Thoughts on David Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’

I finally finished this book after reading it on and off for months. First, I'll say this is a very unsettling book. By this, I mean it makes you think again about things you thought you knew already, and can't be easily assimilated into an existing worldview. For that reason alone, it's worth reading.

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 3, 2012

What follows isn't really a review, but some thoughts on some of the concepts put forward and ideas raised in the book. Nor am I going to summarise the arc of the book's main arguments. If you've no idea what the book is about, there's a summary by Graeber here, an interview about it here, and a smack-down on some free-market critics here which give a pretty good idea.

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today. - David Graeber, Debt

Communism, exchange and hierarchy

The first thing I'd like to pick up on is Graeber's claim that all societies are a configuration of three fundamental organisational/moral principles: communism, exchange and hierarchy. What Graeber calls 'baseline communism', the giving according to abilities and receiving according to needs, is he claims, the "the foundation of all human sociability", the very condition of possibility of society itself. He writes that "The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so." I like this formulation, and it echoes a line a line of argument I made in the libcom vs parecon debate. But there's a sting in the tail. By the same token, Graeber argues that this is rarely the whole story, and there's a tendency for communism to slide into other forms of society.

These involve exchange and hierarchy. Exchange, for Graeber, implies equality between the parties. But it doesn't necessarily mean commodity exchange, i.e. the obligation isn't necessarily quantified. So in many stateless, non-commercial societies, you simply admire the thing you want ('What a lovely pig!') and the possessor makes a gift of it. You don't owe a pig in return, but an obligation of roughly equivalent status (Graeber says there are broad categories of object, e.g. everyday objects and sacred objects, which aren't commensurable with each other). So for example, Marcel Mauss' work on 'The Gift' explores this kind of exchange. Commercial, market exchange, is of course something we're familiar with. The difference between the two is the difference between 'cheers mate, I owe you one' and 'thank you shopkeeper I owe you £1'. Furthermore, the temporal disjunction in gift exchange creates 'debts'1 and therefore social bonds and solidarity, whereas the immediacy of commercial exchange creates no ongoing obligations, and is therefore the form of exchange appropriate for strangers - or enemies. So for example, stateless societies have often been communistic internally, but practised forms of gift exchange in their relations with other groups. Graeber explores this in some detail, which I won't repeat here.

Finally, hierarchy. Hierarchy is not necessarily the formal hierarchy of organised violence of the state, but may also be informal and based on status. Graeber, following Mauss, argues that gift exchange is often a competitive contest for status, with the party who gives the most attaining the highest status. It is in this sense that purely communistic societies are always prone to these alternative moral logics, which could transform a communistic society into something else if not kept in check (this is part of the role of ritual in 'primitive' societies, which it turns out, are in fact rather complex). So for example, communistic relations apply to the in-group, but that has never (yet!) been all humanity. Between in-groups, exchange arises, and this carries with it the tendency to hierarchy. There are other permutations, but this is the kind of analysis these concepts give rise to. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, but I do think it's highly thought-provoking. I also suspect Graeber is playing a double-move given the US context: first establishing that communism is the ever-present basis of society, then playing down the idea of a communist society. In the context of 'communism' being a dirty word, this may well be a tactical move to provoke US readers (and others) into rethinking what communism is, and perhaps warming to it, without having to admit to being 'commies'.

The distinction between ‘human economies’ and ‘commercial economies’

The second thing I want to pick up on is Graeber's conceptual distinction between 'human economies' and 'commercial economies'.

Graeber

Often, these currencies [yams, shovels, pigs, jewellery] were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.” By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

By contrast, "historically, commercial economies — market economies, as we now like to call them — are a relative newcomer." I think this distinction is quite an interesting one, and in many ways parallels Marx's notion of 'commodity fetishism', with commercial economies being those where "the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things." (Karl Marx). In other words, commercial societies, specifically capitalism, pose a fundamental ontological inversion, where "capital subjectivizes itself through the subordination of human ends and purposes to its own self-expansion. Like a vampire, it is dead labour preying on the living." This inhuman force then governs and restructures social life (though not without resistance). Communism then, from a libertarian communist perspective, would be something like seizing back control of society from this inhuman force, and instantiating social relations based on human beings and our needs. In Graeber's terminology, libertarian communism would be a form of human economy (as well as perhaps the movement that prefigures it).

However, Graeber also makes what I imagine will be a controversial argument about Medieval Islam and free markets. Throughout the book, Graeber points out that the common sense view of 'market' and 'state' as diametrically opposing forces is false, and that "historical reality reveals (...) they were born together and have always been intertwined." Consequently, he is dismissive of the economists' idea of the free market, since markets are underpinned by state force, and historically were created by state action (typically taxation to raise armies to wage war). However, in Medieval Islam, Graeber does identify something like a true free market, that is, a market without any state involvement. But here, without the force of the state, the only guarantee for commercial activity is honour and trust. In the absence of coercion, market relations tend to be reabsorbed in the web of social relations, a 'moral economy', regulated by custom and reputation, and thus based more on co-operation than competition. Thus, paraphrasing the work of the Islamic scholar Tusi (1201-1274 AD), he writes that:

Graeber

The market is simply one manifestation of this more general principle of mutual aid, of the matching of abilities (supply) and needs (demand) - or to translate it into my earlier terms, it is not only founded on, but is itself an extension of the kind of baseline communism on which any society must ultimately rest.

This is certainly a provocative argument: markets are communist! To be clear, this is not Graeber's argument, so much as his summary of Tusi's. However, it isn't as paradoxical as it sounds. Graeber's argument is that without state power, commercial economies tend to revert to more human ones, with honour, trust, mutual aid and co-operation replacing coercion and competition (more on this below). I also suspect there's a hint of provocation here to the US right: finding the only example of functioning 'free markets' in the writings of Islamic scribes. There's also a hint of Karl Polanyi's 'double movement', where the 'self-regulating market' comes up against a counter-movement to subordinate it to social needs (Karl Polanyi, from page 88 of the pdf). I'll pick up on some of the implications of this below.

Marx, critique and utopia

David Graeber

Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we do start from the economists’ utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but their brains and bodies, the results will be in many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself. What everyone seems to forget is the “as if” nature of his analysis. Marx was well aware that there were far more bootblacks, prostitutes, butlers, soldiers, pedlars, chimneysweeps, flower girls, street musicians, convicts, nannies, and cab drivers in the London of his day than there were factory workers. He was never suggesting that that’s what the world was actually like.

The final point I want to pick up on is Graeber’s reading of Marx. Graeber is at pains to point out that Marx's Capital is not a critique of actually-existing capitalism, but a critique of the capitalist utopia imagined by the political economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo and so on). He even goes as far as to claim capitalism is not in fact based on wage labour. Now, few if any posters on libcom would have a closed, economistic reading of Marx. After all, we all know that Marx was writing a critique of political economy and not 'economics': he was critiquing the claims made by capitalism's ideological supporters, not claiming to describe how capitalism actually works. Implicit in Graeber's argument seems to be the idea that Marx's immanent critique needs to be supplemented by an external critique in order to properly situate and understand actually-existing capitalism and its relationship to other social formations. An anthropological perspective, and some of the conceptual distinctions discussed above, are a way of doing that.

What does this mean for our understanding of capitalism? I contend that plenty of us on libcom, and I've certainly been guilty of this, do tend to take Marx as describing actually-existing capitalism even when we know otherwise. Now in a sense, I think this is in part because Capital does do this (e.g. Marx's lengthy quotes from newspapers and parliamentary reports into working conditions are describing real-world capitalism, not the utopia of the political economists). But to the extent we take Marx as criticising actually existing capitalism, we also implicitly accept the political economists reductive, bourgeois assumptions about human beings and society, assumptions which Marx only provisionally adopts in order to explode political economy from within. Why, for example, would we think 'the tendency of the rate of profit to fall' could explain the current crisis, unless we thought Marx's Capital described actually-existing capitalism? I think there's several implications to this, though I've yet to fully work through them all.

First, in taking Marx's Capital as a critique of actually-existing capitalism, we could well be overstating the power of capital (and thus understating our own power). For example, the arc of Marx's Capital begins with commodities and shows how commodification implies class society. There's a tendency to deduce therefore, that any time anything exchanges for a price, capitalism will be reproduced, rising vampire-like from the dead to once more suck the blood of the living. Graeber sees it very differently. In the absence of state power, market exchanges tend not to give rise to the inhuman monster of capital (markets, and even wage labour, after all, have existed far longer than capitalism), but rather tend to be re-absorbed into a moral economy of a human society, a society to which Marx's account doesn't apply (e.g. Graeber's example of Islamic 'free markets' discussed above).

The consequence is significant. Rather than seeing every exchange for a price as the seed of a resurgent capitalism, Graeber sees exchange as tending towards being embedded in social relations and a moral economy unless this is actively prevented from happening by state power. So in this sense, something like a 'free market' anarchism wouldn't resemble a commercial market at all, but something closer to a gift economy, with everyone taking what they need on trust then settling up in periodic 'reckonings', with account taken for inability to pay.

To be clear, Graeber does not advance this as his favoured society, and my description is drawn from his discussion of the village economies of Medieval England (which he cautions not to idealise). But nonetheless, the implication is that by ignoring the tendency of human society to reabsorb commercial relations into social ones, to ignore "religious ideas, ethical concepts, customs, habits, traditions, legal opinions" as well as the more familiar "political organisations, institutions of property, forms of production, and so on" (Rudolf Rocker), we overstate the resilience and durability of capitalism. In other words, without an anthropological perspective, we tend to over-state the power of 'the market' and the naturalness of capitalism, even while we think we're critiquing it (a form of capitalist realism, perhaps?). An unsettling thought.

If we accept this line of argument, it would suggest we could be worrying too much about things that look too much like commodity exchange leading to the restoration of capitalism (e.g. the various alternative currencies during Argentina's economic crisis of 2001, or the voucher systems used in parts of revolutionary Catalonia in 1936). Rather, it is state power which is pivotal in reconstituting these exchange systems into commercial, commodity markets rather than them being reabsorbed into webs of social relations based on needs, mutual aid and so on. I'm not sure what I make of this, but it's an intriguing reversal of conventional libcom wisdom. Rather than capital being the all-powerful hydra that regenerates from the smallest stumps of market behaviour, rather all societies are based on a basic communism which threatens to assert itself whenever state power recedes, re-embedding markets into webs of mutual aid which could render the commodity form obsolete, superseded by direct social relations and bonds of honour and trust.2

Second, Graeber provocatively picks up on this to explain the current crisis. He argues that only while we could imagine capitalism as a historic system that had a beginning and must have an end was it possible for the cycle of boom and bust, and particularly for speculative bubbles of credit and debt, to function. Now that capitalist realism rules, the whole economy breaks down because the idea of endless expansion of debt makes everything go nuts:

Graeber

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

This is very closely bound up with Graeber's claim that "there is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist". The triumph of capitalism has rendered it dysfunctional. The expansion of debt is only tenable if it is considered to be finite. As soon as we think capitalism will last forever, it necessarily goes into crisis. And at the same time, we're running up against ecological limits... It takes an anthropologist to draw attention to the importance of beliefs, norms, customs and so on in understanding what economists claim is the hard science world of 'the markets'. I can't say I'm convinced by Graeber's specific diagnosis of a belief in eternal capitalism causing the global economic crisis. But again, it's a provocative thesis, and forces us to think about the role of culture and beliefs in determining economic processes, in addition to the more familiar approach of doing the opposite (either approach, alone, would be reductionist).

Finally then, Graeber offers one concrete proposal, in a book which is meant more to change paradigms than set out blueprints: a debt jubilee, i.e. a mass cancellation of debts to allow the system to start up again. This is inspired by the ancient Babylonian practice, which periodically saw debts wiped clean and debt-slaves released. Graeber even points out that the first recorded word for 'freedom' means literally 'return to mother', referring to the liberation of debt slaves during periodic jubilees. Frankly, it's quite a disappointing conclusion. For one thing, Graeber proposes debt cancellation (a policy to be implemented by those in power) and not a debt strike (a tactic to be employed by the powerless). I suspect this comes from academic habit. Even when I was at university, there was a pressure on students to frame arguments in 'policy relevant' terms, i.e. aimed at making suggestions to the ruling class. I suspect this pressure is even stronger on academics. All that said, the book does not aim at concrete tactical proposals and should not be judged on this basis. 'Debt' is a wide-ranging and provocative read which manages to be both accessibly written and intellectually challenging, and is certain to make all but the most hardened dogmatists re-examine things they thought they already knew.

  • 1The problems caused by quantifying and moneterising these debts is one of the main themes of the book.
  • 2The caveat here is the human society and moral economy wouldn’t necessarily be one libertarian communists would find desirable. As I’ve said, Graeber’s at pains to point out human societies are not necessarily humane societies. I guess this is where the importance of prefigurative struggles comes in: establishing the norms which will rule with the supersession of the state-market complex.

Comments

Cooked

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Cooked on January 3, 2012

Graeber is at pains to point out that Marx's Capital is not a critique of actually-existing capitalism, but a critique of the capitalist utopia imagined by the political economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo and so on).

I was always wondering if there was some consensus that Marx accidentally critiqued the real thing when he himself believed he was critiquing only the theories, of Smith etc.

Theoretical constructions like human organisations seem to have a will to lead independent lives according to their own logic.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 3, 2012

I'm no Marx expert, but it does seem to me Capital does both: critiques the categories of political economy, exploding them from within, whilst also using empirical evidence from actually existing capitalism to do so.

I guess that's only internally consistent if Marx believed political economy was in some sense correct (the same sense that commodity fetishism sees things as they really are). I think this probably is the case. Marx had a lot of respect for Ricardo iirc, and spent 12 years reading and researching political economy, which suggests he thought it was a serious body of literature with some explanatory power, rather than just bourgeois ideology.

However, 'orthodox' economistic Marxism then sees Marx as 'completing' the work of Ricardo et al. I think where an anthropological perspective is probably useful, and the concepts Graeber sets out may help here, is in reminding ourselves that Homo sapiens are not Homo economicus. While nobody on libcom explicitly thinks that, it's easy to lose sight of the breadth of human social possibilities and end up producing utopias which owe rather to much to capitalism (I argued Parecon is something of this type in the aforementioned debate).

In short, I want to read more anthropology.

Khawaga

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on January 4, 2012

If you want to read up on gift economy, I recommend Marurice Godelier's The Enigma of the Gift, in which he (briefly) critiques Marx belief in the possibility of dispelling the fetish. While the commodity's fetish might be dispelled, Godelier argues that what governs social relations and exchange is just as mystified in "primitive" societies.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 4, 2012

Cheers, I'll check that out. I'm also planning to finish reading Mauss' 'The Gift', and I want to re-read Bookchin's 'Ecology of Freedom' which goes into this kind of thing (and, iirc, critiques gift exchange as something done between strangers, from a communist perspective). After finishing this, I've also added Graeber's 'toward an anthropological theory of value' to my list... My ever-growing list.

Edit: Holy crap. I guess I'll be going for the second-hand paperback then. A seller with a sense of irony?

Khawaga

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on January 4, 2012

If you want to explore that stuff there's just loads. I recommend reading the classics. In addition to Mauss, there is Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Sahlin's Stone Age Economics, Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Gregory's Gifts and Commodities. And there's tons of ethnographies as well.

Graber's Anthro Theory of Value is interesting, well worth a read because he makes a very good overview and critique of theories of gift exchange.

I'll check Bookchin. Didn't remember he wrote about gift exchange.

Choccy

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Choccy on January 4, 2012

maybe start an anthropology reading guide?
I don't read much anthropology, but if I ever did it'd be a nice starting point ;)

david graeber

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by david graeber on January 4, 2012

That's a really thoughtful and wonderful discussion and above all else, I'd like to thank you for it.

About the Jubilee - for what it's worth, I am, even now, working on promoting a debt strike - that is, as an activist. I thought I was being vague, in proposing a Jubilee, on who would promulgate it or how it would be effected, but I guess you have a point that it ends up sounding like something that would be imposed by state power. I guess the scenario in the back of my mind was some sort of combination: either a debt strike, or a broad Argentina-style campaign of delegitimizing existing structures of political authority, would cause them to declare a debt cancellation to reestablish their legitimacy, in much the same way as Sumerian kings felt they had to do in the face of mass flight or passive resistance in order to prevent the collapse of their regimes. But really I wasn't thinking practically so much as conceptually, I wanted to introduce the notion of hitting the reset button, as it were, on all levels of society, not just revolutionaries but anyone willing to listen, as a way of reacting to economic crisis, since it struck me that doing so would open the door to far more radical challenges to capitalism further down the line.

By the way, in several of his other comments concerning my sense of audience, the reviewer is remarkably astute so I thought it might be nice to let him know it. Yes, I certainly did take a certain wicked pleasure in pointing out to the American Right that free market ideology - including many of the specific ideas and arguments of Adam Smith - not only traces back to Islam, but even, specifically, to sharia, which was after all in part civil commercial law not enforced by the state. I also was quite intentionally challenging popular conceptions of the term "communism" in just the way you describe. Well spotted!

Thanks again for the review.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 4, 2012

Ha, a lucky guess about the sense of audience I suppose. By complete coincidence, I came across this last night in a textbook of international relations key concepts...

IR: key concepts

When we examine different social formations and look for the method that each has used to orchestrate its material life, a pattern emerges. There are three basic methods of organisation: tradition, command and the market. In the modern world, every actual social formation is to some degree a mixture of all three organisational principles. Modern capitalism is a market-based social formation because the market is the primary organising principle, yet we can find plenty of examples of command and some examples of tradition even here. For example, you may select an occupation based on family traditions. Most farmers also have farmers for parents. And there are certainly elements of command in modern capitalism. Government commandeers, through taxation, the resources to provide for defence, a system of courts, education, and much of our infrastructure (such as roads and harbours). In extreme cases, such as major wars, government may commandeer labour directly through the military draft.

There's quite a long way between 'baseline communism' and 'tradition', but with 'command' (hierarchy) and 'the market' (exchange), an interesting and unexpected similarity. Fwiw, I think the triad set out in 'Debt' is much more useful, as 'tradition' could seemingly just as easily apply to traditional hierarchies (i.e command) or relations to the market (they use the example of trades within wage labour). 'Exchange' is also broader than 'the market', which is important in terms of not unduly naturalising capitalist relations. Being an IR textbook, it also doesn't see these organising principles as at the same time moral principles... but yeah, just a random coincidence I was reading this textbook just after writing this blog.

I'm still thinking through the uses of this kind of conceptual framework, but it does seem to have potential in exploring things like the emergence of informal hierarchies from egalitarian groups (tyranny of structurelessness etc), as well as looking at how alternative exchange systems/currencies can either be a trajectory away from commodity/market exchange or back towards it, depending on the context, use of state power, moral norms and so on. As a libertarian communist, these are pretty important questions, since they relate not just to the kind of society i'd like to live in but also the kind movement required to create it, and the pitfalls that might arise along the way.

Nate

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Nate on January 4, 2012

Thanks for another solid blog post J. I've not got around to reading this book yet but after this I'm going to bump it up on my list. Just wanted to comment now on the jubilee stuff. here's Peter Linebaugh on that - www.midnightnotes.org/pdfnewenc12.pdf - and here's a thing where the jubilee call has been circulating within Occupy in the US - http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/143 a google search with terms occupy debt jubilee turns up a lot of hits as well.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 5, 2012

david graeber

I guess the scenario in the back of my mind was some sort of combination: either a debt strike, or a broad Argentina-style campaign of delegitimizing existing structures of political authority, would cause them to declare a debt cancellation to reestablish their legitimacy, in much the same way as Sumerian kings felt they had to do in the face of mass flight or passive resistance in order to prevent the collapse of their regimes. But really I wasn't thinking practically so much as conceptually

I think it's fine to think conceptually. Not everything has to be immediate tactics, and because of the book, we're now discussing tactics that might not have occurred to us before. Obviously it also may not be appropriate to discuss tactics in an open forum in any detail, so by all means let's not talk beyond concepts and generalities.

That said, having suggested a debt strike, I guess I should flesh it out. I mean something like that would be seemingly very difficult to organise: debtors are even more atomised from one another than tennants or workers, so it would seem, from an organisational point of view, harder than pulling off a rent strike or a stop-work strike.

But the example of Argentina is an interesting one. As i understand it, what happened there was more the banks telling the middle class their savings no longer existed, and everyone kicking off and smashing up banks, defaulting on payments and setting up alternative currency schemes and/or mutual aid bakeries etc. So a strong part of it was necessity: the banks more or less collapsed, and people then stopped paying them. For us though, it's the other way around. The state has bailed out the banks, and all our obligations to them are still due. But, increasingly, people are being unable to pay and defaulting. The #occupyhomes stuff is really promising in this respect.

I think perhaps the nearest successful thing I can think of in a modern context would be the anti-Poll Tax movement in the UK, which at its peak saw 17 million people refusing to pay. There, things started with a mixture of those who simply couldn't pay and those politically opposed to the tax, but as they refused and clogged up the courts (and resisted evictions), more and more people joined in until it more-or-less brought down Thatcher. Now, it was far from a total victory (the council tax introduced in its stead was only a bit less regressive), but it is an example of a mass campaign of non-payment having a significant impact.

I'm pretty remote from occupy in the US, and i'm told the dynamics are quite different to in the UK, but the stuff around occupy homes could maybe be comparable to the start of the anti-Poll Tax unions in Scotland... at least the optimist in me can imagine that kind of trajectory. Any mass default on mortgages would be a pretty full-on challenge to private property in a way tax refusal isn't though. Literally saying i need housing, I have a roof over my head, i'm not paying you for it and you can't take it from me. It's that ever-present communism again.

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 16, 2012

Interesting discussion.

I think I'm broadly in agreement with Joseph's 'qualified Graeber' reading of Marx (and the benefits of a sympathetic and complimentary anthropology) but when Joseph says ''Why, for example, would we think 'the tendency of the rate of profit to fall' could explain the current crisis, unless we thought Marx's Capital described actually existing capitalism?'' can I presume he is simply rejecting the idea that abstract 'laws' can somehow operate independently of human action or is there an implication here that this tendency isn't actually anything with real substance at all? As I see it there is a real such tendency in capitalism which is a fundamental factor in the current crisis, but it results from the actions of real people as representatives of capital in competition with each other and in struggle with the working class. The rise in the organic composition of capital and the displacement of labour and the historic shift from the formal to the real domination of capital/subsumption of labour is an observable fact but one which tends to absorb the whole of society beyond it's narrowly 'economic' base. It is precisely in the repetitive everyday class struggle through which the representatives of capital and labour reproduce capitalist social relationships and continually modernise and revitalise the system (including through the cancelation of debt/ devaluation of capital). This is the 'viscious circle' to which we have been and are condemned until a rupture is brought about through a combination of objective (economic 'laws') and subjective (class struggle beyond the everyday) factors. We make history but not in conditions of our own choosing. A 'base communism' or inclination in our 'species being' towards human community may well be an ever-present reality but it has been repeatedly constrained/prevented from fully emmerging by isolation, defeat and re-absorbtion into one class society after another so I don't think we can underestimate the power of capital as the beneficiary of all past class society/civilisation.

Although we can in theory (drawing on our experience of previous non commercial societies) give quite different meanings to words such as 'exchange', 'money', 'wages' 'markets' etc than their meaning in highly commercialised societies such as capitalism, such attempts by proclaimed revolutionaries, living in and influenced by capitalist society, to put flesh on the bones of socialism/communism or more often describe some supposed transitional society, have a sorry history of providing accomodation with capitalism rather than a fundamental break with it.
A new world human community ie 'communism' is a world beyond the divisions of economics and politics not a reversion to some earlier form of 'moral economy'

Malva

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Malva on January 16, 2012

A new world human community ie 'communism' is a world beyond the divisions of economics and politics not a reversion to some earlier form of 'moral economy'

Word.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 16, 2012

Malva

A new world human community ie 'communism' is a world beyond the divisions of economics and politics not a reversion to some earlier form of 'moral economy'

Word.

Right, i'm for the abolition of the economy as much as the next communist, but as I understand it (and I think as Graeber uses it) the term 'moral economy' has little or nothing to do with the discipline of economics or the separate autonomous sphere of 'the economy', but rather describing the way in which social life is subordinated to social norms, customs, values etc (I think it comes from EP Thompson, or at least that's where I've encountered it). So axiomatic statements of communism as the overcoming of capitalist separations don't really engage with the concept as it's being used here imho. Sure, you could use the term 'moral economy' to describe attempts to make the economy more moral ('ethical capitalism' and all that). But neither I (nor Graeber as far as I know, with his criticism of markets and states) are doing that.

Rather, it's a way of putting back human beings where political economy posits only Homo economicus. The former's relations tend to be governed by norms and customs whereas the latter construction is basically sociopathic. That both changes our understanding of the relation of political economy (and the critique thereof) to actually existing capitalism, and supplements the immanent critique of political economy with an external critique which challenges its foundational assumptions. Thus, for example, the class struggle could be understood not just as a struggle between classes but a struggle between the inhuman logic of capital which reduces everyone to mere objects and resources, and the tendency of human societies to generate their own norms and customs based on human needs (iirc Beverly Silver in 'Forces of Labour' calls the former 'Marx-type' struggles and the latter 'Polanyi-type' struggles over (de)commodification).

Spikymike

an I presume he is simply rejecting the idea that abstract 'laws' can somehow operate independently of human action or is there an implication here that this tendency isn't actually anything with real substance at all?

I'm saying Marx's immanent critique of political economy necessarily adopts its fundamental assumptions1 and thus only explains actually existing-capitalism to the extent those assumptions are sound. They can certainly be questioned, and therefore the extent to which Capital explains real-world capitalism needs to be demonstrated in each instance rather than taken for granted. If falling rates of profit are observed (i've seen data either way, and have no particular opinion on it), Marx would certainly be one of my first points of call to explain that.

So really what's at stake is: (1) an immanent critique (like Marx's) has to take on the assumptions of its target (political economy in this case). (2) therefore it will only describe the real world to the extent political economy does and (3) any problems with the assumptions of political economy will likely create theoretical blindspots where the immanent critique doesn't match up to reality. Does that make sense?

To try and give some examples, my point's not really anything to do with abstract laws vs human action, but rather the pitfalls of treating immanent critique as a description of actually existing capitalism, with all that's excluded. For example Graeber points out that rarely if ever has free wage labour been the majority condition. Even now, when the majority of the world's population has been proletarianised, there's millions in bonded labour, virtual debt peonage, paid in company scrip and living in company housing, eeking out a living in the grey economy, working in prostitution and so on, who are by no means the free and equal citizens of political economy (and thus Marx's critique). Marx's critique is radical because it shows that even if everyone was a free and equal citizen with equal rights, there would be exploitation and a class society. But the 'even if' is crucial in understanding how this relates to the real world (the point Graeber makes explicitly).

For example feminists like Maria Mies have pointed out that overwhelmingly women have never had such status, but have in fact been treated as the property of men. This has changed somewhat de jure in places like the UK, where marital rape was finally abolished in 1991, and subsequently equal rights have been legislated for e.g. via the recent equalities act. But in many ways the de facto situation still lags behind the de jure. Treating Marx's Capital as a description of actually-existing capitalism would therefore create a massive blind spot for all those proletarians who've been dispossessed but never been proprietors of their own bodies. Similarly, Capital contains very little discussion of the margins, those dispossessed but excluded from wage labour; landless peasants, urban street hawkers etc, who rather than being swept into the reserve army seem in fact to be continually reproduced by capitalist development, particularly outside of the MDCs. Some Marxists have set about trying to rectify this theoretical gap e.g. Kevin Anderson's 'Marx at the Margins' which I've yet to read.

  • 1 e.g. about human nature/psychology/behaviour, about the universalisation of free wage labour/rights-bearing citizens able to make contracts and so on.

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 16, 2012

Malva,

For now.

I take your point about my rather lazy concluding remark.

I don't think I have misunderstood Graeber's explanation of what he is referring to by the term 'moral economy' though, but in my preceding paragraph I was merely trying to suggest that some might take comfort in the fact of preceding societies based on such to extend this into a flirting with something short of communism in the form of say 'labour time vouchers' or other forms of equivalent exchange between say mutual enterprises.

I don't think we can rely on Marx's theory of 'the falling rate of profit' to fully explain crisis in the capitalist economy but I do think it is a critical factor.

The shift from the formal to the real domination of capital is also I suppose a tendency as well - there is a sense in which capitalism is developing towards an approximation of Marx's analysis of it in it's pure form but it hasn't, and of course cannot ever, be the same for all the reasons you mention, (though the domination of the commodity form over society does not require every one to be formally a wage labourer - and are not your 'dispossed' the 'displaced' labour I was treferring to?).

I will have another read of all this and any other comments that might come forward when I have a bit more time.

Nate

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Nate on January 16, 2012

Sort of at a tangent to this discussion but I think not so far as to be inappropriate, I think Immanuel Wallerstein's shot book/long essay Historical Capitalism would really interest folk here in terms of the differences between Marx's presentation of capitalism in v1 of Capital and the actual history of really existing capitalism. Dale Tomich's book Through the Prism of Slavery might interest folk as well though it's annoyingly badly edited. Tomich spends a lot of time on what the relationship should be between marxist theory and the realities of the history of slavery as a system of property, trade, and labor.

Also, I think these two E.P. Thompson quotes are relevant to what Joseph said about political economy defining humanity in a reductive and economistic way.

“The injury which advanced industrial capitalism did, and which the market society did, was to define human relations as being primarily economic. Marx engaged with orthodox political economy, and proposed revolutionary economic man as the answer to exploited economic man. But it is also implicit, particularly in the early Marx, that the injury is in defining man as “economic” at all.” (From an interview in Radical History Review from 1976)

"While one form which opposition to capitalism takes is in direct economic antagonism – resistance to exploitation whether as producer or consumer – another form is, exactly, resistance to capitalism’s innate tendency to reduce all human relationships to economic definitions. The two are inter-related, of course; but it is by no means certain which may prove to be, in the end, more revolutionary. (…) [People] desire, fitfully, not only direct economic satisfactions, but also to throw off this grotesque “economic” disguise which capitalism imposes upon them, and to resume a human shape.” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1965/english.htm.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 16, 2012

Apologies in advance for the long post. Like I say, this book got me thinking...

Spikymike

I was merely trying to suggest that some might take comfort in the fact of preceding societies based on such to extend this into a flirting with something short of communism in the form of say 'labour time vouchers' or other forms of equivalent exchange between say mutual enterprises.

Ok, I see what you're saying. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think the argument goes something like this: 'if we soften our attitude to exchange, we'll inevitably fall short of communism and end up with some form of self-managed capitalism.'

I guess what I'm getting at, or rather, the question Graeber's text opens up, is why, or under what conditions, is that the case? What is it about exchange as a generic principle which leads to capitalism? Graeber's argument is that there's a massive range of forms of exchange from communistic potlach to atomised commodity exchange, and these can't be understood simply from their form but also the content of the social relations which they are part of.

So far, so good. But he also argues that exchange cannot become market exchange (commodity exchange as described by Marx) without the constant exercise of state power. In other words, that human sociality is a strong force which tends to subordinate exchange to social norms (which may be humane and egalitarian or brutal and hierarchic, the content of the 'moral economy' is up for grabs), meaning commodity exchange isn't the totalising force Marx seems to describe from the beginning of Capital without the constant exercise of state power and violence (not just as primitive accumulation to kick things off).

So look at say Argentina in 2001. The economy collapsed, and people needed to eat. Various exchange schemes were set up, some approximating barter, others described as 'alternative currencies' and the like. But Graeber's text suggests to me it's a mistake to dismiss these as merely the preservation of the commodity form, because even when they were formally buying and selling things for a price, the actual content of the exchanges were an expression of mutual aid rather than ruthless competition, with plenty of allowances made for need. For example:

I

Brukman proposed to cover the textile requirements of public hospitals, Panificadora Cinco provision of bread’, while Chilavert opened a clinic (Aufheben 2003; Sitrin 2006: 72). However, workers are aware of the limits to this. Candido, a worker at the occupied Chilavert firm says ‘our primary commitment is to make sure we’re paid and paying our bills. After that, we have our commitments to other recuperated businesses, society, and to the neighbourhood assemblies that defended us’ (quoted in Sitrin 2006: 72)

They had to keep paying their bills because the utility companies were still functioning as capitalist enterprises who'd cut them off, but they wanted and indeed did orient to social need as much as was possible under the prevailing conditions. They also didn't see themselves as competing separate enterprises but different nodes in a network of occupied workplaces operating according to a different logic of social needs and mutual aid (again, as much as was possible). This wasn't really an ideological predisposition: neither communist, pareconist, mutualist etc ideas drove the movement - material necessities did. The mutual aid was a product of the conditions and the struggle, as occupied workplaces identified with one another and sought to support one another contrary to market logic.

Their exchanges were partly market exchange (exports to raise cash to pay bills etc), but also other forms perhaps inaccurately labelled barter, gifts, via 'alternative currencies' etc. So it wasn't really the retention of exchange per se that was the problem, but the isolation of these expropriations and the absence of a wider movement of communisation sweeping away private property and the state. 'Normal' commodity exchange was only re-established when the state re-established itself, either violently evicting the occupations or normalising their legal status, reintegrating them into the normal capitalist economy essentially as workers' co-ops operating in a competitive market (with all the problems that entails).

But Graeber's analysis suggests that in the context of a spreading, expanding movement the various alternative exchange schemes which sprung up to meet immediate needs in the context of collapsing capitalism wouldn't have been the seeds of a capitalism's phoenix-like rise. But rather the mutual aid element would have been generalised and the communistic logic of needs could have asserted itself over the quaint and obsolete logic of exchanging priced goods between discrete enterprises. So I think what Graeber does (or at least how I read him), is refocus us away from looking at forms of exchange towards looking at social relations and the trajectories of struggle.

Perhaps we don't need to worry too much if people in some Buenos Aries barrio or Shanghai slum are swapping bread for roof tiles using some newly invented voucher scheme. this could just as easily be an expression of mutual aid as an expression of residual/embryonic capitalism (probably a contradictory mix of the two). Rather, the operative factor is whether the struggle is expanding and extending, because if more and more workplaces are being occupied and the state is being weakened and forced back the logic of mutual aid immanent to such a struggle is likely exert itself, rather than capitalism rising from the ashes. Without state power, market exchange is quickly reabsorbed into the prevailing social relations and becomes something else (in the context of struggles, likely mutual aid and communism), even if on the surface it looks similar in some ways.

So I don't think this is about a transitional phase, or aiming short of communism ('not an ideal to be established but the real movement'), but rather not worrying too much about the forms of exchange people improvise to meet their needs in the context of a collapsing capitalist economy, since without the coercion and violence of state power there's no way they can reconstitute themselves into a revived capitalism (according to Graeber's account). And with the reassertion of state power, any revolution is on the retreat anyway and local exchange schemes would be the least of our worries! On the other hand, too literal (and linear) a reading of Capital would suggest the opposite: that the commodity form is the seed that contains the whole of capitalist social relations, and anything resembling it will spawn the monster anew.

I think this is important because it gives us a richer palette from which to theorise the various breaks and ruptures with the logic of capital (such as Argentina 2001) than can be drawn from Marx's Capital alone. And it also refocusses our attention on social relations and the spreading of struggles against state power (e.g. expropriating private property and fighting off evictions, like at Zanon), rather than worrying that various improvised forms of exchange carry the seeds of counter-revolution. It wasn't the various forms of exchange which re-integrated the Argentinian movement into capitalism, it was the failure of the movement to generalise across borders to such a point the more market-like forms of exchange (including wage labour) were rendered obsolete.

In any global revolution scenario, things are certain to develop unevenly and state power is likely to be 'spread thin' (e.g. through deploying its limited coercive forces to some places and not others). it's also more-or-less inevitable there will be various local mutual aid initiatives, some more resembling market exchange (but operating according to a different logic), like Argentina perhaps, while others are more straightforwardly communist. Again, this isn't about aiming at a transitional phase of mutualism or whatever, but recognising things are likely to be messy. And that in the absence of state power, competitive markets (and thus the dangers of the commodity form) are more or less impossible and likely to be subsumed into more communistic social relations.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 16, 2012

Nate: yeah those EP Thompson quotes are mint. In terms of what I just posted above, I think they are relevant. If we accept the 'economic man' of political economy (and thus to an extent, of Marx's critique), it follows that so many Robinson Crusoes trucking, bartering and exchanging with one another will reproduce capitalist society via the arc Capital describes (the commodity form, use/exchange value, money, wage labour, class society etc). But if we remind ourselves we're human beings (what I called an anthropological perspective in the OP), the picture looks rather different: rather than a totalising capital ready to reassert itself from the smallest seeds, we see a powerful human tendency to organise social life according to collective norms which is only kept at bay by constant state violence. Rather than capitalism being an inevitable expression of human society at a certain historical juncture, it requires constant reimposition by violence and is thus more vulnerable than we might think. An interesting and provocative reversal of common readings of Marx (including my own).

Malva

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Malva on January 17, 2012

@Spikeymike

I was actually agreeing with you.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 17, 2012

revol68

it was also the major issue I had with the endnotes discussion between Theorie Communiste and Gilles Dauve, in that both treat the failure of revolutions as being down to a failure to remove all traces of the commodity form in one swoop and so those seeds you talk about inevitably producing monstrous weeds that will choke any revolution, a position communisation takes to rather absurd not to mention tautological lengths, hence it never says nothing more than communism will only happen through communism.

Like I say, I've previously argued something like this myself in criticising co-ops and parecon. Now I more or less stand by those criticisms (parecon aim at 'fair' wage labour, co-ops in a competitive market do have to impose capitalist imperatives on themselves...). But I think the focus is wrong. It's not imperfect forms of organisation/alternative social models that are really the problem, but the lack of a wide enough international movement which can allow a logic of mutual aid to assert itself without the mediation of markets, the separation of discrete enterprises and so on.

So take Spain say: the use of various voucher schemes (e.g. in Barcelona) wasn't a case of the dastardly CNT preserving capitalism and the commodity form, but an expression of the isolation of the communist movement which limited the extent to which a communist logic could assert itself (so wages of sorts were retained, although they were equalised and paid according to size of family i.e. needs, while separate competing firms sought to merge into industrial federations and so on). But these schemes weren't the reason the revolution failed, but an expression of it's isolation and failure, including the failure to smash the state apparatus, which was ultimately crucial in restoring capitalism.

I'm extrapolating quite a lot from Graeber's text here. He doesn't really talk about revolution/communisation at all in the future tense. But this is the kind of thing his anthropological approach has got me thinking about. After all, plenty of societies weren't capitalist without being communist. If the struggle against capitalist conditions depends on high levels of solidarity and mutual aid, it strikes me that these will shape and future social formations that emerge in ruptures with the logic of capital, even if they superfically resemble familiar things (like currencies, prices...). Like I said in the OP, I found it a very thought-provoking book and one which unsettles assumptions.

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 17, 2012

Well I can see that anarchists will be attracted to an idea which suggests that the absense of the state, or at least it's substantial weakening, is the primary barrier to 'natural' communistc tendencies asserting themselves, and indeed who here could argue against the critical importance of defeating the state as being essential to any possibillity of succesful revolutionary change. It has after all been one of the main criticisms of the tradional anarchist movement in 1936 Spain made by marxist left communists amongst others.

I can agree that in the context of a social and economic collapse of capitalism (for reasons we can still argue about) workers attempts, in a move outside of traditional representative forms of the everyday class struggle, at various forms of mutual organisation short of full communisation, should not be written off by communists and would still have the potential to move outside and beyond their initial framework provided they do not become isolated. But the state is not the only barrier. (see additional note below).

I think we are in danger here of underestimating the depth to which the rule of the commodity form has sunk it's roots into our everyday behavior and our very pschological make-up, such that we often end up reproducing capitalist social relations through the very forms of our attempted opposition to it. It's what I meant by saying that the 'real domination of capital' was not simply a matter of the economy (something I think Sander and Internationalist Perspectives explain quite well).

In any potentially revolutionary situation there will be plenty of people arguing for their left wing and mutualist 'solutions' and plenty of situations where fear and tiredness weigh heavily on even the most active participants in struggle such that more, almost unconscious, conservative ways of doing things start to reassert themselves. In these situations the minority pro-revolutionary communists surely need to be pressing for a simultaneous assault on all remants of state power and the rapid implementation of communising measures.

It is not an either or matter.

(Aditional Note: I agree that it is the real social content behind words like 'exchange', 'money', 'prices', wages' etc is what is important in a situation like this, but we should remember that peoples understanding of those words, and their continuing reality for much of the remaining world around them, would have been largely preformed by their experience in capitalism rather than the new provisional conditions. When erstwhile revolutionaries like Castoriadis and his followers could so easily claim quite falsely to be using such words differently it is wise to be at least critical when they reappear in situations of social revolt).

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 17, 2012

Edit: another looong post. Sorry!

Yeah, we should definitely be critical (always, about everything, in the sense of 'not taking at face value' rather than 'being against'). And no, the state isn't the only problem (I don't think I've said this: rather, without state power, commodity exchange is impossible. The two are 'co-constitutive').

The point i'm making is that in many ways the mutual aid schemes in Argentina were communising measures. Their trajectory was away from capitalist logic and towards communism (self-organised activity to meet social needs: bread, health clinics etc). Only the movement wasn't wide enough to escape the re-imposition of normal capitalist relations.

So let's imagine a revolutionary situation. Conceived on a world scale, even a more-or-less instantaneous revolution is a matter of months and years rather than overnight. Let's say there's major, worldwide industrial unrest and international sympathetic action. There's been waves of factory occupations across the world, and while some have been evicted, others are springing up at a faster rate. Some governments are toppled. In some places this has lead to weak populist regimes, in others a succession of powerless governments lasting only weeks, in others, armed workers organised in councils hold de facto power and have disbanded the government apparatus with the army mutinying in support, or are in an uneasy situation of dual power with neither side able to strike the decisive blow - for now.

This process is developing unevenly across the globe, with some places racing ahead only to face repression, while others leapfrog them and others atill lag behind. This is a movement of communisation. 'The revolution' is not a glorious day (not saying you see it this way), but the very process of open antagonism by which the logic of human needs supersedes the logic of capital. Neither is this a transitional phase: it's a messy series of overlapping and escalating conflicts which expropriate private property, stretch and smash state power and abolish mercantile relations.

Let's return to the various occupied workplaces. They find themselves in an odd position. They've occupied and resumed production under workers control, transforming processes to reduce boredom and improve safety, perhaps reducing working hours with lower output or by taking on unemployed/locked out workers. But much of the world is still capitalist. To the extent workers still need to purchase their necessities, they've retained wages. But perhaps voted to equalise them and provide allowances based on dependants. In this uncertain environment, banks are collapsing and credit is drying up. Suppliers want cash up front, or refuse to deal with occupied workplaces full stop. So the various occupied workplaces of the world network with one another to support each other.

This may include 'normal' commodity relations: buying stuff to provide cash to buy raw materials. It might involve mutual aid schemes in their local areas: converting the old management office space to health clinics for the local community, who in turn provide bread to the workers (since just-in-time global food supply chains are disrupted). These schemes may or may not involve some form of accounting ('alternative currencies'), or some kind of rationing (access conditional on say, a union card or something stamped by the local assembly). To the extent workers can meet their needs via these self-managed mutual aid schemes, rather than the market, wages become obsolete and occupied workplaces stop paying them, using scarce cash to procure raw materials or pay utility bills as circumstances dictate.

What I'm saying is it would be a mistake to see these things as 'not communist' because they are part of an (imperfect and uneven) movement of communisation, as opposed to communism being an ideal against which to measure them. The trajectory matters. Even if there's superficial resemblance to some of the utopian schemes of mutualists or Castoriaidis or whatever, the social relations are dramatically different to atomised, market exchange as a result of the solidarity forged through struggle. And because of that struggle which necessitates mutual aid, and because of the weakness or absence of state power, forms of exchange tend to be subsumed into once-latent now resurgent communistic social norms. At least so long as the movement is ascendant. It's not self-managed capitalism (though it may become that if the movement fails to generalise).

Now of course, if things continue on this route, states are toppled and the world expropriated, then the movement needs to continue to broaden and deepen, and some of these things may become barriers to be overcome (rationing bread may make sense in immediate shortages caused by supply chain disruptions, but is needless once needs-based food production and distribution under workers' control takes hold). But it's not the forms of exchange in themselves that's of primary importance, but their relation to a real movement attacking the prevailing capitalist conditions. Does that make sense?

(this is a long way from anything in the book, btw!)

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 17, 2012

Joseph,

OK we are not entirely at odds here but as I see it...

1.Communisation measures in your scenario would need to involve NOT paying the utility bills - refusal to pay more generally would itself be part of the further breakdown and collapse of the capitalist economy and the spread of the revolutionary process.

2. Communisation includes the breaking down of separate enterprises not the federation of mutual, worker controlled production units.

3. Communisation includes the abandonment or destruction of socially harmful production and distribution units and the abandoning of the production of items purely for the purposes of equivalent exchange.

4. Rationing is not a form of equivalent exchange as long as it remains divorced from hours worked etc. Wages, equal or otherwise are.

Communisation needs to be distinguished from mutualisation even if the later may in some circumstances precede the former.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 17, 2012

1. I'm not saying paying your bills is revolutionary, no. But refusal to pay in isolation is impossible, so refusal is dependent of a wider movement.

2. Federation under worker control is the breaking down of separate enterprises.

3. Yeah. Though this process may be patchy and uneven as it develops.

4. Yeah. I disagree on wages. I'm for the abolition of wage labour. But if I was occupying my workplace and waiting for the rest of you feckless bastards to catch up, equalisation of wages/paying a dependants' wage would be a move in the direction of 'according to needs' as much as the conditions (relative isolation) allowed. Odds are in such a situation there would be no money anyway (look at the unpaid wage arrears in Greece at the moment), so we'd be talking about something other than money as we know it too (vouchers, ration card stamped by an assembly, whatever).

My main point is that this isn't really about mutualisation at all imho. Mutualism is a more or less utopian philosophy that proposes worker-enterprises trading with one another, it simply could not exist in conditions of open class conflict since the social relations of such a struggle coupled with the forcing back of state power makes such mercantile relations impossible. There would be no guarantees of credit, contracts etc apart from trust and solidarity, which would necessitate a shift towards a needs-based logic (forgoing payment in case of hardship, not pricing according to market forces but popular consensus etc) even if for some reason workers wanted their occupied firms to be separate, competing entities selling commodities on the market (which I think is unlikely, looking at Argentina or anywhere else there's been mass workplace expropriations... they've generally seen themselves as at the very least allies not rivals, and sought to support one another as well as the communities which defended them from eviction).

I think mutualism is far more likely under a Tory government now than it is in a revolutionary situation. That is to say, I can far sooner envisage worker-shareholder schemes and some kind of worker-representation on the board (perhaps even an elected board) under capitalism, but simply can't see competing private self-managed enterprises existing under conditions of economic crisis, open class conflict and social revolution.

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 19, 2012

Joseph,

Not to row back from our previous measure of agreement in this discussion but....

Your logic in support of 'equal wages' is poor.Some things that happen within capitalism , wether driven by class struggle or the needs of particular sectional capitalist interests, approximate more towards needs than a straight market determined share (since as we agreed there is no pure 'free' market capitalism in reality) but that doesn't make them a contributing factor towards a rupture with capitalism and a movement towards communism, even if they are desirable in themselves, unless you believe in a reformist 'building socialism within the shell of capitalism' which I don't think you do.

Federation as an organisational measure does not guarantee the breaking down of separate 'enterprises' - to put it another way it is not a 'dissolution' into the emmerging community.

'Mutualism' has more than one face it seems to me.

Still we would both probably like to see a situation in which our theoretical differences were tested in practice I suppose and we are some way off that as yet!

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 19, 2012

See, I don't think it's about our theoretical positions being tested in practice. That's precisely what I'm getting at...

Spikymike

Your logic in support of 'equal wages'

Let me stop you there. I'm not sure how you've managed to conclude I'm in favour of wage labour, so let's run through this again.

Wage labour exists.

You and I don't want wage labour to exist.

Ergo, there needs to be some kind of movement from A to B, wherein wage labour is abolished. All pretty straightforward so far.

The questions then arise, what are the conditions for such a movement? What is its content? How does it develop? There seem to me to be two basic frameworks to answer these: communism as a movement and communism as an ideal to be established.

Now me or you or anyone can take a magic communist measuring stick and hold it up to all social forms extant to imagined, and return a verdict of communist or not communist. By such a standard, obviously anything involving forms such as wages, the state, commodities and so on are 'not communist', because the definition of communism is 'not those forms'. But we're dealing in axioms: essentially reciting a definition of communism, as if that tells us anything. This seems to fall into the trap revol highlighted above, i.e. such an approach seems tautological. If communism is the absence of wage labour (amongst other things), the presence of wage labour is not communism. We can recite this til we're blue in the face without actually saying anything.

The other approach seems far more productive. If communism is the movement that abolishes the present conditions, then it is not a question of assigning social forms to the categories 'communist' and 'not communist', but the content of a real movement. Thus, the same social form could be both part of such a movement, or a moment in a counter-movement restoring capitalism, depending on the movement of which it's a part. So say the factory occupations in Argentina had sparked off a global wave of strikes and occupations the world over, states crumbled and communism emerged. We'd be sat here looking back at those mutual aid/alternative exchange schemes as the start of a movement which supplanted the logic of capital with a logic of human needs. That this didn't happen is not a consequence of inadequate forms of exchange. Rather the forms of exchange were an expression of the isolation and limitations of the movement.

I don't "support" wage labour. It exists. In the course of its abolition, it is likely to be stretched, twisted and finally broken rather than disappearing at the flick of a switch. Think about why we need wages. We need them to meet our needs, because everything is commodified, because everything else is produced by wage labour too. Everything we know about social revolutions suggests they are messy, contradictory processes, an open clash of opposing forces that sees advances and retreats, consolidations and capitulations. They proceed unevenly in fits and starts, ebbs and flows, and all the more so when we're not talking about the overthrow of one state but 200-odd! There are Februaries and Octobers, Zanons and Asturian risings.

However a global revolutionary wave starts, somewhere goes first. Some factory or office or infrastructure is the first to be taken over. The drive for this (looking at Zanon, and the Seattle General Strike), is likely to be material necessity. Those workers can't just abolish the wage form on their own before mercantile relations break down, but they can do things like equalise wages and make allowances for need (family size, medical conditions...). History shows they're likely to do so. Whether you or I approve is neither here nor there. The point I'm making is that such moves are part of a real movement that abolishes wage labour. If that movement is isolated, it will fail and fall back, and normal capitalist relations will be restored (perhaps with a bloodbath for the workers concerned). If it spreads, wages will be rendered obsolete as the relations of mutual aid between worker-controlled firms or industries allow us to meet our needs without them (perhaps via rationing, perhaps free access, perhaps some combination or something we've yet to imagine).

But this is a process. It's a movement. It will likely develop over a period of years. This isn't a 'transitional phase', it is what a revolution is. The idea of revolution as a glorious day was born on the threshold of the Bastille and embellished with the mythologising of the storming of the Winter Palace. Any global revolution will have its dramatic days, but the idea of revolution as an instantaneous transition belongs to those who wish to seize power in a single state. It's utterly inadequate for the overthrow of an entire mode of production.

In terms of the separate firms thing, this is another of those Dauvé rhetorical flourishes which kinda crumbles on closer examination. Firms, ultimately, are not delimited by any of the things which spring to mind. Multiple firms operate out of the same physical premises, surrounded by the same fence. Multiple firms employ the staff for a single production unit. Multiple firms jointly own other firms. The only thing that reliably delimits one firm from all the others is its balance sheet, which delimits what it owns. It would be impossible to delineate firms, even under capitalism, without such a mechanism. So unless insurrectionary workers restarting production under self-management are endeavouring to produce reliable financial returns while they battle the forces of reaction and federate together to better reorient production to meet social needs, then it's not really a problem.

knotwho

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by knotwho on January 19, 2012

I just wanted to say I've enjoyed the discussion happening in the comments as much as I did the original post. Very thought provoking.

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 19, 2012

Joseph Kay

I think mutualism is far more likely under a Tory government now than it is in a revolutionary situation. That is to say, I can far sooner envisage worker-shareholder schemes and some kind of worker-representation on the board (perhaps even an elected board) under capitalism

I'm going full nostradamus! (or i secretly write Cameron's speeches :bb: )

BBC

He said "popular capitalism" should allow "everyone to share in the success of the market" and criticised an "out of control" bonus culture in the City. A Co-operatives Bill will be introduced to help employees take a greater stake in their companies, he said.

Obv, I don't expect full-blown Proudhonism complete with a Peoples' Bank, but still.

Spikymike

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 20, 2012

Joseph,

Perhaps re-read my earlier posts to see that we do largely agree about process and about the social content of words, since you persist in trying to paint me into the cormer of positing an abstract ideal.

The difference between us I think rather lies in the fact that I perceive a depth in the totalitarian nature of modern capitalism such that breaking free from a practical everyday reproduction of the social relationships that sustain it, even as we seek to oppose the effects of that system and create alternatives, is significantly harder than you seem to think, even with the comfort of knowing that there exists some basic underlying human inclination towards 'human community' (to put it no more exactly than that for now). So that I weigh more heavily in the balance of probabillities the fact that most aspects of the class struggle, even in their, so far, most radical expressions have resulted in the regeneration and extension of capitalism rather than it's demise.

Despite the influence which 'Council Communism' has had on my thinking I seem to be placing more weight than you on the need for a conscious communist intervention in the scenarios you have outlined, at least to the extent that such an intervention guards against false paths which only return us back to capitalism.

You will doubtless want to respond to this and I'm inclined to let you have the last say this time!

Joseph Kay

12 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on January 20, 2012

I'm not trying to paint you into a corner, perhaps i've misunderstood you. I'm happy to leave it at that rather than having the last word!

Nate

12 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Nate on January 30, 2012

I haven't had time to collect my thouhgts on the discussion here but wanted to say about the claims made about the commodity form in some of this, I think the first 9 or 10 pages of v2 of Capital are really relevant here -- http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#1 (up to but not including "Second Stage. Function of Productive Capital"). In that passage, Marx says that it's easy to mix up money and capital. One such mix up is to attribute qualities of capital to qualities of money, or to explain capital through qualities of money. I think the claims about the commodity form verge on that kind of mix up. It seems to me in those passages that Marx is above all talking about labor markets. that has a relation to other markets but it's the existence of labor power on the market that's the real issue in capitalist society, not commodification of other stuff, which existed for a long time before capitalist society.

Redwinged Blackbird

12 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Redwinged Blackbird on February 12, 2012

I just picked this book up and am about to start reading it. Look forward to it..... But $33, fucking christ. I can see why they call it "Debt", ya feel me?

Croy

12 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Croy on February 29, 2012

[quote=Joseph Kay] However, in Medieval Islam, Graeber does identify something like a true free market, that is, a market without any state involvement. But here, without the force of the state, the only guarantee for commercial activity is honour and trust. In the absence of coercion, market relations tend to be reabsorbed in the web of social relations, a 'moral economy', regulated by custom and reputation, and thus based more on co-operation than competition. Thus, paraphrasing the work of the Islamic scholar Tusi (1201-1274 AD), he writes that:

Graeber

The market is simply one manifestation of this more general principle of mutual aid, of the matching of abilities (supply) and needs (demand) - or to translate it into my earlier terms, it is not only founded on, but is itself an extension of the kind of baseline communism on which any society must ultimately rest.

So is this a form of anarcho capitalism that actually semmed to work (not knowing the historical details about what actually happened) ? If this is anarcho capitalism, then by the Graeber quote, it would mean anarcho capitalism is in fact communist in some regards ? I certainly am begginning to see what you mean when you say this is a challenging and un settling read Joseph !

Joseph Kay

Graeber sees it very differently. In the absence of state power, market exchanges tend not to give rise to the inhuman monster of capital (markets, and even wage labour, after all, have existed far longer than capitalism), .

The bit in brackets I take issue with. It seems to be a consensus on this site that capitalism at its core can be defined by wage labour, largely above all other defining factors. I have seen others criticsed for suggesting capitalism is at its core defined by other things like monopolies on violence, opression etc. So if this is true how, can it wage labour exist without capitalism ? This then gets back to anarcho capitalism ?

Joseph Kay

12 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on March 1, 2012

I don't think medieval Islam was anarcho-capitalist, as from what I can tell (from Graeber) it was neither anarchist nor capitalist. There was a state, it's just that the market functioned independently of it, with religious (Sharia) law mediating contracts. And I don't think a market is the same thing as capitalism either, and I suspect trade on credit regulated by Sharia was more of a long distance inter-societal thing done by merchants than central to everyday life (i.e. not just goods but labour power being a commodity). Though I'm guessing a bit here as I'm not familiar with the period outside Graeber's book. I think he's mainly trolling the US libertarian right here, which he seems to have confirmed in the comments above.

In terms of defining capitalism, I think wage labour is central, but that's not to say its always been numerically dominant (it wasn't until the 1970s iirc; and if debt-bonded labour, payment in company scrip etc doesn't count, probably still isn't). That is to say (following Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiskins-Wood), changes in class relations in the English countryside - the development of private property in land and waged labour working it - set in motion an accumulation process which enabled the industrial revolution. The consequent huge productivity surge forced other countries to follow suit or be conquered. By imitation and conquest capitalism thus spread rapidly around the globe, incorporating or destroying other social forms.

The alternative account (I think mainly from Fernand Braudel) is that capitalism arose much earlier in trading republics around the Mediterranean and Holland. But the problem with this is it equates capitalism and the market. I think Graeber's account actually mitigates against this, since he shows things like credit weren't so much an innovation of medieval bankers but a very old form, and that market-based economies had existed throughout history (typically created by the requirement to raise money to pay taxes, to fund wars).

I think Graeber is right to draw attention to the fact that slavery and other forms of less than free labour have been a huge part of capitalist development. Any account of capitalist development which leaves these out is lacking (e.g. the plantation cotton that Lancashire's textile industry ran on for starters). But I don't think you can understand the rise of capitalism without looking at changing class relations and wage labour is a central aspect of that. I think Graeber's emphasis on the importance of state violence in creating markets fits with Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation (the end of traditional land rights, creation of a proletariat) as the basis for wage labour and capitalism here.

Indeed, capitalist development is only intelligible from this stand point imho. If it was just a question of money being invested to make a profit (which had happened in various forms long before), rather than private property employing wage labour, theni don't think the vast productive power of capitalism would ever have taken off in the way it did. Indeed, almost all the other factors were present in China centuries before, but no capitalism and no industrialisation. Sure, various institutions which developed first elsewhere (banks, stock markets) became key aspects of capitalism. But I think the key ingredient was changing social (class) relations, which brought these institutions together in the constellation we call capitalism. I hope that helps... It's a pretty big discussion even within Marxism tbh, let alone adding in anarchist anthropology!

knotwho

12 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by knotwho on March 17, 2012

What Graeber calls 'baseline communism', the giving according to abilities and receiving according to needs, is he claims, the "the foundation of all human sociability", the very condition of possibility of society itself... "The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so." .... But there's a sting in the tail. By the same token, Graeber argues that this is rarely the whole story, and there's a tendency for communism to slide into other forms of society.

I wonder, has anyone compared this communism with the communisation tendency?

From Sic:

To say that the revolution is communisation means that communism is not only its aim and end result, but also its content. Capital is not abolished for communism but by communism, or, more precisely, by the production of communism. Communising measures are not an embryonic form of communism but the production of communism. Communisation is not a transitional period, but the revolution itself, which is the communising production of communism. What distinguishes communising measures from communism is the struggle against capital.

It seems like an interesting contrast. For instance, in light of his baseline communism theory, how does Graeber define revolution? Perhaps this essay, Revolution in Reverse, goes into that.

Joseph Kay

12 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on March 17, 2012

i was actually thinking of doing a blog comparing the 'traditional' conception of communism as an antagonistic movement that negates capital with both Graeber's notion of 'baseline communism' and Holloway's 'communism of the cracks'... i'll try and pull this together when i get time.

Spikymike

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on June 7, 2012

Joseph,

Did you ever get round to the exercise you mentioned in your post above? Sounds ambitious to me but possibly the basis for a conference type discussion sometime (though such 'theoretical' discussions do not seem too popular at anarchist events).

Joseph Kay

11 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on June 7, 2012

it's one of a number of blogs i've got roughly sketched out but no time to write at the moment :(

JustDumbLuck

11 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by JustDumbLuck on July 4, 2012

Is the party over? Anyone still here? Yowsers, the level of grammatical sophistication displayed here is just a tad daunting, but given my US public education level of linguistic instruction, I'll just have to do as best as I can to keep up. Seriously, the only reason I stumbled on this board was a 6 month old interview with David Graeber I heard on the local lefty station out of Berkeley, CA this morning. Finally, someone articulating much of what the muddled morass that is my brain has been pondering. And in following up on 'Debt', here I am. A question here...is a 'debt strike' the same as what I've been thinking of as a national 'Don't pay your bills day'?

Joseph Kay

11 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on July 4, 2012

JustDumbLuck

A question here...is a 'debt strike' the same as what I've been thinking of as a national 'Don't pay your bills day'?

Hey, I was just kinda musing about how a debt jubillee is a demand on the powerful, whereas a debt strike is a concrete tactic we could take. But that said, I've little idea what it would involve or whether it's possible. And indeed you could go on debt strike to demand a jubillee.

I guess it could function something like a rent strike for people with mortgages and/or credit cards (or in the US medical debts?). On the face of it it seems hard to pull off, but if people are already falling behind on payments maybe getting together as 'debtors unions' to refuse to pay until a portion of debts are written off or something might work? Backed up with the kind of anti-eviction, anti-bailiff action that some Occupy groups have been engaged in, maybe it could work.

I'm kinda modelling this on the fairly successful resistance to the Poll Tax in Britain, which began with anarchist-encouraged non-payment and bailiff resistance in Scotland before snowballing into a national non-payment movement peaking at 17 million people, more or less bringing down Margaret Thatcher. Presumably some things would need to be done different with a different issue and in a different context, but it seems the best real life example of something of this kind.

A quick google suggests "there’s a growing call in OWS for a debt strike", so maybe we're about to find out in practice!

JustDumbLuck

11 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by JustDumbLuck on July 6, 2012

I have to say I'm not familiar with the Poll Tax resistance movement, other than to say another coordinated effort to restrict voting rights is occurring stateside as we speak. No longer is it ok, in many jurisdictions, to simply show up and give the poll worker your name and address, you will now have to produce some form of picture bearing government ID, and many are also barring student ID's use as ID, while allowing a concealed-carry permit to be used to vote.

In practical terms, I understand the difficulty in organizing the unorganized, of coordinating the fearful and disunited. And overcoming a moral obligation just adds to the task. But at some point, when enough people are there anyway, in not being able to pay all the bills, it could be done en masse. If enough people know about it. Coordination is always the toughest part of it. At least I now know that I am not alone in the idea...I didn't before I wandered in here...

kingzog

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by kingzog on September 23, 2012

I think wage labour is central, but that's not to say its always been numerically dominant (it wasn't until the 1970s iirc; and if debt-bonded labour, payment in company scrip etc doesn't count, probably still isn't)

do we have numbers for this, Joesph? Also, a great number of workers are payed by piece-rate and often times the world bank does not include them in the figures for the wage/salary earners. Although Marx considers piece-work to be wage labor. [edit: on further investigation, I cannot find out if the world-bank does include or exclude piece-work, maybe someone can shed some light on this]

Also, I tend to think that being paid in company-script is a wage, it's just in a different form as opposed to a money-wage. I'm not clear on what you mean by debt-bonded labour either. is this a situation where the worker is only working to pay off debts and so his wage simply goes towards paying off that debt?

Joseph Kay

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on September 24, 2012

I think Eric Hobsbawm writes somewhere that wage labour became numerically dominant in the 1970s, but I don't have a reference to hand. I think the important point is that capitalist exploitation is compatible with formal freedom ('freedom, equality, property, and Bentham' etc), even if in practice some of that wage labour is partly unfree (working off a debt, mandatory work placements), or not really waged (domestic labour, workfare). An analysis of actually-existing capitalism needs to take into account both imho. where Marx is useful is understanding what makes capitalism capitalism, where empirical work is useful is looking at the actual relations between wage labour, unwaged labour, relatively free forms and relatiively coerced forma at a given time and place.

Edit: debt bonded labour would be a situation where a workers was working for a specific employer to pay off their or their family's debts (e.g. an undocumented migrant parlaying off their traffickers), and so lacking the formal freedom to sell their labour to the highest bidder in the labour market.

kingzog

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by kingzog on September 27, 2012

the important point is that capitalist exploitation is compatible with formal freedom ('freedom, equality, property, and Bentham' etc), even if in practice some of that wage labour is partly unfree (working off a debt, mandatory work placements), or not really waged (domestic labour, workfare)

I don't see how working off a debt fits into this. Also, what is a mandatory work placement?

debt bonded labour would be a situation where a workers was working for a specific employer to pay off their or their family's debts (e.g. an undocumented migrant parlaying off their traffickers), and so lacking the formal freedom to sell their labour to the highest bidder in the labour market.

I thought a debt-bonded laborer is someone who is working for the person they owe debts to, and this is a legally recognized affair. The worker isn't forced to work for someone in order to pay of the debts they owe to someone else, technically speaking. They would still have formal freedom in this case, right? but, not real freedom. Is that correct?

Joseph Kay

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on September 27, 2012

As I understand it, if you're working for someone to pay off a debt, you're not free to sell your labour power to the highest bidder. I've read this is a common situation for undocumented migrants, having to work (sometimes doing illegal stuff) to pay off the organised crime gangs that got them into the country. With compound interest, this could be years of labour, without the formal freedom to change employers.

Mandatory Work Activity is one of the workfare schemes in the UK. Strictly speaking you're formally free to sell your labour - if you can find a job. Or you can refuse to work and lose your benefits (like most proles turning down work in the absence of a welfare state). So it's not slavery, but it's also more compulsory than 'normal'/ideal free wage labour in the UK at least.

kingzog

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by kingzog on September 27, 2012

if you're working for someone to pay off a debt, you're not free to sell your labour power to the highest bidder.

I don't mean to be a stick in the mud. but I still don't understand how you're not free to sell your labor-power to the highest bidder if you owe someone money. Are you not free to work for the boss who will accept you, just because you owe debt? I could see a situation where one owes money to an employer and they are then forced to work off those debts by working for that employer (on his field, factory or whatever). Or maybe the laborer simply sells themselves into some sort of servitude. But simply owing debts, be it to organized crime, or to a bank, doesn't mean you are not a 'free' wage laborer. Maybe it's worth mentioning that when thinkers in the 19th century talked about free wage-laborers it was typically in contrast to chattel slavery or serfdom.

this is a common situation for undocumented migrants, having to work (sometimes doing illegal stuff) to pay off the organised crime gangs that got them into the country. With compound interest, this could be years of labour, without the formal freedom to change employers.

The point you make about lacking freedom to change employers is touching on something though. If the state considers your residence illegal and you do not have the right to work within it's borders, are you a free laborer? At least not so much in that country!

fingers malone

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by fingers malone on September 27, 2012

kingzog

if you're working for someone to pay off a debt, you're not free to sell your labour power to the highest bidder.

I don't mean to be a stick in the mud. but I still don't understand how you're not free to sell your labor-power to the highest bidder if you owe someone money. Are you not free to work for the boss who will accept you, just because you owe debt

It doesn't mean anyone who is in debt, debt bonded labourer is a specific situation, and people are not free to go and sell their labour somewhere else, that is part of the meaning of the phrase.

Nate

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Nate on September 27, 2012

Debt peonage is when you're required to stay in a location and work for the creditor and can't go elsewhere. It was widely used in the U.S. south until at least the 1940s. I believe (but am not at all sure) that in some cases the peonage could be hereditary and familial: the family owes the creditor and all family members have limits on their physical/geographic mobility and on their labor market mobility (ie, they can't move away and they can't change employers), and that if the parents die the family stays debt bonded until the debt is paid off. I'm pretty sure there were elements of this in company towns and company stores in the US as well outside the south - legal inability to leave until debts for homes were paid for or debts to company for consumer debts.

kingzog

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by kingzog on September 27, 2012

Oh Okay, thanks Nate and Fingers Malone. I think that clears things up! I also found some statistics on this from the wiki article on Debt-bondage(suppose I should have looked that up in the first place):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage#Modern_views
'Researcher Siddharth Kara has calculated the number of slaves in the world by type, and determined the number of debt bondage slaves to be 18.1 million at the end of 2006.'

so debt bondage, according to this researcher, accounts for about 18 million people in the world, as of 6 years ago.

Joseph Kay

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on September 28, 2012

Fwiw, I don't think any of this invalidates Marx's analysis. Marx shows how capitalism is a novel set of social relations where class exploitation/surplus extraction is compatible with, and to an extend dependent on, formal freedom. That doesn't mean everyone is formally free.

Some Marxist-feminist analysis would argue the formal freedom of wage labourers is premised on the patriarchal unfreedom of the domestic sphere (e.g. Dalla Costa/James, Wendy Brown). Some world systems and/or uneven and combined development types argue the liberal freedoms of the capitalist core are premised on unfreedoms in much of the periphery (and historically, the slave trade). But neither of these lines of argument (necessarily) invalidate Marx, so much as expand on the analysis in Capital. I'm not sure Graeber helps much here beyond pointing out the gap between actually-existing capitalism and Marx's critique of political economy (which is mainly a matter of different levels of abstraction, imho). But mainly, reading Graeber's book set me off thinking about how this stuff fits together.

kingzog

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by kingzog on September 29, 2012

Joseph, I agree. it appears that all we can really reduce Capitalism to is a system of generalized commodity production through abstract, social labor. I think that there is a lot of benefit in having anthropological studies like Graebers as well. If Marx wanted to write Capital as a history book, than he would have done that so it is problematic to compare "Debt" with "Capital". Plus, Marx did write this stuff in the 19th century when archaeology and anthropology were still fairly new.

JustDumbLuck

11 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by JustDumbLuck on November 16, 2012

'Sixteen Tons and whadda ya get, another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't ya' call me, cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store.' It's just another form of indentured servitude.

I had a thought yesterday. I reread some of the links Joseph posted in this review, and noticed the correlation between money or credit and agriculture. After thinking it over, I really don't see any other way for the idea to have taken hold, other than a population organized by agriculture. Which is maybe the tale told in so many of the genesis myths. I have no empirical evidence for this, it was just a loose train of thought, but it seems like a nomadic, or semi-nomadic lifestyle would be more of a burden on women, and so they would be more the more likely to see the benefits of agriculture, thereby precipitating the loss of freedom caused by the burdens of agriculture(taking a bite of the apple?). I'm sure I'm not the only one to have come up with that. It does sound familiar.

The thing about Capitalism, it needs stuff to do. Like dig, or cut, or build, whatever. Anything that can be done to make a profit over and above what was loaned with interest. Or sold with the promise of a share of future profits. It's not a mystery, it just needs resources and labor. What gets me when I hear economists talk about the 'recovery', as in 'when the economy recovers', or 'when the jobs come back', is they never say from where. Oh, its those overseas jobs(ok, we take them back, now they're unemployed, again), or the 'new sector something'. But the economy isn't magic. It may be governed by the idea of a magical substance, but it isn't magic itself. It's not going to materialize stuff out of thin air. There is a reason it worked when in did in the last half of the century, but they never bring that up. We(collectively, I wasn't actually there at the time) demolished a large part of Eurasia and the Pacific Island rim nations, along with some of China, and did a pretty massive redistribution of wealth to rebuild them. Sort of like upending the Monopoly board and starting over. After that ran out, corporations, in order to keep profits rising, began working on ways to reduce their labor costs. At the same time, more or less, since there wasn't much new to do, they began raiding each other of resources, initiating the LBO decade(s). After that sort of ran out, when companies either figured out how to protect themselves, or were not worth the bother, they began to merge, in order to realize additional cost savings - there's a word for it, but I can't remember it - through downsizing duplicate functions. Oh, yeah, then there's that little thing called automation, which was, in large part, the downfall of organized labor. It's tough to have any leverage when your employer makes money whether you're there or not. When the merger phase was largely over, we had the housing boom, when the capital went in search of a function, again. So now I hear the same tired line, "We just have to compete, compete smarter, build a better educated workforce, innovate, work harder than anyone else, and the economy will come roaring back." In the meantime, Mr. President, don't you think they're going to be doing the same thing at the same time? Or is that what all the foreign 'projects' are all about? Constant competition got us into this mess, do you really believe it's going to get us out?

So now we have Strike Debt with in their Rolling Jubilee project. In a way, though, it kind of annoys me. Not that people are getting their debts forgiven, nor the idea to try and make debt seen for what it really is. What annoys me is, it is, in a way, another free ride for the 'banksters', one that they themselves cannot take. That it could, in theory, make a difference in the inflation rate is a positive thing, but that's supposed to be the job of whatever central bank it is that is regulating the money supply. I realize David would surely sacrifice the continuing use of this system, before seeing a repeat of the last 'Debt Jubilee' we had, but it nevertheless ticks me off that people are still left with the task of bailing out the banks, because the banks can't admit that money is not real.

And no, don't bring up the gold standard as the solution. There is the opposite problem with using a physical substance as both commodity and means of exchange. There always need to be new supplies, otherwise as the commodity is used up, the price of everything drops to nothing as the commodity disappears. Hmmm, maybe the proponents of gold have a point, even if they don't quite realize what it is. They'd probably just come up with 'imaginary gold', though.

Looks as if I got a little carried away, there.

Malva

11 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Malva on November 17, 2012

A couple of points. First, the archaeological evidence shows that the move from a pre-agricultural society to an agricultural one was an absolute disaster for women. The life expectancy of women was cut in half and one can only imagine what that meant about their everyday lives. Secondly, automation is like a sword without a handle. On the one hand, it cuts costs by reducing the amount of labour, but on the other hand, value is based on the extraction of surplus labour so in the long term your profits fall dramatically and it becomes harder for capitalist wage labour to function as a total system of social organisation. I was a bit unclear as to what some of your other points were.

JustDumbLuck

11 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by JustDumbLuck on November 18, 2012

Hi, Malva, thanks for responding. I in no way meant to root my little fable there in anything resembling facts, pesky things that they are. It just occurred to me when I stumbled on some historical(well, I use that term guardedly) accounts of 18th century colonists' impressions of the Native peoples in America. One theme that ran through them was the relative burden of 'work' seemed to fall on the women of the societies. Which just led me to a wildly speculative tale of the origins of agriculture, and the genesis stories. An interesting aside from those accounts is the difference between clergy and secular impressions of native societies.

You are correct about the long term affects of automation, but that really does not enter into the picture in the short term. It's about profit and shareholder value, and the assumption that something else will always come along to pick up the slack. We all sort of sat around in the '80's and '90's, wondering if these people had lost their minds, automating endlessly, moving jobs offshore, buying up and selling off parts of one company after another, and all the other seemingly stupid things they were doing, but really, in the end, it was all to generate the increasing profit the system demands. That it was and is unsustainable, is not even a consideration. Whatever adds to next quarter's profit is all that matters.

The rest of it was just kind of a rant on the nonsense I hear coming from the 'learned economic' circles about what we need to do next. Well, what we did last time was blow up Europe and Japan, develop a huge industrial complex to rebuild them, and revalue all the currencies onto the dollar. That's what I was referring to as the last 'debt jubilee', where all the debt that was holding the world economy in thrall was destroyed, and we began it all again. Capitalism has, again, run out to things to do. I really hope the Debt Jubilee accomplishes what they have set out to do, but my comment on it was partly my fear that no one will understand what the message really is. That if debt isn't real, what does that mean for money?

ptar

11 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ptar on December 23, 2012

David Graeber,understandably, lacked the time to go further into the origins of money in his book. However, anyone who wants to know more about the origins of money should check out Alla Semonova's article:

'Would You Barter with God? Why Holy Debts and Not Profane Markets Created Money', American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol.70.

Semonova argues that coins originated in ancient Greek sacrifice rituals in which cooked meat was shared 'equally' among worshippers. Such rituals probably derived from hunter-gatherer traditions of egalitarian meat sharing. In other words, coined money, seems to have its origins in the degeneration of the communistic traditions of hunter-gatherer societies. This history raises numerous questions, some of which are explored in: 'Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and the Return to Primitive Communism'.

Spikymike

8 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on April 22, 2015

For some reason I cannot make the link for this blog item and discussion work so I'm bumping this up again as I think the early part of this discussion has some relevance to the background differences between those I described as 'the critics' and 'the enthusiasts' (more particularly Connor Owen's) on a number of the highly charged threads about Kobane/Rojava and the PKK influenced social movement. The crossover is in relation to Graeber's support for the PKK inspired social movement in Rojava and comparisons with the 'Spanish revolution' and specifically the relationship between mutualism and communism. Some of the comments here may seem favourable to Owen's 'social ecology' approach but there is an important and essential emphasis by communists on a practical working class or proletarian internationalism as the means of breaking down national state boundaries and spreading a nascent anti-capitalist movement. This is not to detract from other aspects of the anarchist and marxist influenced communist critiques of the PKK and it's associated organisations or Bookchin's 'Social ecology' expressed on other recent discussion threads.

Kivie

6 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Kivie on June 24, 2017

Joseph Kay

And I don't think a market is the same thing as capitalism either
...
The alternative account (I think mainly from Fernand Braudel) is that capitalism arose much earlier in trading republics around the Mediterranean and Holland. But the problem with this is it equates capitalism and the market. I think Graeber's account actually mitigates against this, since he shows things like credit weren't so much an innovation of medieval bankers but a very old form, and that market-based economies had existed throughout history (typically created by the requirement to raise money to pay taxes, to fund wars).

Hey, I know this is a ridiculously old thread but it's something I've been looking into lately so I'll ask anyway.

I'm curious what the essential difference between markets (or more pertinently, market economies) and capitalism is supposed to be. If wage labour only became dominant recently, or perhaps still isn't, then that can't be it. Moreover, in my reading I've found references to wages and wage labour in ancient Babylon, Rome, China, pre-colonial Africa and medieval feudalism well before the 'official start date' of capitalism (i.e. I hear people say 15th/16th century). Wage labour was never dominant but if it still isn't dominant (or only achieved dominance very recently) then it seems to be more a matter of degree than a matter of a qualitative shift.

Other factors that seem crucial to the definition of capitalism - capital accumulation, profit, money, competitive markets, economic growth etc. - have also all been attested or claimed to have been present in some earlier societies well before the 15th century.

The only thing that makes them look different, from my perspective, is the presence/absence of industry.

Noa Rodman

6 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noa Rodman on June 25, 2017

I think the difference is that those wage contracts were mostly for "unproductive" (read: non-profit driven) business; paying a barber for a haircut, soldiers' pay, builders of temples, etc. Now it is true that accumulation existed, as Kautsky wrote:

[...]the possibility for some individuals to appropriate and accumulate the means of production of many others in order to exploit them, either directly, by buying bound workers, or indirectly, by forcing free propertyless workers to hand over to them part of their production, for instance through shared tenancies.

This accumulation of wealth can become a mass phenomenon even before the appearance of the capitalist mode of production; a sort of ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, as Marx called it, through different forms of violence, especially war. Already at the beginning of historical times, with the Babylonians and the Egyptians, we find from time to time such mass accumulations. The Roman army offered the most gigantic example of this phenomenon in antiquity, as Salvioli’s book clearly shows.

Each one of these accumulations always ended up, sooner or later, with the decline of the state in which they took place. The separation of the mass of the workers from their means of production finally led to the paralysis of economic and political life, to the downfall of the state that plundered its more barbarous neighbouring peoples, living under more primitive conditions.
...

I think Kautsky here also implicitly points to the lack of an industrial reserve army of labour.

adri

6 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by adri on June 26, 2017

Kivie

I'm curious what the essential difference between markets (or more pertinently, market economies) and capitalism is supposed to be. ...

Though he's not held in much high regard around here (nor do I -- I might watch his 'economic updates' every now and then) I think Wolff is correct in saying that markets do not define capitalism. After all, Proudhon's Mutualism and other forms of market socialism rely on markets but are not exactly capitalist because the employees themselves control the surplus value (which is what Wolff proposes as well). Of course if you're a libertarian communist you would reject markets and any form of remuneration for work done in favor of free access to goods. Self-managed enterprises in a market system, like capitalist ones, have their problems in that they're forced to act in anti-social ways to survive and not get crushed by the competition.

However, capitalism was neither the first nor the only system to utilize markets as its means of distributing resources and products. In the slave economic systems that prevailed in various times and places across human history, markets were often the means of distributing resources (including slaves themselves) and the products of slaves' labor. In the pre-Civil War United States, for example, masters sold slaves and cotton produced by slaves in markets. Thus, the presence of a 'market system' does not distinguish capitalism from a slave system.

So then how should we define capitalism to differentiate it from alternative economic systems such as slavery, feudalism, and a post-capitalist socialism? The answer is 'in terms of the organization of the surplus.' How an economic system organizes the production, appropriation, and distribution of its surplus neatly and clearly differentiates capitalism from other systems.

In a socialism defined in terms of surplus organization, the producers and the appropriators/distributors of the surplus are identical; they are the same people. In such socialist enterprises, the workers collectively appropriate and distribute the surplus they produce. They perform functions parallel to those of boards of directors in capitalist corporations. Such "workers' self-directed enterprises" (WSDEs) are unlike slave, feudal and/or capitalist enterprises. WSDEs represent the end of exploitation.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30678-critics-of-capitalism-must-include-its-definition

Tom Henry

6 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tom Henry on June 27, 2017

Kivie,

Hopefully what I have written below goes some way toward constructing a framework to use for investigating your question. My post here is not to do with the Graeber thread itself, only a response to your questions.

Capitalism (the acquisition of absolute and relative surplus value from a labor force) was definitely an innovation of traders and merchants. For example, in the seventeenth century it was traders who dominated the English coal industry, and one of the earliest examples of the factory system was instituted in the same century in the silk mills of Northern Italy by merchants. I get this information from Jairus Banaji, see below. Marx (in Capital Vol 1 1976 Fowkes page 554), also notes the revolts against ribbon-loom machinery across Europe in the same century, and the destruction of a wind powered saw mill near London in the 1630s.

But capitalism is more than a market economy and there is a decisive break in the pursuit of wealth and power that occurred around the seventeenth century.

Agrarian historian Jairus Banaji, in Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (2010), explores the complexity of your question by investigating the assumptions used to define capitalism based on the form of exploitation of labor. Here we discover that differing forms of production, such as that based on slavery, or the feudal-serf model, can, in his view, exist as capitalist operations. This is because for a productive unit to be described as an individual capitalist enterprise, the condition of the producers of surplus value, i.e. the labourers, is irrelevant. Whether workers are slaves or peasants or hired labour is not the issue for defining a capitalist enterprise which may exist outside of the capitalist mode of production. It is merely the fact that profits are used to generate even greater profits by investing in improved production methods, and that money is not left idle. Furthermore, in these capitalist formations prior to capitalism as the dominant mode, wage labor does not have to be defined by money. Where all the means of production are supplied by the employer, as in share-cropping, for example, wages can be paid in the form of a portion of a crop produced. Banaji’s key point, following Marx, is that capitalist formations can exist prior to the capitalist mode of production. Prior to capitalism as the dominant mode, individual capitalist operations can exist and operate with the use of unfree labor that is not necessarily selected from a market. It is only when capitalism becomes the whole economic system that workers in general, necessarily and simultaneously, become fictitiously free (waged labor), by being made available for hire in a market place.

Labour power is a commodity that, if surrounded by the right machines, the right links in a productive chain, and the right social organization, can be used to generate what has now been experienced as limitless wealth. This commodity, or object, that people became in capitalism meant that they had become an object like any other object and a thing like any other thing that can be bought and sold, but which, unlike other objects, and this is what makes them special, can be made increasingly productive and can be used to generate ever more wealth. The value of products can be increased if the productivity of the labour power employed to produce them can be improved. That is, the cost of making products is driven down by deploying human labour power in ever more efficient ways.

The conscious generation of this value is the key underlying feature of the capitalist economic system and was termed by Marx the acquisition of “relative surplus value.” The extraction of surplus value based on simply making people work harder and longer but for less remuneration, termed absolute surplus value, comes up against predictable limits. But development in social organization and technology, driven by the rational goal of increased profit via the introduction of mechanics that increase productivity is only constrained by a lack of imagination. The social organization and astonishing technology we see in the world around us is less the invention of particularly clever people who have been particularly well-trained and more the product of the imperative to increase relative surplus value, the particularly capitalist way of increasing profits. The appearance of the steam engine as a revolutionary object owes more to the development and understanding of relative surplus value, its consequences, and its conscious pursuit than it does to the acclaimed genius of James Watt. The consequences of the emergence of the systematic acquisition of relative surplus value was increased monetary wealth for a whole class and the setting aside of a portion of this wealth to be continuously converted into time and funds for further research and invention. The same can be said for the silicon chip as the steam engine, a difference perhaps being that early inventors and scholars were often funded by their families while modern inventors and scholars tend to be funded by governmental bodies and corporations.

The sustained achievement of relative surplus value relies on the arrangement of a whole array of devices, including the displacement of workers from their rural roots; their relative impoverishment; discipline; a new work ethic; enhanced social control; the assignment of workers to particular tasks in the creation of products (given perfect expression in the assembly line); and the building of component-making machines that require increasingly less supervision as they are improved and refined. In order to become commodities, or things, people must be freed from all ties and made available in the market. The point is that in a capitalist enterprise, the organisation of work and the creation of technology that assists or controls labour must be persistently improved upon or revolutionized because this all occurs in a competitive arena. Otherwise, the acquisition of relative surplus value, or continued profit/wealth comes to a halt.

Banaji, following Marx, emphasizes that capitalist production existed sporadically before it became the motor of the entire economic system. But it was only during “the great watershed of the sixteenth century” (Banaji: 43) that it became apparent that capitalist production was no longer merely increasingly prevalent. On the contrary, it had become the single mode of production for those key countries in western Europe. I think the difference between a society that engages in capitalist production sporadically and one that is dominated by capitalist production is crucial to an understanding of why and how capitalism was able to make such momentous advances from the sixteenth century. It is only in a fully capitalist mode of production that the whole of society is geared towards, as well as determined by, the raising of relative surplus value, defined here as the raising of the relative productivity of each worker. In this situation, we witness a proliferation of James Watts’, because society requires both a constant revolutionizing of production methods as the basis of competition and the escalation of wealth generated by relative surplus value. This, then, is the often-seeming magical basis of the dramatic technological developments seen in the capitalist epoch.

For the capitalist system to work as a system, all workers must be commodified in the marketplace and freed from all other modes of daily life, whether that be, for example, formal slavery or serfdom, etc. Thus the worker can be hired at a wage, but the productivity of the worker can be exponentially increased. But workers are not paid for their productivity as such. They are paid according to the value they can demand in the market place, where they are commodities like any other. Put simply, if there is a shortage of labour, and the labour has choices, then labor should be able to demand a higher price for itself, whereas if there is an excess of labor, its price is driven down. The processes that capitalism uses to make production more efficient and to increase the productivity of each worker therefore, as part of the structure, serve to keep labour cheap in comparison to profits. The price of labor is determined not by its productivity but by its value in a market place, just like any other commodity, or thing. The mode of production that we call capitalism is consequently the form of domination that dehumanizes humans to a greater extent than any previous form of systemic domination. This is so because it finally and completely severs them from all bonds except those of money and their status as commodities.

So, what defines capitalism? The extraction of relative surplus value from laborers combined with their (fictitious) freedom in the marketplace. However, due to the ever-expanding innovations in the extraction of relative surplus value capitalism has been able to run away with itself (become ‘personified’ as Marx put it) and now, however messily, directs all human endeavour through technology and organization (aspects that are developed and fine-tuned through universities and schools, for example, which is, by the way, the reason capitalist society is the most pedagogical society of all societies so far).

We do not control this process, even if we claim to disagree with it. No one controls it. It controls us. Daily, we do the work of capital for it. Whether we are working in a factory, ‘studying’ at school or university, lecturing at university, on holiday, asleep, overseeing a vast business empire, or engaging in politics.

Spikymike

6 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on July 19, 2017

A couple of good additions to this old thread. And hopefully anyone interested in the possible implications of all these issues for our social practice today will take the opportunity to read through the whole discussion.