Rachael Sotos Arendtian Grounds For Graeber's Debt Liberation

Rachael Lauren Sotos, leftforum March 2012 "David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5000 Years"
Probably there is no need to justify an Arendtian reading of Debt: the first 5000 years. David Graeber has much in common with Arendt, Urmutter of participatory freedom, self-proclaimed "political propagandist," arguably the most important political thinker of the twentieth century. Graeber the anarchist of course demurs from acknowledging any such canonical affinities. He warns repeatedly that violence, war and slavery have twisted our experiences such that "it is very hard to imagine what meaningful freedom would even look like."(D 385) But the lineaments of his normative commitments are fairly clear. Graeber's "baseline communism" proclaims, with Plato and Marx, justice to be contributions from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. Graeber's uniquely
singular individual is manifest when and only when she is embedded in the complex web of human relations. In both commitments I hear echoes of Arendt's incomparable account of worldly freedom.1 There is not time for an extensive comparison of Arendt and Graeber, although I do recommend the exercise, particularly if one has anarchist propensities. Arendt's deconstruction of the history of metaphysics, "dismantling" as she calls it, is a salutary complement to Graeber's ambitious and surprising reversal of gold buggery. For the present let me first be clear about one thing. If Arendt were alive today, she would be an advocate for debt liberation and would make short shrift of the claims that morality requires the imposition of experiments in austerity. This is true from wherever we position ourselves within Arendt's oeuvre. Her work on Kant's aesthetic reflective judgment develops a philosophy of culture that speaks as the "moral conscience of humanity." (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy ) With a distinctly low opinion of conventional morality and the squares who uphold the status quo, Arendt's worldly spectator takes radical positions, affirms revolutionaries and subversives. The criteria guiding judgment,
The disclosure of the agent in the appearances of plurality, perhaps most memorably the passage in the Action chapter of the Human Condition, "if men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future ...If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood."(175-6) 2
which Arendt deems superior to the moral law, are pleasurable communication and the social sociability of mankind.2 On Revolution also reads as a polemic against austerity experiments and for debt liberation. Anticipating Graeber's insightful discussion of the transformation money and debt can have on human agency, Arendt presents a parallel account of the loss of agency among those laboring under "the two-edged compulsion of ideology and terror." (OR 48) Graeber explains that we cannot understand the early European explorers such as Hernan Cortez as "rational" actors, for they were weighed down the with shameful burden of personal debt obligations and selfrighteousness and resentment. The crux of the matter though is that Cortez' genocidal fury was sparked by his own trauma as a debtor: money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it quickly can become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools and potential merchandise. Every human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation.(D 319) The revolutionaries following the French model -- Bolsheviks and others -weighed themselves down by submitting themselves to the seemingly irresistible forces of historical necessity. And here to be clear, while in centuries past revolutionaries have proved themselves the fools of history, in the present context,
2
As Arendt makes clear, social sociability is opposed to asocial sociability that operate behind the backs of men, the invisible Hand, Cunning of Reason, etc. The "moral" claim that we should sacrifice our children to experiments in economic austerity, for instance, could only be approved if aesthetic reflective judgment deemed this in the interests of the social sociability of mankind right here and now and took pleasure communicating this idea to others. 3
those swept up by the logic of Debt (another kind of necessity) have proved themselves capable of parallel crimes in parallel circumstances. The Terror was perpetrated in the name of the abjectly suffering people by revolutionaries who never solved the problem of scarcity, Arendt assures us. And today there is a similar logic at work in the social question; everyone seems to accept that the historical process over which no one has control, but which everyone submits in the hope of future equilibrium, "must eat its children."(D 48) The self-regulating market appears to operates as if with a mechanism akin to the forces of nature. And those swept up in the draft of debt imperialism likely swim in an ocean of suffering, their very sentiments trained on the market, making them "so curiously insensitive to reality in general and the reality of the persons in particular whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their principles." (OR 80) Grounds for Jubilee At the end of Debt Graeber suggests that we liberate ourselves from our debt, not only to relieve so much genuine suffering, but to affirm our autonomy, "if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way."(D 390) Debt liberation is an opportunity to discover our "real freedom," "to make friends," and to discover what sort of promises "genuinely free men and women make to one another."(D 391) Graeber's egalitarianism is no less evident in his interpretation of the ancient debt relief. Comprehension of the
4
phenomena requires "an assumption of equality." (D 86) Put simply, as slaves in antiquity rarely revolted, we do not expect call for debt liberation to come from people who live in extremely unequal social relations, e.g. between masters and slaves. In conditions of equality people tend to treat each other better, and -- in antiquity -- to offer each other loans with reasonable rates of interest. It is under such circumstances of at least implicit equality that we imagine citizens grieved and demanding relief. The Old Testament provides ample reminders, Graeber explains, of the ire of men empowered for having shared a common history, but grouching that men once equals are now, "enslaving one another's children." Graeber's egalitarianism makes for a sharp contrast with the economic historian Michael Hudson, in present debate and ancient commentary both. Hudson, a thinker with a well-developed appreciation of state sovereignty, is a fellow advocate of debt liberation, and a fellow left-leaning traveler, yet when he speaks of Jubilee he speaks in terms one would never hear from Graeber. For Hudson we should have debt relief to save capitalism and to save the state. Governments should choose to save the economy rather than the creditors, the nation rather than the banks. The situation Hudson finds in the Bronze Age is parallel. The governments of monarchical Mesopotamia were confronted "with the potential for complete social breakdown." (D65) The debt amnesties were effectuated because the kings had "cosmic pretentions." They were in a position to
5
authorize periodic debt-cleansing, "clean slates," because they understood themselves as "literally recreating human society." (D65) Moses Finley, an economic historian closer to Graeber's populism in spirit, likewise emphasizes the agency of the sovereign. In Finley debt liberation is effectuated from the top down in order to keep "free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight wars." (D86) Graeber reminds that it was the conditions of equality that ensured that kings like Nehemiah was "willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints."(D86). In On Revolution Arendt admittedly does not directly discuss debt liberation, but, reading between the lines, we discern both a modern and an ancient Jubilee. In the modern case Arendt shows affinity with Graeber as her story parallels his. To put it simply: Arendt's theory of modern revolutions is itself predicated on a special kind of de facto Jubilee. Graeber, we recall, describes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as utopian because it imagines a world of free laborers unburdened by credit or debt relations.3 Arendt likewise identifies a utopian streak in Smith, although where Graeber identifies medieval Islamic economists as inspiration, Arendt argues that the eighteenth century revolutionary imagination was sparked by the news of the colonial experience of "lovely equality," a de facto Jubilee effectuated by the abundance of nature in the New World. The results
3
Graeber's presentation it is likely Smith took his inspiration from Medieval Islamic texts, because there we see markets but not usury. 6
cannot be overestimated in Arendt's story. It is only because of the modern day Jubilee that the revolution in the true sense of the word, as a beginning of a fundamentally new political entity, came into being. Arendt explains that frequently enough in antiquity there were "overthrows and upheavals" that established a "new order," often with bloodshed. The difference to the new modern situation is that these events "depended on a distinction between poor and rich which itself was deemed to be natural and as unavoidable in the body politic as life is in the human body."(OR 12) In antiquity instead of a true revolution that self-consciously begins something fundamentally new, Arendt locates, "ancient cycles of sempiternal recurrences." (OR 13) In contrast to Arendt, as we will see shortly, Graeber does not underscore the cosmological claims of ancient Jubilee and debt relief. Preferring to think debt relief in light of an autonomous community's self-liberation, he seems interested in neither Hudson's monarch with cosmic pretentions, nor in Arendt's cyclical ancient history. Graeber lets his readers know about the new order established in the New Year Celebration, that may return in a Sabbatical Year seven years hence. (D )Just in passing, Graeber mentions that in that many ancient languages the word for interest is offspring, child, e.g. tokos in Greek. (D ) He touches on the Sumerian word amargi, liberty. He notes Hudson's translation, "clean slates," and also informs us more precisely, "to return to mother." That is, the famous "rinsing
7
of tablets," whereby citizens made are mad equal to each other again, " is a return of the child to the mother, the mother to the child."(D ) How should we understand Graeber's relative cosmological apathy? As he makes fairly clear, his reading of the entire Axial Age is materialistic; he has little interest in any religious tradition's alternative to the morality of debt. (D89) This is not to suggest that he is anything but ambitious, for he successfully situates a narration of "the rise of patriarchy" within his polemic against the commercial culture of ancient Mesopotamia and his history of Axial Age debtor creditor relations. Patriarchy developed, Graeber explains, over the centuries in which we witness "general decline of women's freedoms...in all the great urban civilizations," In this centuries long dynamic, which was integrally connected with the history of debt relief, we find first a denigration of sexuality from the sacred to the profane. The second story however is the story of patriarchy, the story of the establishment of the fathers and their rights. Graeber tells it thus: the fathers gradually consolidated their rights when, on the one side, the state enforced debt laws and the rights of the fathers; on the other side, it offered periodic amnesties."(D 183) And in the course of this long process of many centuries of struggles among debtors and creditors increasingly exposed to the exploitation of commercial relations, women everywhere take the shorter side of the stick .
Graeber is remarkably sensitive to the plight of the beleaguered patriarch confronted with commercial relations and thus unable to protect his family; "some of our daughters are bought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them." "One can only imagine what those words meant to a father in a patriarchal society," Graeber worries.(D 85) In order that we may imagine the process of commodification that the patriarchs both resisted, and which were the ground of their ever more absolute patriarchal prerogative, Graeber asks us to imagine, "the terrifying prospect of one's sons and daughters being carried off." (D85) He next asks that we imagine the psychic challenge an Old Testament patriarch confronted among the sophisticated, pleasure-minded sacred prostitutes in the urban civilization of Mesopotamia. 4 With deep skepticism regarding commercial relations, the entire edifice of debtor creditor relations would likely appear to the psychically beleaguered patriarch as simply criminal. Just as it does to Graeber's hypothetical student, laden with educational loans. It is perhaps not surprising then that the moment that stands out in Graeber's presentation most dramatically is one of destruction, literally the smashing of the debt tablets:
4
Now, while it must be said that this account of the rise of patriarchy exclusively on grounds of commercial relations is troubled, particularly insofar as it leaves out political battles (biological rights, metaphysics), Graeber's case is all the more relevant insofar as it certainly reflects the reality of our contemporary post-colonial planet. Might be offbase about origin of matriarchy, but Graeber is indeed correct regarding his claim that "this is what money has meant to a majority of people for most of human history; the terrifying prospect of one's wives and daughters being carried off. " (D85) 9
for the last five thousand years, with remarkably regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records -- tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. (After that, rebels usually go after the records of landholding and tax assessments.)(D8) Much differently than Graeber, Arendt intersects the institutions of ancient Jubilee. Although an anarchist through and through, she will diverge from the path of 5000 predictable years of ritual destruction. Positively put, Arendt speaks the ancient Sumerian word liberty, amargi, the freedom that is a fresh start and a return, the mother and offspring embedded in the cosmic cycles. And, let it be noted, while cyclical ancient history does NOT correspond to (abstract) modern equality in Arendt's account here, it certainly does provide the conditions of possibility for authentic experiences of freedom, and by extension, ensures the preservation of egalitarian relations in the ancient city. Riffing on Virgil's Fourth Ecologue, a primary source for her political ontology, Arendt explains "that the world's potential salvation lies in the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever."(OR 203) More specifically, Arendt instructs us regarding the youths' ontological function, somehow "equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners."(OR 203) . In a delightful sense ,Arendtian natality continually brings a little bit of jubilee into life everyday.
10
No doubt Arendt's account is original. Unlike Graeber, she does appear concerned that the Greeks refused "to allow a challenge to the principle of debt itself." Graeber, for his part, makes the unprecedented claim that the Greek aristocracy retained more power than in the more populist New East, i.e. than the egalitarian patriarchs of the Old Testament. He does not long for a Mesopotamian monarch to effect debt relief, or even a Greek "tyrant," but he does observe that the ancient Greek city-states are often in bad shape, plagued by crises, and without any mechanisms of relief, short of revolutions. None of this is a concern to Arendt in the present context. She prefers in this case to put freedom before equality and she has good, anarchist reasons. In contradiction to the Romans, the Greeks were convinced that the changeablility occurring in the realm of mortals in so far as they were mortals could not be altered because it was ultimately based on the fact that neoi, the young, who at the same time were 'new ones' were constantly invading the stability of the status quo. (OR 18) The ontological function of youth, we see, is precisely to preserve egalitarian relations by continually preventing the establishment of hierarchical relations. To break it down: while freedom is given precedence initially, equality is proven to be the very essence of the political order. This is the everyday jubilee, the youth's daily liberation of the world from reification. Illuminating further this most fundamental form of debt relief, Arendt explains that it is our love of the world that commits us to the neoi.
11
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is here we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (CE 196). Certainly Arendt's anarchist ontology of natality complements Graeber's 5000 predictable years of ritual destruction. Positively put, the neoi should not be burdened by the weight of debt, but should be free for the world. For if the young become overburdened, the conditions of non-foundational freedom will be extinguished and the world will be unable to regenerate itself. An advocate of absolutely sovereign political entities, Hudson is not surprisingly skeptical of the accounts of the Palintokia, the law demanding retroactive paying back of interest paid , said to be enacted by the Megarian democracy in the sixth century B.C.E. Notoriously extreme in the eyes of later historians,, the Megarian democracy is also credited with the invention of the genre of comedy, the best weapon against tyrants, according to Arendt. What is especially worth noting in the present context is the Megarian's philosophical anarchism. As Aristotle irritatedly reports in the Metaphysics, for the Megarians, there is no "being able""to dunasthai," apart from "being actual,""to energein."(1046b9ff) In contrast , Aristotle's foundational metaphysics precisely does claim that something not actually in a state of actually still has a right to claim
12
the ontological status of full actuality, e.g. a man sleeping is still to be called a man, a runner at rest will still be a runner. The Megarians, true philosophical anarchists, Arendtian neoi if you will, require that actuality be manifest in performance every time. Picking up one of Arendt's favored themes, we can say that where Aristotle posits the archai as eternal, unchanging principles or rules, the Megarians preserve the ancient, original and non-foundational sense of archai, beginnings.
"the beginning of something yet to be determined" Graeber concludes Debt with a brilliant speculative reversal. The gold fetish inverted, Nixon's abandonment of the bullion backed dollar in 1971 signals a moment of opportunity: "if history holds true, an age of virtual money should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery and debt peonage." (D 368) As it is now, the "new currency" is rooted more than ever in military power, and the world is burdened by the "vast bureaucratic apparatus" designed "first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternate futures."(D 382) While I cannot take up the numerous interesting topics as yet untouched in this discussion of Debt, I will attempt to offer a comment on the seeming perplexity of an anarchist and seemingly sincere modern egalitarian singing the virtues of Middle
13
Ages. Arendt's project, bringing to realization the full promise of a properly dismantled modernity, novum ordo saeclorum, would leave Graeber somewhat in the cold, although he too has no interest in divine authorization, intervention or legitimation. The point of difference is that while Arendt is more than willing to fit the Reformation and the Absolutist state into her narrative of modernity... certainly necessary steps in the process of secularization, Graeber insists on revealing the dark side of Luther's early modern act of debt liberation. For when Luther renounced the indulgences, and gave up access to the Treasury of Merit, he found plenty of room for Satan in this world, and plenty of need for law, order and repression. Usury itself a sin, he found it to be was no worse than the rest of the sins. (D 322 ) And once the materialist genie was uncorked and usury permitted, individuality expressive of "self-interest" emerged, "tacitly at least...one could now treat anyone, even an neighbor as a foreigner."(D 323) The earlier Age of Credit, to which Graeber imagines some sort of return, was not just an epoch of "superstition, intolerance and oppression;" but, rather, "an extraordinary improvement for most of the earth's inhabitants," certainly an improvement from what went before during the Axial Age. (D 251) . Graeber reminds us of the decline of slavery, the reigning in of predatory lending; the protection of debtors, communism as a living ideal, the dominance of virtual money instead of bullion. In this time there were a few clear-headed thinkers who
14
understood that money has no intrinsic value whatsoever, that it is an empty "symbolon" or "tally."Others, more mystically inclined, believed a "symbolon indicated another realm of meaning, "entirely beyond the realm of sense experience."(298-9) The paradigmatic Christian here is the sixth century Greek mystic Dionysus the Aeropagite. As Graeber has it, Dionysus understands the symbols to indicate the Oneness of God, but in a manner that makes it absolutely impossible to conceived any relation of reciprocity, debt or mutual obligation.(D 300) Graeber takes great delight the expression of failed equivalence, as one discovers repeatedly throughout Debt. A sacrifice expresses an impossible equivalence in Graeber's understanding. Primitive money, we learn, that serves as a "blood payment" or "bride payment" is money that acknowledges debts that are impossible to pay. (D 136) Likewise Graeber offers a clever reading of the Vedas' codification of the levels of a human being's obligations. He freely speculates and concludes that the real meaning of the overly schematized structure of debt obligations is that, ironically, "our relation to the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be."(D 68) Given the vast terrain of 5000 years and the diverse topics Graeber covers, it seems to me that project of thinking debt relief might be better served utilizing
15
the broader category of the ontological difference.5 I make this suggestion first and foremost because Graeber seems intent to establish just this categorical distinction in many of his discussions; "human beings live in time, noted St. Thomas Aquinas, so it makes sense to say that sin is a debt of punishment we owe to God. But God lives outside of time. By definition, he cannot owe anything to anyone."(D 286) But the content of Debt is so heterogenous, and Graeber's principles somewhat inconsistently applied. Sometimes it seems as if Graeber would have guard oneself from thinking one has debts that cannot be fulfilled. He instructs that there can be no debt to "society," to "the state" or "humanity as a whole;" the idea of debt everywhere "leaves everyone with the uncomfortable sense that human relations are somehow an intrinsically tawdry business, that our very responsibilities to one another are already somehow necessarily based in sin and crime." (D207) Alternatively, sometimes our Cartesian sense of certainty strains with imponderables: "if we are born with an infinite debt to all those people who made our existence possible....who or what do we really owe it to? Everyone? Everything? some people or things more than others/ And how do we pay a debt so diffuse?" (D66-67) At other moments Graeber warns against thoughts of reciprocity and equivalence; "Trying to flip things around by asking, "what do we
5
:in Heideggerean, the distinction between Being and beings; in Plato we recall the idea of the Good is beyond Being. And of course even more basically, Diogenes the Cynic, the first philosophical anthropologist, sought everywhere for an anthropos, i.e. a man who is not confused with a god. In Arendt Appearance (or the World) and appearances; 16
owe society?" or even trying to talk about our 'debt to nature" or some other manifestation of the cosmos is a false solution -- really just a desperate scramble to salvage something from the very moral logic that has severed us from the cosmos to begin with. (D387) Even if it is possible to imagine ourselves as standing in a position of absolute debt to the cosmos, to humanity the next question becomes who exactly has the right to speak for the cosmos, or humanity, to tell us how that debt must be repaid? If there is anything more preposterous than claiming to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiation with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side. (D 68) At other points Graeber is keen to refute the retributive theory of justice, "'an eye for an eye' does not evoke justice so much as vindictive brutality." (D 91) And at yet other points in Debt it appears that the claim is that we can get a clear view of a distinction between debt and moral obligation. Or: it is surmised that we can judge there to be "profound confusions" when it seems two discourses collide, when the Furies in the Eumenides, for instance, claim to be owed a debt due in blood. (260, 329) I cannot speak to other traditions, but in the ancient Greek the facts of language are very difficult to Graeber's argument regarding the possibility of analytic distinctions. If we consider just a few of the words obviously pertinent to Debt; we see that it is very difficult to separate clearly these spheres because the words themselves are so multivalent: ousia is property and being; nomos is money and law and statute and custom; nomisma is coin, custom; kreia, debt, necessity,
17
money, needful thing, useful thing, oracular thing. And, as Heidegger reminds us, kreia, debt, is also "the oldest word for being." I cannot say for certain what it would mean to bring the categorical distinction of the ontological difference to bear on Graeber's text, in addition to the concern for abstract, mathematical equivalences. It might very well mean that one would chose not to abandon the retributive theory of justice. For the fact of the matter is the ancient Greeks were not exclusively materialists in the Axial Age; nor did they fail to have a conventionalist understanding of money. And because the ontological difference itself, the need to preserve it, is a self-conscious theme from Parmenides to Diogenes the Cynic, close readers surely discover something more than "moral confusion" and intellectual failure in the Axial Age. With the shelter of the ontological difference, one might perhaps discover forms of freedom that are expressive of things other than sovereignty, non-foundational foundations very salutary to a New Epoch of Credit Money, and even likely perhaps, still more thought-provoking exempla of debt liberation..
18

Rachael Sotos Arendtian Grounds For Graeber's Debt Liberation

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Rachael Sotos Arendtian Grounds For Graeber's Debt Liberation

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Rachael Lauren Sotos, leftforum March 2012 "David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5000 Years"

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi