Graeber: Debt, the sovereign, peasants and amargi

via Occupyweb

delanceyplace.com 10/14/11 - kings forgive loans

In today's excerpt - in ancient city-states such as Babylon, Sumeria and Judaea, rulers found it necessary to cancel all consumer debt from time to time to keep peasants from becoming permanent debt-peons and thus to keep society from being torn apart - a phenomenon all the more interesting from the perspective of our debt-laden 21st century:

"Mesopotamian city-states were dominated by vast Temples: gigantic, complex industrial institutions often staffed by thousands - including everyone from shepherds and barge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical administrators, [and these Temples owned many of the assets of the city-state]. ...

"We don't know precisely when and how interest-bearing loans originated, since they appear to predate writing. Most likely, Temple administrators invented the idea as a way of financing the caravan trade. This trade was crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants - some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries - who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way for the Temples to take their share of the resulting profits.

"However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread. Before long, we find not only commercial loans, but also consumer loans - usury in the classical sense of the term. By C2400 BC it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain, sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly, followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's household - or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves. In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.

"The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: 'clean slates,' as economic historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

"In Sumeria, these were called 'declarations of freedom.' - and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for 'freedom' in any known human language, literally means 'return to mother' - since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do. ...

"Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

"The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian- style 'clean slate' edict - having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled 'in the Sabbath year' (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt."

Author: David Graeber
Title: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Publisher: Melville House
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
Pages: 64-65, 81-82

author:	David Graeber
title:	Debt: The First 5,000 Years
publisher:	Melville House
date:	Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
pages:	64-65, 81-82
tags:
Should you click through our site to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds from your purchase will benefit a children's literacy project. Delanceyplace is a not-for-profit organization.

Pulled from Delancey Place, which has an odd habit of disappearing its excellent selections. This is from David Graeber - haven't yet read it, but it seems like it might be, uh, relevant. He's an anthropologist (Rick Scott says Florida needs no more of them). Graeber is busy, among other ways, suspending the ivied wall between academia and the world.

All the other people's writing that's fit to print

This guy* might have a point --

"Is it appropriate for a national newspaper to reprint my personal tribute to Edward Woodward as if it were an article written for them?" tweeted Wright today. "They just lifted it from my blog without asking. And cut off the entire end section about my last meeting with him … I'm not talking about quotes. Am talking about the entire article. But with edits they made that make me look ill informed and unfeeling … Perhaps they would like to send the fee they would pay the commissioned writer of such an article to Edward's memorial... ." Media Monkey

Grosso modo: To what extent are news organizations like the Times trapped in a print publisher's economic model (and, btw, of news) that is already on its way towards being outmoded? And if that's the case, how can they be relied upon to provide us with news?

*via a Jarvis tweet

The magical mirror of consumer pricing, commodity enslavement, and unprepossessing fecklessness

A lot of recent books, films and other media commodities have lambasted corporations, often with eloquence and holy rage. (I'll append some later to this post-in-progress, but I should mention I've not read most of them).

Let's start with, there's something to be said for devices dedicated to accumulating wealth. And that is my definition of "corporation," for now. A corporation in USia is merely a mechanism whose entire function is to accumulate wealth, an enterprise that takes many enterprising forms.

I realize the definition is under-developed, but it has the virtue at least of ruling out the possibility of confusing such wealth attracting mechanisms with those entities who are envisioned, under the Constitution, as "men."

We USians have been very good at figuring out how to build these giant machines, how to manipulate them, and at discovering how they can further manipulate their environments to expand power, "brand," and control. They have made possible economic effects unimaginable in earlier ages (except perhaps at times of moments of massive slave labor) or within other, more regulated, national platforms. Without corporations, we'd still be pissing in the wind hoping it'll bring rain.

We have been rather less good at understanding that simply because something is good at something, that does not mean it's good at everything. Instead of seeing that there's a lot about corporations that, left to their own devices, will be destructive to life, liberty and the pursuit of whatever happiness money can't buy, we have caved to the gods of unregulated motion, and only now are beginning to glimpse some of the rewards of our craven largess. Many of the recent studies of the evils of corporations appear to make this argument in one form or another.

Someone recently said the USian economy is 70% consumer-driven. Let's just accept that for now. As we witness the debacle involving thousands of retailers throwing good merchandise at us at ludicrously low prices, pleading that we take their giant TVs, SUVs, Home Entertainment Centers, indoor dog restrooms and the like for next to nothing, (it's like an engine screaming millions of RPMs and getting no traction, like some sort of behaviorist experiment gone seriously awry "come on, little chinchilla, you liked your dopamine + testosterone + meth shot before, have your 5 millionth dose of pleasure" [vide supra]), we, lacking money, jobs, healthcare, communally centered systems of value, practice and security, grow pale, bloodless, and dumb.

I want to look at an aspect of the "consumer-driven economy" that I, haven't seen explored (perhaps because I'm an entirely unlettered non-student of economics).

The thought occurred to me today as I listened to a tape of the late Ted Kennedy, in a radio interview, talking about the out-of-control way in which corporate interests use money to influence elections:

...at this present time people say, look, I don't want my tax money used into politics. They just don't want it, but at the end of the day they're getting it because they're paying for it with these lobbying activities. And it's something that, as I have said too often, we're getting the best Congress that money can buy, and I think it's a real disgrace. link

Kennedy is noting something that we all know, but that we resist acknowledging at too intelligent a level: When we avoid using money directly for public purposes, our money gets used indirectly to subvert public purposes.



The particular transaction of interest here is the consumer's purchase of a product. When a new product hits the market, its price is a compound reflection of the costs that put it there - materials, labor, marketing, transport, etc. When we buy products, we make them whole -- we pay for the recovery of those costs. The price re-presents a stacked set of various kinds of purposively organized activities, energies and materials laid out with the promise of redemption upon the consuming of the commodity.

It's naive to assume a simple or direct relation of price to costs in a capitalist system. Let's face it, the sellers (vendors, supply chain, point of sale etc) all have to take their piece, it's what justifies -- or at least enables -- their being there at all. Like a magical mirror, price "reflects" certain costs, and it conceals certain surpluses. The same number is both an indicator of certain actual cost values and a misdirecting gesture hiding an uncertain quintessence of value.

What specifically interests me is the engagement of this quintessence in the logistics of brand power. Because it's clear that in the end, a brand becomes Huge Brand by exerting power over the marketplace and the "consumers." How does it acquire that dominance?

In part through marketing. In part, as well, through rear-guard actions that do everything possible to defeat litigation, defuse interest in competitors, and defeat any contenders to brand supremacy. Or maybe that's still marketing?

Now, the dollars for marketing come from the consumer. They're built into the price structure. So when we "buy a product," we're not simply buying a product. We are entering into a complex campaign, a campaign which may not be in our best interest, particularly when, for example, it uses our dollars to pay certain officials to look the other way in certain unfortunate product liability situations.

This suggests that in typical commodity transactions, "price" isn't a simple compound of representation and concealment. It's a conflicted engagement of the interests of "the consumer." We are paying in part for the power of the seller to deceive us as to the value, or liability, of the thing we're buying. An enforced collusion, resulting from a delusion of innocence. Of course we're innocent -- how could we possibly know?

The purchase of a commodity then is itself a battleground that comes complete with its own potential conflict of interest. We are investing in the power of the corporate seller to gain ascendance over the market. As the corporation's power increases, we are left with less market command: less reliable information and fewer choices -- products that tend to cost more, and are probably less well made.

Or could it actually be worse than a conflict of interest? Because as we continue to buy what we are sold, we should try not to forget that corporations, according to our current world view, are also citizens.(1) These civic actors network with elected representatives, trade groups, and regulators to assume more power over the market, over the range of choices, over the regulatory system, over who gets elected to rule.

Thus their costs include large expenditures for contributions to media campaigns, for lobbying efforts, and presumably for all sorts of less visible effects.

In order to have the wherewithall to spend on buying houses of congress, corporations need to generate ever larger surpluses. Pricing has to include costs to the end user that pay for the agents charged with diverting lawmakers from the Public Interest to private interests, in order to guarantee that prices can be set to incorporate larger "citizenly costs" with impunity.

This is known as "building brand."

As we (consumers) buy commodities, we lose freedom, cede power. Markets narrow, monopolies grow stronger, brands appear on shirts, skin, and soon, doubtless, on DNA.



Put another way: built into the pricing of the commodities that corporate citizens sell is a component which is allocated to the abridgment of our rights as citizens. Brands build in part by deforming marketplaces, depreciating the quality of your engagement while appreciating theirs.

I suspect it's this claustrophobic predicament that causes USians to feel helpless, dull, powerless. Every day in every way, we pay. For the privilege of our own expropriation.

The economy is indeed consumer-driven, only the consumers are posing as corporate citizens. We who were supposed to be the citizens are merely the consumed.




(1) A corporation is legally a citizen of the state (or other jurisdiction) in which it is incorporated. #

Cognitive blindness

Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves Dept.: The more I look at it, the more it seems that the reason most USians do not have a problem with a patently schizoid internet economy (all $$ to Big Pipe, $0.00 to Content) is that they don't see it. Things that serve merely a use value function are green-screened out in the USian Capitalist, branded, techno-social economic delusion. If it ain't a snazzy business model complete with huge brand and tits, it n'existe pas.

Business Model

Prof. Pluggy explains it all to you

The old man is sound, hearing. Lear, ear. The daughter is the image, what is seen. The father insists on words: he has specific things he wants to hear. But the daughter will say only "nothing." Link

I know less about economics than Godard did about King Lear:

I would have thought that there was something I was missing if Sellars had not told me that Godard had in fact never read King Lear.

That didn't stop him him. Therefore I humbly offer my solution to two conundra of the current Internet economic predicament. Which, in brief, is:

This is one of Godard's many films in which he attempts to reconfigure the cinema from a razed ground zero.

Zero Re-set

On one side, the USian telcos and ILECs -- the service providers, in short -- are raking in huge bucks for essentially doing nothing except enjoying Proprietorship of the Pipes. They are the Landlords of the IntarTubes. Now, granted there were some costs associated with putting those pipes in, and turning on their systems, and selling them to a generous assortment of would-be content creators, thieves, and middlemen. And a few customers. If these costs haven't been recovered by now, some stockholders ought to be asking why. So for doing pretty much nothing beyond maintaining their system, and (some expansion where they see fit), yer lordships be making billion$ every quarter.

Professor Pluggy might be an absurd concoction — a cinematic prophet with hair made of audio-visual cables, a cigar perpetually in his mouth, and a mumbled, slurred diction that makes him sound like he's narrating the film while eating breakfast — but he's the one who introduces Shakespeare's descendant to the idea of the image.

This is not enough, however, for the telcos. In the movie they're making of reality, they get to charge customers for the privilege of using free capacity on their systems. Free to the telcos. Unused part of the band. By limiting text messages to 160 bits, it costs virtually nothing to let trillions of text messages swim through the vasty and deep inane of their pipes.

The image shows, unequivocally, Shaksper meeting Edgar, but the voiceover suggests something stranger, something surreal and impossible to visualize: Shaksper meeting Edgar and a girl who isn't there.

Essentially the landlords are charging us tenants to write to each other even though it costs them nothing when we do so.

1. "Lear: Speak.
2. Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
3. Lear: Nothing?
4. Cordelia: Nothing.
5. Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again."

The landlords, not unlike Mr. Bernanke and Señor Tetragrammaton, have mastered creation ex nihilo.

.

On the other side, the tenants are freely appropriating tons of alleged intellectual "property" in the form of mp3s etc., except in this case, other landlords, such as the RIAA, are not afraid to use the courts to collect their pound of Mr. Tenenbaum.

Norman Mailer: I knew Godard was going to destroy any script I wrote for King Lear; he hated scripts. He considered them his personal antagonist. But it was worth it. So I wrote a script of King Lear, which I called Don Learo. Godard and I got along 24 hours before we went our separate ways. I will say, for the record, he may be the second or third most awful man I've met in my life. And that's saying a lot."

So, in brief, I propose a return to good form, say, a cutaway two and a half somersault half-twist. The Telcos will continue to charge the texters for using nothing and paying something. The profits realized from this bonanza will be put into a {{{{pool}}}} to supplement the paying of nothing for the alleged IntelProp something. Kind of like hair plugs. Any time Mr. Tenenbaum steals a song he happens to like, some record co. executive with bad hair gets $.0007 from the proceeds of the Telcos' movie about texting.

"I don't know if I made this clear before, but this was after Chernobyl."

You can gaze, but you can't see

[cleaned up a bit to make, hopefully, clearer]

Part of the reason the current frantic scribbling about US journalism's prospects of economic dissolution seems arid, tepid and inconsequential is that it takes place within the same tidy, unreal frame in which news is conventionally represented as taking place. Now that the framers of the journalistic gaze are turning it upon itself their own predicament, they're missing the boat. (Sonderman good on this here and here. I attempt to describe the invisible vessel here and here).

Our hypothesis: Content providers have been working on the plantations without making a nickle from the plantation owners - the ILECS - who rake in profits driven by the labor of the content creators.

What is noteworthy, and indisputable, is that very little of what is contained in the frames of the gazers listed below can be found anywhere in USian media (other than Democracy Now) - even now, after all the economic lies that have been exposed. What do USian journalists read, anyway? There's a form of transparency I'd love to see. Do they ever read actual critique?

A brief supplemental reading list, from here:

Michael Parenti: The Hypocrisies of Capitalism
Nena Baker: The Body Toxic
Raj Patel: Stuffed & Starved
Maude Barlow: Peak Water
Vandana Shiva: On Gandhi
David Suzuki: Betraying Nature
Bill McKibben: Climate Change: Tipping Point
Ralph Nader: The Politics of Health Care
Paul Roberts: Food System in Danger
Satya Sivaraman: Human Rights in India: Binayak Sen
Robert McChesney: Journalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Arun Gupta: Banksta Capitalism

Haque and Doc on news, evolution, and bucks

Attention to the dire straits of news as insolvent, failing enterprise and what to do about it goes on. Interesting discussions include that of Umair Haque, who suggests that nichepapers may provide a clue to how content can make money in the future. He makes a distinction between news - the commodity that is immediately available everywhere when something "newsworthy" (Michael Jackson dies) happens and knowledge, which is "meaningful" and "lasting."

Doc comments on Haque, offering a tantalizing suggestion about how the new news is larval, how it pixellates via many witnesses and sources, and how this may over time evolve into something rich and strange.

The results paint a mosaic, or perhaps even a pointillist, picture of news sourced, reported, and re-reported by many different people, organizations and means. These are each portraits of an emerging ecosystem within which newspapers must adapt of die.

Where Haque is looking at the hierarchic depth of knowledge as gleaned from informed sources by discerning journalists, Doc is watching the world scan itself, reacting with almost a visceral immanence, seismically, to events. Twitter picks them up and gossip bubbles up.

Somewhere between Doc and Haque may lie some future -- place? medium? manner? -- of instant information channeled and built into useful knowledge.

One thing both writers speak to, but implicitly, I think, is the current complexity of what is now knowable as news. Newspapers can still position themselves as significant cullers of local news and information useful and desired by their local audiences. But no single newspaper can hope to match the scale and complexity of the Internet as a sensorium resonating with the quickening awareness, wit, and free comment, learned or ignorant, moving all around us. Nor can any modality other than the Net contend with the complexity and intricacy of, say, the Federal Government or Organized Crime in all their tentacular scope.

Rather than compete with the Net, newspapers - no, news organizations - will need to adapt and work with it. Haque and Doc are both saying this, but I'm emphasizing the evident difference imposed by scale that makes this not an option, but a new norm. This is why TV studio local news has become nothing more than a joke - its simplicity beggars belief in a networked world of information.

But the other side of this - how to make a profit - is still unclear in Haque and Doc. According to Haque, successful nichepapers like HuffPo are indicators of how money is made:

"What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness."

I'm less persuaded that content alone, no matter how stunning or seductive, can establish reliable, viable earnings. Which is why I have been trying to formulate one simple observation -- that we who use the Internet think of the Net as both mechanism and mind - pipes and content. We believe that when we've paid our Internet Service Provider, we've done our share. The stuff we find when we connect is what we have already paid for.

Only, the corporate "owners" of the pipes do not see it this way. They make a clear distinction between pipes and content (and then proceed, if they're Verizon or Comcast, to offer miserable excuses for content), and tell us we are only paying for the pipes.

What strikes me in all the discussions, white papers, and bloggery among journalists and commentators is, they apparently buy this hokum -- hook, line, sinker, and mouse turd. Not once have I seen the savvy content gurus suggest that the money we end users intend for content is all being waylaid, ripped off, by the pipe guys. Somewhere back in the day when the pipes were being laid, there was a logical moment when Big Pipe had to think: "What if no one puts any content out there? Then who will use our infrastructure?"

Fortunately for Big Pipe, no content provider apparently ever raised the issue with them, saying, in effect, "That's a nice pipe you've got there - want some content? Let's make a deal."

That deal has yet to be made. The discussion involving the economics of content seems trapped inside Flatland's notion of content. They extrapolate from antique models of moneymaking and apply them to the future, instead of journalistically analyzing the lie they've all been fed, and all believe, that the Internet can, in the eyes of its paying customers, be divided neatly into monthly infrastructure charges on the one hand, and then, on top of that, an infinity of charges to the same customers for the privilege of reading or seeing anything.

My $.02 is that this entire economic system of the Net has to be revisited. The mega profits generated and hoarded by Verizon, Comcast and their keiretsu buddies needs to be shared with content makers -- not just with news, but with anyone doing worthwhile stuff. This is what I've been trying to speak to in recent posts here, as you'll see if you scroll down.

My proposal (caution: Language!) recommends creating an independent pool of funds generated from the income streams of the ISPs or ILECs -- funds which then can be shared among providers of content via an equitable micropayment system.

I don't mean to imply this is the way it must be. I'm saying that I've yet to see any economics of content - including that of David Simon - that makes better sense by leaving out the economics of the totality, which includes the infrastructure. I'll be happy to be pointed to a better idea.