Towards a conceptualization of a debt-credit social process (original) (raw)
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Review of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011). David Graeber’s 2011 book, Debt: The first 5000 years, has received a great deal of attention in academic, activist, and popular media venues (see Hann, 2012; Kear, 2011; Luban, 2012; Meaney, 2011). Graeber himself has been credited as instigator and theorist of the Occupy movement (Meaney, 2011); and one of the central goals of Graeber’s book – a crossover book intended for a broad readership – is clearly to support detachment from the sense of moral obligation too many people feel to pay financial debts to financial institutions that feel no reciprocal obligation. As debt now plays a leading role among the strategies of capital accumulation (deployed to strip assets from variously targeted populations) and as our sense of moral obligation can only be accounted as an instance of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’, that is, an attachment t...
A consideration of the phenomenological foundation of debt in our being-in-the-world, that argues our notion of financial debt derives from our fundamental ontological and generational indebtedness, noted already by the pre-Socratics, and that the forgetfulness of this fact produces a hubris in us that blinds us to the debt we cannot escape and that the world will ultimately require us to pay.
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Geoforum, 2020
This paper proposes the concept of the ‘socio-economy of debt’ to explore the ambivalence of debt, its multiple facets and its capacity to exploit, protect or emancipate. This socio-economy of debt conceives of debt as a material transaction (defined in terms of prices, modalities of repayment, and collaterals), as well as a power relationship (inseparable from an overall set of interdependencies, protection and social differentiation) and as a social and moral experience (imbued with subjectivities, felt-obligations and also aspirations). This framework sheds a new light on the issue of “debt bondage”, applied to seasonal migrants from South-India. These workers are tied to their employer through a wage advance while enjoying widened access to market debts. Paradoxically, such widened choice has reinforced their dependence on their employers and other forms of interpersonal debt. These various forms of debt, both market and interpersonal, bring about various forms of exploitation, and the dispossession of time and bodies. But these debts equally allow those workers to break with the past and imagine a new future, partially liberated not from caste hierarchies but from their local forms of expression. They offer a source of hope, confidence and courage to act. It also allows some debtors to make investments and improve their lives. Within this analytical framework, it is not the market or non-market-based quality of a debt that explain its emancipatory or alienating potential, as long argued by economic anthropology, but how a particular debt bond is articulated with other forms of interdependence and protection.
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Ever larger parts of life and nature are integrated in our socioeconomic system as future cash flows, augmenting obscure, unstable and unsustainable debt structures. The larger and deeper these debt structures grow, the larger, more multifaceted and destructive the inequality divide in our societies becomes. It is now normal for people to live indebted, as it is normal for young students to have their future monetised through student loans, the debt implications of which may never escape. What forces normalise these abnormal and unsustainable patterns and our rather admissive/submissive response to them? How our lives and future have been monetised and where have our social consent and agency been in these processes? Is there a way out, before crossing the boundary of social sustainability and environmental collapse? The three books examined here offer refreshing and complementary perspectives on these 'big questions' on which our monetised future depends.
Mass Indebtedness and the Luxury of Payment Means
2020
Without the remarkable explosion of the credit industry since the early 1990s it’s almost inconceivable that late capitalism, in its neoliberal mode, could have maintained the vibrant and multifaceted consumer markets of the last few decades. Its capacity to create payment means by attaching contractual claims to prospective futures has allowed capitalism to transcend the decline of its material productivity, sustaining consumption against the upward concentration of wealth. In this chapter we consider both the source and the implications of that transcendence, tracing it from the rarefied confines of the financial industry into the lives of consumers to explore the implications of distributing payment means as a kind of ‘systemic luxury’ running counter to the material productivity of prevailing systems and processes.
Debt as Power (with Richard Robbins)
Why is indebtedness under capitalism the near-universal condition? Why is it so interconnected and interwoven into the fabric of social relations? Is debt the great enabler or is it more important to understand debt as derived from the capitalist ownership and sabotage of money? Why aren’t democracies in control of their own money supply? And if they are not, who is? How are debt, credit and the creation of money central to understanding and perhaps transforming the social disorder of capitalism? In this talk I will argue that debt is a technology of power and that understanding it as such can help us explain some of the prevailing social phenomena of capitalist modernity.