Like most of us, you probably learned in school that people invented money to replace barter, markets are guided by The Invisible Hand, and a debt is a kind of sacred promise. Like much else you learned in school, says anthropologist David Graeber, this is wrong. Markets are constructed by states, while the appearance of debt, slavery and money in human affairs coincide with the appearance of violent empires, and recede when empires are in decline. Debts are only sacred, Graeber explains, when the poor owe the rich, and there are key distinctions between debts and promises. Graeber, the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years is interviewed by C.S. Soong on KPFA's Against the Grain...
The Origins of Debt, Money, Slavery and Empire An Against the Grain Interview by C.S. Soong and Sasha Lilley
KPFA.s Against the Grain is consistently one of the best interview shows around. We at BAR steal ideas from them all the time. You can find a link to Debt: The First 5,000 Years here .
listen
http://www.againstthegrain.org/files/files/atg/atg_2013.01.07_graeber.mp3
An abolitionist frame of thought is a rebirth, a spiritual process, a painful undertaking, and an ancestral conjuring for Black and brown people.
Looting and rioting appear as immediately effective tactics in the struggle against whiteness, property and the police.
Weapons are flowing to pro-regime gangsters suspected of assassinating opponents of the US-backed regime.
We must instead think creatively about how to either take total community control of law enforcement as an institution or to bring about an independent, nation-building, self-governing reality.
It’s Cowboys and Indians updated: a wicked game where Black people are seen as predators but almost always end up prey.
