shennong posted:
i'm familiar with Mauss' work and have read that graeber paper. what i meant was that after Graeber's typology of exchange, and all this great info about different really-existing exchange systems (and some pretty clear indications from Graeber that he's sympathetic toward some types and sees them as useful), i wanted to get down into some practical nitty-gritty about what this stuff can mean for people living in a modern globalised debt-currency regime.

i don't have my copy of debt here as i lent it to a friend, but i recall in one of the later chapters graeber saying something like "everything's different now" and it wasn't clear to me if that meant he didn't think the preceding history/description was all that relevant anymore. i came away from it feeling as though the way forward for me was to try to expand the sphere of communistic exchange in my life by refusing to apply market logic to any exchange where i could avoid it, and to try to participate in local community credit systems, but the second part was a huge stumbling block.

i've been talking with some other people about time banking for a while, and the great advantage is that you can evade taxation and state intervention because you're not using a market value system, but how do you hook that up to exchanges of goods? the challenge in transitioning away from the current exchange system to one that's still useful for dealing with, say, strangers from other communities, but is more in line with our values are difficult to wrap my head around

oh, ok. basically it comes down to quantification and scheduling. that is how money most likely developed: along with the establishment of other weights and measures. it will probably strike you as obvious that the development of agriculture required planning seasonally (at least now that i said it anyways). in this context, time is cyclical rather than linear (calenders) and it's probably not a coincidence that festivals and holidays often appear at roughly corresponding times across cultures (including the "new year"). this allows for what has been called "time discipline"

ultimately, you have to have some sort of forward planning and the crucial question is the way it's done. as for the present, something like time banking is just a matter of making the units "incommensurable" and hence the activities connected with them. i've sort of wondered about whether or not it might be possible to toy with "temporal organization" along with organization by geography and communication because it could work across distance and would be really hard to detect* without understanding how it works. you could put disparate groups/communities on a separate schedule so that they're organized together, but also have a degree of administrative autonomy from the "capitalist" one. idk, it's just idle speculation

it might also be possible to use weights and measures in similar ways to expand the scope. it would be kinda like the Saussurian synchronic/diachronic distinction only with forms of measurement and activities instead of sounds and concepts. it would be a supplement to/moment in present forms of political organization rather than something fundamentally different.

in addition to timekeeping, you might be able to get historical clues from studying wars, which are how we got things like cryptography. cryptography is founded on some form of antagonism everywhere it's used.

*once you understand the logic of chartalism, you'll notice that there's a seemingly automatic tendency to detect forms of resistance to it, from Paulites to Hawala networks.

e: some further reading

the originator of Chartalism as theory (practice obviously goes back a lot longer) is a guy from the German Historical School named Georg Friedrich Knapp. Keynes got it from him and was the one responsible for getting his book translated into English

no matter what you think of them politically, the anachronistically named "Modern Monetary Theory" people (see here and here) have some stuff that's really interesting and Graeber cites several of them. i could see the influence in his book. L. Randall Wray is pretty much the chartalist theorist in terms of institutions. Krugman's attacks on them seem aimed at guarding the arcana imperii

Michael Hudson is the one that Graeber got the stuff on Mesopotamia from as well as stuff on dollar hegemony. he teaches at the same university as the "MMT" people, but he really does his own thing.

there's a canadian professor named R.T. Naylor (also cited by Graeber) who has written several books on all kinds of things related to capital flight and illicit finance involving organized crime, the extremely wealthy, and certain governments (to the extent that they can be clearly distinguished). Naylor got a lot of his understanding from Hudson (see this interview).

there's a concept called "exchange control" that is basically the administrative counterpart to capital controls. apart from Naylor, i don't have anything specific on it besides the name Paul Einzig, whose books are long out of print and way too expensive afaik. it became kind of a lost art with the advent of neoliberalism.

another concept is "transfer pricing" which is the modern corporate equivalent to the Mesopotamian system. you have to be careful about what you find on it because they too have fallen victim to economics imperialism and been turned into "market prices" governed by impersonal forces. real accountants and other administrators still have to understand how they work, so you would want to find the type of things they would read. i fucking hate economists

lastly, you might want to take a peak at a balance of payments manual (pdf), which tell you a surprising amount about the institutional dynamics involved.

Edited by dm (Dec. 8, 2011 09:50:19)

discipline posted:
Sixth, make sure your investments are not based in currency instruments or paper. Switch them over to durable investments like gold, silver, wood, water, oil, food crops, etc. These have real value. Right now there is no real way to tell if any of the paper instruments have any value what so ever.

should add bitcoins to the list imo

Parmenides’ position was obviously absurd; and indeed, science has since shown that Heraclitus was more right than he could possibly have known. The elements that make up solid objects are, in fact, in constant motion. But a fairly strong case can be made that had Western philosophy not rejected his position for Parmenides’ false one, we would never have been able to discover this. The problem with his dynamic approach is that while obviously true it makes it impossible to draw precise borders and thus to make precise measurements. If objects are really processes, we no longer know their true dimensions—at least, if they still exist—because we don’t know how long they will last. If objects are in constant flux, even precise spatial measures are impossible. One can take an object’s measure at a particular moment and then treat that as representative, but even this is something of an imaginary construct, because such “moments” (in the sense of points in time, of no duration, infinitely small) do not really exist—they, too, are imaginary constructs. It has been precisely such imaginary constructs (“models”) that have made modern science possible. As Paul Ricoeur has noted:

It is striking that Plato contributed to the construction of Euclidian geometry through his work of denominating such concepts as line, surface, equality, and the similarity of figures, etc., which strictly forbade all recourse and all allusion to manipulations, to physical transformation of figures. This asceticism of mathematical language, to which we owe, in the last analysis, all our machines since the dawn of the mechanical age, would have been impossible without the logical heroism of Parmenides denying the entirety of the world of becoming and of praxis in the name of the self-identity of significations. It is to this denial of movement and work that we owe the achievements of Euclid, of Galileo, modern mechanism, and all our devices and apparatus.

There is obviously something very ironic about all this. What Ricoeur is suggesting is that we have been able to create a technology capable of giving us hitherto unimaginable power to transform the world, largely because we were first able to imagine a world without powers or transformations. It may well be true. The crucial thing, though, is that in doing so, we have also lost something. Because once one is accustomed to a basic apparatus for looking at the world that starts from an imaginary, static, Parmenidean world outside of it, connecting the two becomes an overwhelming problem. One might well say that the last couple thousand years of Western philosophy and social thought have been and endless series of ever more complicated attempts to deal with the consequences. Always you get same the assumption of fixed forms and the same failure to know where you actually find them.

mcnally posted:
Through the financial equivalent of a complete blood transfusion, a stop was put to the bank collapses. But the consequence was a colossal buildup in government debt. In medicine, a total blood replacement is also known as an exchange transfusion. And that is exactly what global banks received. Financial institutions that were collapsing under the weight of bad debts simply exchanged their toxic assets for good money from central banks. However, in order to come up with this cash for the banks, governments had to sell bonds in the financial markets. Yet government bonds are themselves a form of debt, loans that must be repaid with interest. And the investors who make those loans pay close attention to the capacity of borrowers to repay—even when those borrowers are sovereign states. As a result, when the immense debt burdens of a number of European governments, like Greece, became public knowledge in early 2010, investors shunned their bonds, setting off more tremors in world financial markets. The specter of government defaults traumatized markets, forcing European states to dish out another $1 trillion in bailout funds.

again, this is not a problem with the book, this was something that was constructed and picked up by a lot of people who didn't stop at seeing the push and actually internalized the rationale. here is an example from that book by R.T. Naylor that i posted in the book thread:

It was generally accepted that, during the heyday of 'liberalism' in Argentine economic policy, the debt rose astronomically. But the actual figures were only working estimates. Late in 1982, Jorge Wehbe declared the debt was $43 billion. The air force insisted that it was no more than $37.8 billion. In 1983 AmEx bank estimated it at $43.7 billion, adding the significant insight that of $63 billion of debt 'missing' among the twenty-four largest debtor countries, Argentina had 'lost' a quarter of the total.

how is it that it has become so easy to precisely quantify with no dispute? it's just sort of accepted in a fashion that i would call cynical if i hadn't actually watched the conception being constructed. again, it's not the particular book at all, on the contrary, it's the staggering acceptance. oh well, i'll march onward. this thing has just been bugging me everywhere i see it

e: fucking shit, the very next paragraph

Greece, moreover, is no isolated case. Britain, Spain, the U.S., Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and many other states have become dramatically more indebted as a result of the Great Bailout. Public debt in these countries is now above 60 percent of their annual output (or gross domestic product)—and rising. Indeed, that is what has most rattled investors: the realization that governments have borrowed so much, and lost so much potential tax revenue due to job loss, that public debt in these countries is set to soar to as much as five times the gross domestic product within a generation. It doesn’t take rocket science to realize this is not sustainable. Just as we do not expect wage-earners to be able to handle debt loads on that scale, investors doubt the ability of governments to do so as well. The prospect that sovereign states might default sent a new wave of panic through financial markets, compelling European governments to intervene massively once more. Prudent gamblers will not bet against it happening again.

the "mechanics" don't work that way. the debt that the banks held is private debt and remains privately held rather than being allocated to be spent on future public programs. they did an audit in Ireland and found:

Debt as a proportion of national income will likely be 144% in 2012 and will probably still represent 140% of national income by 2015 - despite several years of savage austerity. When the aforementioned ‘contingent liabilities’ are factored in, the Irish national debt stood, according to the recent debt audit, at €371.1 billion on 31 March 2011. This is equivalent to almost 300% of Irish national income. Of this, €279.3 billion (over 75%) is accounted for by the state-covered debts of the Irish banks, and this, as the audit notes, is before taking into account the likelihood that much of the direct government debt of €91.8 billion may itself have arisen from the banking crisis. In other words, the audit proves conclusively that the Irish debt crisis is a crisis of private (subsequently socialised) debt, not public debt - the allegedly ‘bloated’ nature of the Irish public service, or ‘generous’ welfare entitlements, did not cause this crisis. As the audit puts it, “it is clear that the bulk of Irish government debt has arisen directly from the banking crisis, the decision in September 2008 to rescue all of the Irish banks”. Alarmingly, the audit notes that the headline figure of €371.1 billion may be an underestimate. For example, the audit does not count unguaranteed bonds issued by the banks (and therefore not legally the responsibility of the Irish state) as part of the debt but, to date, the Irish government, presumably at ECB insistence, has been repaying these bonds also. As recently as Wednesday of this week, the government repaid in full a debt (unguaranteed) of $1 billion (approximately €731 million) owed by a now defunct bank to an unknown creditor, a debt which had been traded on the secondary market for little over half of its value i.e., an anonymous speculator has just made an enormous profit. And the Irish government seems insistent that it will not seek any debt relief despite such relief having been extended to Greece.

So who then is getting all this money? Another hugely important finding from the audit concerns secrecy, what the audit describes as “the anonymous nature of bonds, and the culture of confidentiality and secrecy which surrounds them”. We simply do not know to whom the debt is owed and to whom it is being repaid. (We can safely assume it is European financial institutions as, if it were not, the ECB would not be so vigorously protecting their interests). And yet the bondholders are obviously exerting enormous influence, directly or indirectly, over Irish government policy with attempts to ensure that the bondholders take a ‘haircut’ (some write-down in the value of the debt) being strenuously resisted by, in the particular, the ECB. The audit argues that “The importance of the holders of the debt in determining policy suggests that their relationship to the Irish state is more controlling than is usual for bondholders, and strengthens the case against their anonymity”, which is putting it mildly.

the same rhetoric is there too about "sustainability" (something Fraternite likes to stress) and the government budget/household budget. am i obsessing about this or is this really just seriously fucking weird?

Edited by dm (Dec. 8, 2011 15:01:43)

The insanity of the capitalist mode of conception reaches its climax here, for instead of explaining the expansion of capital on the basis of the exploitation of labour-power, the matter is reversed and the productivity of labour power is explained by attributing this mystical quality of interest-bearing capital to labour-power itself.

this is literally how they calculate the "debt sustainability" with imaginary equations and no audits. i'm fucking crazy. this is not happening

fuck

The conception of capital as a self-reproducing and self-expanding value, lasting and growing eternally by virtue of its innate properties — hence by virtue of the hidden quality of scholasticists — has led to the fabulous fancies of Dr. Price, which outdo by far the fantasies of the alchemists; fancies, in which Pitt believed in all earnest, and which he used as pillars of his financial administration in his laws concerning the sinking fund.

"Money bearing compound interest increases at first slowly. But, the rate of increase being continually accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid, as to mock all the powers of the imagination. One penny, put out at our Saviour's birth to 5 per cent compound interest, would, before this time, have increased to a greater sum, than would be contained in a hundred and fifty millions of earths, all solid gold. But if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and four pence half-penny. Our government has hitherto chosen to improve money in the last, rather than the first of these ways."

His fancy flies still higher in his Observations on Reversionary Payments, etc., London, 1772. There we read:

"A shilling put out to 6% compound interest at our Saviour's birth" (presumably in the Temple of Jerusalem) "would ... have increased to a greater sum than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn's orbit." "A state need never therefore be under any difficulties; for with the smallest savings it may in as little time as its interest can require pay off the largest debts" (pp. XIII, XIV).

What a pretty theoretical introduction to the national debt of England!

Price was simply dazzled by the gargantuan dimensions obtained in a geometrical progression. Since he took no note of the conditions of reproduction and labour, and regarded capital as a self-regulating automaton, as a mere number that increases itself just as Malthus did with respect to population in his geometrical progression, he was struck by the thought that he had found the law of its growth in the formula s = c(1 + i)n, in which s = the sum of capital + compound interest, c = advanced capital, i = rate of interest (expressed in aliquot parts of 100) and n stands for the number of years in which this process takes place.

if i can demonstrate how that exact equation has been slightly modified into how they calculate the debt-to-GDP ratio would it be worth it? i mean i seriously fuckin give up fuck

Coordinated restraint and austerity could have similar effects on the world economy as a whole. Economist Paul Krugman argues that these policies will induce a “third depression” (the first two being 1873–96 and 1929–39). Describing the shift to aus- terity as a return to neoliberal economic orthodoxy that sees government debt as inherently bad, he asks, “And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of mil- lions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.”

we are all neoliberals now

Crow posted:
i knew it! There is truth in the false procedure!

http://twitter.com/#!/zizek_ebooks/status/140127878384861184

indeed. did this crisis not itself emerge from the previous crisis? we are presently experiencing a crisis of the crisis.

Edited by dm (Dec. 9, 2011 22:11:52)