I was reading a blog post on David Graeber’s book *Debt*, by Marcia B. It’s a good post, and an excellent reminder that I should finish reading the damn book, and also read the new one that got published posthumously.
If debt and commerce … are transhistorical conditions of sufficiently organized society, with no respect to the differences between such societies … then the only political option possible is to impose periodic jubilees to free people of their chains. Graeber, in this sense, accomplishes something very remarkable: he refutes the barter myth, but replaces it with the eternal condition of commodity valuation … My hunch is that this attitude is why many readers of Graeber call themselves anti-capitalists but really tend to advocate for workplace democracy, universal basic income, or owning one’s own means of life. They do not oppose capitalism as such, or capitalism on a fundamental level, but rather capitalism at a sufficiently oppressive stage of development. – David Graeber's Debt: An Informal Review
David Graeber's Debt: An Informal Review
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good add on to provide. All I can say is that the idea of money being an invention by the Roman Empire to make the population of the subjugated lands pay the occupying army is genius, and I had heard about it on the Byzantine History Podcast, too. Basically, the state gives the army coins, they pay for their food with coins, the state collects taxes from the conquered people, so they have to get the coins by selling to the occupying army, the tax redistributes the coin to the occupying armies, who then by more stuff on the local markets… I hadn’t thought of this before, and I still love this idea.
But then @acdw asked:
what even is money
He got some funny replies, and I ended up writing:
It’s the invisible force that binds us all together, and so, like a giant ball of meat and clothes and a lot of rope, glue, and chains, we roll around on the surface of the earth, screaming, crying, crushing some, uplifting others, and it makes no sense and everything is spinning around and I want to puke.
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Was Katamari Damacy a good game? I never played it.
The game’s plot concerns a diminutive prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations, and Moon, which were inadvertently destroyed by his father, the King of All Cosmos. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to human beings to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star. – Katamari Damacy
#Philosophy
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So I got both of the Graeber books at this moment. I am pausing while I move, but if you would like to have a mini book club on them to keep you going, you know where to find me!!
– PresGas 2022-08-04 01:48 UTC
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That is an excellent idea. Should we do it via Signal? Or on a blog‽
– Alex 2022-08-04 07:52 UTC
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I think the main reason I don’t like *Debt* is that it keeps on talking about slavery and violence and that gets me down about as quickly as reading the newspaper. 🥺
– Alex 2022-08-25 11:50 UTC