.. it repeats the story of the parable almost exactly.. and the implications are similarly dire.. after all, mores christians reciting the prayer are aware that they do not generally forgive their debtors.. why then should god forgive them their sins
1752
this is a vision of human life as inherently corrupt.. but also frames even spiritual affairs in commercial terms: w calcs of sin, penance and absolution.. devil and st peter w their rival ledger books.. on one hand outcries against market.. on other.. frame objections in commercial terms.. these ie’s reveal.. when the ancients thought about money.. friendly swaps were hardly the first thing that came to mind.. for most .. what was likely to come to mind: selling/ransoming slaves/prisoners.. corrupt tax farmers, armies, mortgages..and most of all .. tension between needs for money to create families, to acquire a bride so as to have children, and use of that same money to destroy families – to create debts that lead to the same wife/children being taken away
1763
this is what money meant to most people for most of human history: thoughts of sons/daughter being carried off to be subject to every conceivable form of violence/abuse.. possible for years.. as parents waited helpless.. avoiding eye contact w neighbors.. unable to protect
one might object.. ‘that this was just assumed to be in the nature of things: might have been resented but not a moral issue.. some things just happen’.. what’s striking about the historical record.. this was not how many reacted.. many actually did become indignant.. particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply nature of things.. ie: caste, slavery.. why was it that the debtors’ protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight?
1787
what makes debt diff is that it is premised on an assumption of equality.. to be a slave, lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior.. these are relations of unadulterated hierarchy.. in case of debts.. talking about two who begin as equal parties to a contract.. legally.. same
between close kin, many ‘loans’ were probably then as now, just gifts that no one seriously expected to recover.. loans between rich/poor were something else gain.. problem was that, unlike status distinctions like caste/slavery, the line between rich/poor was never precisely drawn..
such behavior could be justified in legal terms by insisting that the loan was not a form of mutual aid but a commercial relationship – a contract is a contract.. (it also required a certain reliable access to superior force).. framing as breach of contract. .meant a moral issue: two out to be equals.. but one failed to honor the bargain
bauwens contracts law et al
1811
(good short summary of ch)
throughout most of history, when over political conflict between classes did appear.. took form of pleas for debt cancellation.. the freeing of those in bondage and usually , a more just reallocation of the land.. what we see in bible and other religious traditions are traces of the moral arguments by which such claims were justified, usually subject to all sorts of imaginative twists/turns, but inevitably, to some degree, incorporating the language of the marketplace itself..
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. again.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness
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be you. 