Concerning the Violent Peace-Police

I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York.

David Graeber studied 5,000 years of debt

Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is David Graeber, who teaches anthropology at Gold- smiths College, University of London. He is the author of “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value,” “Lost People,” and “Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire.”

David’s reply to Brad DeLong

In late 2011, around the time of Occupy Wall Street, he for some reason known only to himself, decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life. He started with outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until my publishers encouraged me to point out that false personal aspersions were actionable

DEBT, VIOLENCE, AND IMPERSONA MARKETS: POLANYIAN MEDITATIONS

If The Great Transformation will be remembered for anything a century from now, it will be as the definitive rejoinder to the great liberal myth. This is, of course, the assumption that there is something natural about what Polanyi called “self-regulating markets”, that they arise of their own accord as long as state interference doesn’t prevent them.

Dickheads: The paradox of the necktie resolved

Some people (me, for instance) put a great deal of energy into organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic power?

Foreword The return of ethnographic theory

It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible – what we call “the economy” – is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is.