You're really into something here. Your timing here in impeccable, as I am currently working on a review of Graeber's Debt. The failure here is seeing debt as a transhistorical, moral phenomenon rather than viewing it -- along with money supply, etc -- as distinctly *political* decisions rendered by a given society (or ruling minority) about how to create and allocate a social surplus through production of credit money supply and physical production. Viewed in this way -- credit money as a social and political existence -- we see how little control the average person has in rendering these decisions. This should be the operative conclusion coming from analysis surrounding issues of debt under capitalism.
There is so much more to say here. I'm interested in other's thoughts on this.
-Adam
Sent from my iPhone
On May 2, 2012, at 1:43 PM, "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Below is a post I received off list in reference to a debate on pen-l on how
> banks do or don't "create money"; the subject line there was: "FW: [Pen-l]
> Paul Krugman, Steve Keen and the mysticism of Keynesian economics"
>
> ******* I think there is a deeply normative argument, being ignored by those
> blogging post-keynesian monetary theory and it's rivals, behind the schools
> of thought trying to determine which theory has the one true account of how
> money is created and diffused across the globe.
>
> This normative argument, or rather deep angst that people are afraid of
> politicizing via normative argument just yet, is that the radically
> asymmetric power to create money is at the same time a radically asymmetric
> power to create what are, ultimately, political obligations.
>
> I take it that is part of the reason David Graeber's book is gaining an
> audience; there is now a massive obligation to pay money, by the sweat of
> one's brow, to people who've done nothing more than to write fancy contracts
> and make entries on spreadsheets that reside in server farms distributed
> across the planet. Such obligation inflation, compounded daily, monthly and
> yearly, leads to a hyperinflation of unfreedoms. How can such duty inflation
> not lead to an authoritarian nightmare of monetary surveillance? We see it
> already in the demands for all kinds of means testing for those who receive
> minimal government assistance and millions toiling for pittances while
> working 12-14 hours a day or more just to pay their bills, with no escape
> from the monetary treadmill in sight. This so-called wage enslavement is not
> a moral problem, it is, along with how to adapt to weird weather on a
> warming planet, the deepest political problem of this century. In that sense
> Carrol, via Rosa Luxemburg, is completely correct.
>
> Have a nice day, *****
>
> *******
>
> The reference is to a paragraph in my response on a seaparte thread.
>
> ****** I would only add that one need not be a Marxist, and arguing from the
> positions of Marx, Luxemburg, Tamás, & Postone to reach similar conclusions
> about capitalism and the necessity to abolish it. It is necessary, however,
> to reject the 19th-c bourgeois Idea of Progress, an ideology which disarms
> struggle by assuming that "History will do it for us." Hence the relevance
> of one of Mao's remarks: If you don't hit it, it won't fall. *****
>
> I've acquired the audio version of graeber's book, and have listened to most
> of the Preface. Even there, Graeber's historicism is glaring, even
> disabling, but I think we should all read the book for the reason the post
> quoted above gives. In this Year 2 of Wisconsin, campaigns for debt
> cancellation are coming to the fore, and this book should be of aid in those
> campaigns.
>
> Carrol
>
> Third Post Today
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk