Middle ages

The middle ages were, for most people, a vast improvement over the axial age. The collapse of empire broke the war/bullion/slavery complex. This also lead to increased political stability, and a localization of political power. The abandonment of the cities meant that each agricultural worker has less mouths to feed. Farm productivity also improved. Coinage evaporated, but the law codes imply a fairly strong credit-based market emerged.

Slavery was widely abolished during this period, not to be re-instituted until the colonial age.

A side question-- where did all the coins go? In India at least, they went into the temples and were melted down to make statues and gilding. Thus to re-create them, an (evil) emperor would have to melt down holy items. Which some did, of course.

coinage and spirituality.

The concept that spirit and flesh were separate seems to emerge with coinage. A tree is living thing, but can be abstracted as wood, which carpentry can turn into a chair, or some other object. A coin is even more abstract, since it turns metal into a collective promise. All in the community agree to accept it, making it transmutable into anything.

Thus peace and community are not things which emerge spontaniously, but need to be stamped onto our baser material nature, just as divine insignia stamped into a block of metal turn it into money. Yet what is money?

Graeber adds that the revolution in spirituality which coincided with the introduction of coinage was NOT the introduction of the concept of a spiritual realm, but rather the introduction of the material realm.

The axial age (800 bc-600 ad)

The name comes from Karl Jaspers, German philosopher. The axial age behind with Zoroaster, and Graeber ends it with the death of Mohammed in 632.

Pythagoras, Buddah, and Confucius all lived at the same time, 570-480 bc. The early iron age was a pause between empires, when the world was a chequerboard of diminutive kingdoms and city states. Externally at war, internally filed with political debate, and the formation of dropout culture.

For the first time, the great questions were investigated with reasoned inquiry. And no new philosophical ideas have been added since.

The trinity of philosophers was matched by the development of coinage. Metal moved out of the great storehouses of temples and kings, was broken into tiny pieces, and into everyday use. Why? War.

Coins to pay mercenaries, gold looted by soldiers... The phoenicians, the great merchants, resisted coinage for centuries.

Credit vs bullion

Gold can be distinguished from credit by one essential feature. It can be stolen. More seriously, it requires less trust and less commitment. Hard currency predominates in uncertain times.

Graeber describes long cycles which alternate between virtual and metal money.
3500-800 bc. Credit. Early agrarian empires.
800 bc-600 ad. Metal. Axial age, the rise of coinage.
600-1450 ad. Credit. Middle ages.
1450-1971. Metal. Capitalist empires.

Liberty

Is it the right to do as one will? Our the right to enter into relationships with others?

If the first, then as I own my body, am I my own slave?

Mesopotamia

In early Sumerian society, 3000-2500 bc, women have status roughly equivalent to today. They are well represented in the ranks of all professions, including rulers. Over the next millenia, all this is lost.

War, states, and markets all feed off each other, creating debt, which turns human relationships into commodities. no man wants to see this happen to his women (wife/sister/daughter) and moves to protect them and mark them as not for sale.

Market vs human economies

A human economy is an economic system primarily concerned with the creation, destruction, and rearrangement of humans. By contrast, a market economy is primarily concerned with gathering wealth.

Maker economies are a relatively new idea.

An ancient use of "money" is to "buy" a bride.  But this is not an ordinary purchase. Rather, the price paid can be seen as an acknowledgment of an unpayable debt. Only another woman is worth a woman. The same with bloodgeld, which, coincidently, often is about the same as brideprice.

These original forms of money are usually closely linked to items of adornment, the clothes which turn a naked body into a social being.

When a market economy meets a human economy, and esp when the market economy is both militarily superior and needs cheap labour, the human economy is turned into a mechanism to produce slaves, generally via these same unpayable debts.

The moral grounds of economic relations

Fundamental moral principles are invoked whenever items are exchanged. The difficulty is that these principles contradict each other. Moral though is founded on this tension.

Reciprocity, justice as a set of scales, is a prime motive of the moral life. Yet when a debt is paid, the two parties can part ways. The relationship is severed. Reciprocity also assumes equality between the two parties, which is not true for many moral relationships.

Graeber proposes 3 main moral principles which can support economic relationships: communism, hierarchy, and exchange.

Communism: common ownership and common management of collective resources. Sharing. No accounts are kept. And it is more than morality, shared pleasures are superior.
Baseline communism is the raw material of society. At this level, reciprocity is vague at best, but mutual responsibility is absolute.

Exchange: a process of interaction tending towards equivalence, in which each side is striving for advantage or to outdo the other. There is no long term commitment. The parties are also equals, and autonomous.

Hierarchy: based on clear lines of superiority. Precedent is the rule. Items or services exchanged are not presumed to be of equal value, nor is it even possible to compare their values.

Side note: the nanny state has its basis in conquest.

re: immorality of debt

Hi, Glenn-
What you say about Nietzche is interesting. I am also seeing a new relevance to Marx's predictions on the accumulation of more & more capital in fewer & fewer hands, leading to a crisis of overproduction as the 98% left out don't have enough money to buy what the system produces, which seems to be the direction in which we are heading.

Immorality of debt

I am linking you to another article which explores my "immorality of debt" hypothesis, the article I probably never will write. Sigh. A quick quote:
"Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that all morality was founded upon the extraction of debt under the threat of violence. The sense of obligation instilled in the debtor was, for Nietzsche, the origin of civilisation itself."

So the big N has returned to the equation. Hard to get away from his pernacious influence.

The article is here, and the answer to the question in the title is (more or less) TRUE (though more less than more), and also the asking of the question is why I want to write the immorality of debt article.

Ah, the link:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/08/are-most-americans-debt-slaves/

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

Immorality of debt

More inspiration for the paper I wish I had time to write on this!!

David Graeber interview

First comes gift-giving (which creates reciprical obligation). This becomes encoded in debt, which leads to money. Barter only comes later.

The old myth is that barter came first, then money. Rebuttal: "Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade."

DRAFT-- (im)morality of debt

This is an idea I wish to develop more.

Posting an early draft version, full of flaws

The morality of US debt

I did a favor for someone recently, which involved money. They thanked me and said they didn't know how they would ever repay me. I said getting the money back would be enough.

Debt. It is essential to social function, to a functioning society. But even more important than debt is debt forgiveness, redemption. Debt is obligation, debt is bondage, and ultimately, debt is slavery.

Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, writing in the Boston Review in 2005, discuss the sorry state of middle America's finances. There seems to be a cry from the right wing and from banks that this is middle America's fault, that if only they weren't so consumer crazy, always buying the latest and best fasion and gadgets, all the while living beyond their means, then they would be in better shape. The cry was turned into a major re-write of bankrupcy laws, laws which were in essence written by the lenders.


But the data does not show that Americans are overspending, in fact they spend less of their income on food/restaurants, clothes, appliances, cars, etc. then they did in the 70's. Instead, they face higher costs, for taxes, health insurance, child care.

http://bostonreview.net/BR30.5/warrentyagi.php

My neice was unemployed for a period of some months. She doesn't have a savings built up because she is young, having just graduated college, and hasn't had time. So she lived off her credit card. Irresponsible? I hardly think so. The bank charged her 24% interest on the credit card loan. How do you repay a debt which has an interest rate of 24%? Who is acting immorally here? In her defense, the debt has been repaid, along with the usurious and exploitative interest charges.


And wait a minute, wasn't it these same prophets of the right who encourage middle America to spend? Who was it who urged us, as our 'patriotic duty', to go shopping after 9-11? Since when did consumption become a patriotic duty?

That question has, in fact, been answered in the great BBC documentary 'The Century of the Self'. This describes how the industrial revolution lead to excess of capacity, threatening the foundations of the industrial society, and, more importantly, the bank balances of its leaders. Something had to be done. Something was done. Advertising convinced us that the route to personal fulfillment was through buying things. This is a message which is continually rammed down our throat, in ever sophistocated means. It is, in fact, a precept. If we measure a country's growth in terms of GNP, then GNP must increase each year, which can only happen if consumption also increases each year. Our economy is built on a model of continually and exponentially growning consumption.

Whenever the right wing gets moralistic, they turn to Christianity to back themselves. This is quite odd when applied to debt. One wonders what would happen if they prayed the Lord's prayer, the way Jesus taught us we are supposed to pray. "Forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. But was Jesus talking about money here? Well, yes, he actually did have a few parables about people who owed money. Nor should we forget the Year of Jubilee, as decreed by God the Father, during which all financial debts are forgiven. Certainly the debts in the Lord's prayer are more than financial, but just as certainly they do not exclude the financial.

And at this point it is also instructive to think about where all this money which we supposedly owe comes from. Did the banks take from their hard-earned resources, which they had carefully built and saved over the years, and risk them to help us? Not hardly. Thanks to the glory of fractional reserve banking (and yes, this is a good thing), the money is, in fact, something they just made up.

And didn't we, in fact, just spend billions (or was it more) of OUR money, earned by the sweat of our brow, via our taxes (remember that the ultra rich and the corporations do not pay tax, only middle America), to bail out these banks?

Something is very wrong with the Repulican party