Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Difference between revisions

To be sure, David Graeber did not come at this question from a conventional place. He was an anthropologist, not an economist or a historian, and of the anarchist left: he was instrumental in establishing the Occupy Wall Street movement. But it would be a grave mistake to write off his book as a Marxist screed. There is so much of value here: in challenging conventional, lazy and simplistic ways we have at looking at the world. Graeber was ... what’s the word? — oh that’s it: a ''contrarian''.

The best thing to do is just pick out some challenging points. Playfully, Graeber introduces the notion of “everyday communism” — I think he could have called it “communalism”, but that wouldn’t have upset the horses — as an alternative to an economic life of sterile, impersonal, quantifiable transactions. This communism: helping people out without question where the relative personal cost is not great; being a [[good egg]] is deeper and more critical to interpersonal relationships than economic transactions, and they depend on it. It is a radical view, not supported by plausible arguments, to try to atomise these unquantifiable social relationships — {{author|James C. Scott}} might have called them “[[Legible|illegible]]” to a pattern of economic transactions. “If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, ‘Hand me the wrench,’ his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?’ ”