----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
At some companies they've replaced time cards with thingamajigs that check your DNA. No one can punch in for a late friend.
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>From the last few pages of "Debt: the last 500 years"
....the legacy of violence has twisted everything around us. War, conquest, and slavery not only played the central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected....even our conceptions of "freedom" itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power.... [this] is only the most dramatic instance--and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like.
If this book has shown anything, it's exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a stituation where it's even possible to imagine that that's what life is really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it. As I've emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations--that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call "love"-- but there's always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy ubilt on top of it. These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous. Still, what we are speaking of here [capitalism] is a very particular type of calculating exchange. As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor, and owing someone a debt, is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demans equivalence. And such equivalence--especially when it involves equivalence between human beings...---only seems to ocur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: "seven martin skils and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother"....
This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets orginate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the conomists' way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it. But even a moment's reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver -- melted down, in most cases from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women's ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history--could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, "smart bombs" from unmanned drones.
....Just as markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different: into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion condstantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers again. In doing so, they make it possible to imagine a world that is nothing more than a series of cold-blooded calculations. Even more, by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very foundations of our being--since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others--into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will anihilate everything.
[snip]
Joanna