le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

debt was a very good book, sorry that graeber is now an unperson because he supports? kurds in syria?? i still have no idea what this thread is about and why i should care that he supports the wrong??? side

I thought my analysis above was the most thorough, but i guess you took an even closer look at the situation, and I'm glad you thought to add your own commentary to the discussion.

RedMaistre posted:

In a situation sans law in which all that I have is yours and all that is yours is mine, the difference between indifference, mutual aid, and violation is irrevocably blurred.

I believe that situation is commonly known as Love, or, in another word, Communism

thirdplace posted:

i think the book clearly admires gift-economy style debts you're talking about there, and recommends a jubilee partly because it considers capitalist debts a gross perversion thereof but mostly because it considers a jubilee an excellent means towards the end of popular understanding of debt as social relation (which can therefore be renegotiated in a categorical manner for social reasons) rather than a reified numerical figure (which cannot be renegotiated in such a way because of math)

i will not repudiate debt because i enjoyed it and found it very interesting. but i'm a liberal

I am not talking only about debts as it pertains to gift economies (though I don't, to be very clear mean to exclude them or any other non-monetary form of human exchange). I am all about making good use of unrighteous mammon , and agree with Stalin/Lenin that:

"The big banks are the 'state apparatus' we need for bringing about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically distorts this excellent apparatus, to make it still bigger, still more democratic, still more all-embracing. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the biggest, with branches in every volost, in every factory, will already be nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. That will be nation-wide bookkeeping, nation-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, that will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society"

And such a system can not rely on the heterogeneity of either gifts or personal relations, which creates relationships that, though real, can not be expressed in a tabulable mathematical figure that can be subjected to budgeting and accounting with social needs in mind. In short, it requires the social reification that is the money form.

2. Graeber in the second chapter of the book ("The moral ground of economic relations") makes clear enough that the totalization of the gift economy is not what he actually wants to replace the present dispensation with. It would be better if he did, since, no matter how impractical a scheme that would be, it's at least a concrete suggestion. But he is looking for something both far more vapid and far more pernicious. As he says in the last sentence of the book:

"And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the larger scheme of things, just as no has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe."

(These are propositions that translate to: "We are infinitely valuable and valueless at the same time; simultaneously owe everyone nothing and everything")

The logic of this position he fleshes out a little earlier in the book:

"If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are how we are to pay it. This at least would be intellectually consistent. If so, it would actually be able possibly see almost all systems of established authority-religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal justice system-as so many fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of the unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human freedom would then be our ability to decide for ourselves how we want to do so." (69)

(but are not all the activities that he describes, among others things, cases of human beings utilizing their capacity to decide how they want to pay back this unlimited debt? The empty standard of freedom he is invoking here is a bare description of what already exists, not a critique)

To conclude: Graeber is not interested in understanding human social relations, or in reaching a point at which we could negotiate the debts that have accrued because of them. For in order to renegotiate debts, you have to have a standard, a rule, and institution, by which you can judge what is a right and fitting way to go about that task. But he rejects the validity of all that as merely a phony way to calculate in finite terms the incommensurable. So he is left with this empty incoherent notion of individual people deciding what they can promise to one another, delivering over human relationships to the obscurity of mere individual caprice.

Such a vision of emancipation can either have peaceful and optimistic Rousseauan implications or violent and nihilistic Nietzschean implications, with the anthropological premises providing some sort of substance to the bare formulae. Graeber's approach is of course the latter. But, as his approach to the Syrian conflict proves, the two notionally different approaches ultimately tend towards the same conclusions.

Edited by RedMaistre (Jan. 19, 2015 06:41:30)

discipline posted:

getfiscal posted:

Hitler got owned so bad he shot himself.

So did Allende

So did Ed Norton in Fight Club

tpaine posted:

do you like him gringus

he is not a marxist-leninist and therefore is dead to me, but he seems nice enough i guess.

Expansion of ‘secret’ facility in Iraq suggests closer U.S.-Kurd ties

A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who’ve seized control of half of Iraq in the past month.

Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are American drones taking off and landing at the facility.

Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split _ complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.

The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government angered Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki when early in the crisis it sent its pershmerga militia to seize the long-contested city of Kirkuk when Iraqi troops abandoned it. Relations have deteriorated since. On Wednesday, Maliki accused Kurdish President Massoud Barzani sheltering Islamic State members. The next day, Barzani demanded that Maliki resign.

Overnight, Kurdish troops seized oil fields operated by Iraq’s Northern Oil Co., whose exports had been controlled by the central government, and on Friday, Kurdish legislators began a boycott of the Iraqi government.

The developments all come as the United States, which has said it won’t come to Iraq’s assistance unless Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive, is expected to announce early next week its assessment of the military situation in the country. Pentagon officials said the assessment might be made public as early as Monday.

But U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they’d need to coordinate any steps it takes both in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway.

“Within a week of the fall of Mosul we were being told to double or even triple our capacities,” said one Western logistics contractor who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he’d signed nondisclosure agreements with the U.S. government on the matter.

“They needed everything from warehouse space to refrigeration capacity, because they operate under a different logistics command than the normal military or embassy structures,” the contractor said. “The expansion was aggressive and immediate.”

Other contractors who deal extensively with moving heavy equipment through Irbil’s airport, which has supported a rapidly expanding oil and gas drilling industry, said they were aware of the expansion. One British oil executive said he’d detected a “low-key but steady stream of men, equipment and supplies for an obvious expansion of the facility.” The local Kurdish intelligence official described what was taking place as a “long-term relationship with the Americans.”

In a statement July 3, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that Irbil would host such a center, in addition to one being set up in Baghdad, and suggested that it had already begun operating.

“We have personnel on the ground in Irbil, where our second joint operations center has achieved initial operating capability,” he said then.

“It’s no secret that the American special forces and CIA have a close relationship with the peshmerga,” said the Kurdish official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing covert military operations. He added that the facility had operated even “after the Americans were forced out of Iraq by Maliki,” a reference to the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal after the Obama administration and the Iraqi government couldn’t agree on a framework for U.S. forces remaining in the country.

The official refused to directly identify the location of the facility but when he was shown the blurred-out location on an online satellite-mapping service he joked, “The peshmerga do not have the influence to make Google blur an area on these maps. I will leave the rest to your conclusions.”

But the official wasn’t shy discussing the past arrangement and potential for a future expansion of the relationship.

“Most of our ‘mukhabarat’ worked directly alongside both the CIA and JSOC throughout the war in Iraq because of our language ability and long experience battling both Saddam and radical terrorists,” he said, using the Arabic term for “information office,” usually ascribed to local intelligence.

“Peshmerga fighters fought closely alongside the American Green Berets throughout northern Iraq in places like Mosul, Tal Afar and Kirkuk because we are very professional and trusted,” he said. “And many of our men would work directly with the most secret units as interpreters and Iraqi experts.”

During a recent visit to the site, extensive construction of new roads off the main highway could be seen, as well as what appeared to be construction of a fortified gate complex to protect access, which previously had been controlled by a simple dirt road and checkpoint flanked by two bunkers guarded by men in peshmerga uniforms.

Armored sport utility vehicles driven by military-appearing Westerners in civilian clothes were seen entering and exiting the facility in convoy fashion.

“Irbil is a very friendly place for people in the intelligence business,” a Western military attache said on the condition he not be identified because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the matter. “So many locals worked with the Americans and remember them fondly, that you didn’t need the hardened defenses that you’d find normally this close to a battlefield.”

The attache said the existence of the facility had long been known to residents. “Nobody cared before because everyone is on good terms,” he said.

A retired American special forces officer said it would be a relatively simple matter for the United States to work with peshmerga forces. “A lot of those pesh guys were known and respected for their training and trustworthiness by ODA, OGA and the Secret Squirrels long before the 2003 invasion,” he said, using the acronyms for “Operational Detachment Alpha,” the official designation of the Green Berets, and “other government agency,” a common slang term for the CIA. “Secret Squirrels” is a term soldiers use to describe Joint Special Operations Command units that usually don’t have an obvious unit designation.

A special operations officer, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he’s legally bound not to publicly discuss his career without specific Defense Department permission, said working with the Kurds would overcome a number of difficult issues that would be present as U.S. advisers worked with the Iraqi army.

“It’s a natural fit that as these guys look around at the collapsed Iraqi army and how all of its remaining competent units are either infiltrated by or directly led by Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders that there would be a high degree of discomfort directly operating with them,” he said. “But the Kurds are trustworthy, reliable and already know how to fight alongside your units. It’s a natural fit to run an operation from Irbil with the pesh, while the other advisers in Baghdad try to stem the bleeding of the Iraqi army and protect that huge U.S. embassy complex.”

He also noted there are advantages to working with Kurdish forces if the United States decides to launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions.

“Airstrikes are close to useless without good intelligence and targeting, and that’s going to be hard to come by on the Baghdad side of things,” he said. “To me it’s a no-brainer. The only real way you can do that is with the Kurds.”

A good article that gives more context to what discipline is saying.