Podcast Join My Cult – Viral News: Interview with David Graeber

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It is a puzzling contradiction that paying debts is perceived as an ultimate moral value, higher than human lives, while at the same time money lenders are seen as evil. David Graeber came to the conclusion that debt is kind of a perversion of a promise. The moral power comes from mutual promises. However, debt has been made impersonal; that is to say perverted by a combination of math (exact calculation) and violence (enforcement). The promise of a debt has been made transferable. Money is just debt. 

The question whether some frugal and diligent countries should bail out lazy ones has nothing to do with economics. It is a moral language as if debt were a sin that must be repaid. In many old languages the words for guilt and debt are the same. After 2008 a question emerged: what is a financial system actually for? Why do we have to repay debt? We had to pretend that nothing happened. But of course the underlying issues are not resolved. Since the 1970s it has been one debt crisis after another. Nobody took notice because it was all mainly in the Global South. Now the Global South successfully resisted and the IMF was not welcome in East Asia or Latin America. But it found its new home in Southern Europe.

It is debatable whether we live in a democracy at all. The political process is inherently corrupted. A genuinely free society is one without systematic bureaucracies of violence. 

Here is the link to the interview.