In this tribute to the late David Graeber, leftist magazine Red Pepper asked activists and academics “what David Graeber’s work meant to them.”
The responses make for interesting reading. Like:
“As David wrote: ‘The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified.’ Whereas debts are impersonal financial instruments, obligations trigger a chain of generosity: gifts and favours of similar, but not identical value, to be granted, not immediately, but at some appropriate time in the future, according to the needs of the recipient and resources of the obliged. Obligations bring us together; debts divide us. Systems of credit and debt have been used to manage our economic affairs for millennia. But David showed us that we are perhaps the first civilisation to orgy in the credit system without having in place the checks and balances that protect the poor from catastrophe.”
and
“The English word ‘free’ derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’— unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends, because the enslaved cannot make commitments or promises. One of the earliest words for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom. They would cancel all non-commercial debts and in some cases allow those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.”
Read all the responses in full here.
Reblogger 