On 05/06/2010 03:15 PM, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/
This is a perfectly horrifying piece, my goodness. :)
The first and overwhelming conclusion
of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to
systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role
of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of
what we now call “the economy”.
I agree with this. And I'd go further. If violence, war, and slavery are
ignored in the study of economic history, then what does that say about
the awareness of those issues in popular culture -- such as general news
and political discourse? In the U.S. I'd say the awareness is as closee
to zero as you can get. I had thought it would be much higher in
academia, though. Perhaps not.
What’s more, origins matter. The
violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of
our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of
institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of
the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence –
maintained by the contemporary state.
This is the bit that really makes this article unsettling.
The institution of wage labour, for instance,
has historically emerged from within that of slavery (the earliest wage
contracts we know of, from Greece to the Malay city states, were
actually slave rentals), and it has also tended, historically, to be
intimately tied to various forms of debt peonage – as indeed it remains
today. The fact that we have cast such institutions in a language of
freedom does not mean that what we now think of as economic freedom does
not ultimately rest on a logic that has for most of human history been
considered the very essence of slavery.
And this is depressing, too. I've heard Noam Chomsky discuss this issue,
as well, but unlike this article Chomsky offers some practical (but
obviously difficult) ways to help mitigate the situation: activism,
community building, anarchism, etc. You organize and run your own
affairs as a community or else you run the risk of getting exploited by
whatever power structure that comes along.
Jim
