Debt, capitalism, justice, liberty

[ashling]

I posted this as an a reply in another thread which has not gotten many views (in fact, mine was the only one) so I thought I would edit it and post in my own thread. The thread was about capitalism and Marx and older forms of human community. Last night I happened to start reading a book on debt Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

As I say, I have just read a few pages - got a "sample" copy on kindle -but he asks some interesting questions about debt and what it is. Ultimately the questions involve or relate to capitalism - which is a system based on debt. He asks the question which I have asked here lately "Who really owes what to whom." It is a question of morality.

In a discussion here recently on Justice I asked "What is justice and who owes it and to whom?" Unfortunately I posed it in the context of the Trayvon Martin situation, so it got little of the philosophical flavor I had intended and a lot of ideological fervor.

I remember when that woman in Houston drowned her infant and other children some years back,an uber-religious person in my office was hawking the death penalty as a solution for all social ills. I asked her why this poor mentally deranged uber-religious person should be put to death and my office colleague told me "She has to pay!"

My response was "What should she pay and to whom?" It went right over her head.

Back to Graeber.


In Debt, Graeber uses an anecdote from a Buhdist monk about a creditor who is being punished by karma for his lack of virtue in being an unreasonable creditor.

It is as one sutra says, "When we do not repay the things that we have borrowed, our payment becomes that of being reborn as a horse or an ox.""The debtor is like a slave , the creditor is like a master." Or again, "a debtor is like a pheasant and his creditor a hawk." If you are in a situation of having granted a loan, do not put unreasonable pressure on your debtor for repayment. If you do you will be reborn as a horse or an ox and be put to work for him who was in debt to you, and then you will repay many times over."

He says that

All of the great religious traditions seem to bang up against this quandry in one form or another. ... insofar as all human relationship involve debt, they are all morally compromised. Both parties are probably already guilty of something just by entering into the relationship; at the very least they run a significant danger of being guilty if repayment is delayed. On the other hand, when we say that someone acts as if they don't owe anything to anybody," we are hardly speaking of the person as being a paragon of virtue. In the secular world morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others, and we have a stubborn tendency to imagine those obligations as debts. Monks, perhaps can avoid the dilemma by detaching themselves from the secular world entirely, but the rest of us appear condemned to live in a universe that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Don't worry, I'm am getting to Graeber's point ... and eventually to mine.

It is at this point that Graeber asks the question "who really owes what to whom?" (What is justice and who owes it and to whom is it owed?)

... the moment one asks the question "Who really owes what to whom?" - or What is justice and who owes it and to whom is it owed? - "one has begun to adopt the creditor's language'

...the capitalist's language.

Just as if we don't pay our debts "our payment becomes that of being reborn as a horse or an ox"; so if you are an unreasonable creditor, you too will repay. Even karmic justice can be thus reduced to the language of a buisness deal

Thinking of justice (karmic or otherwise) as a business deal sort of makes me feel dirty.

Short, humorous (or not) story: When I was in college my girlfriend (then soon to be my fiance who then dumped me - dodged a bullet there!) - but I digress. . . .(I really am getting to that point I promised.) In the denomination I attended we said "forgive us our trespasses." When she went to the church I had been attending, I didn't notice that she was saying "forgive us our debts." However, when I went to her church and everybody else was saying "debts" it was really freakin' obvious when I said "trespasses." If you've been there, you know what I mean.

That is an example of the creditor/capitalist language creeping into the non-secular world. . . . seeing karma/justice as a business deal. Eww! ( 'scuse me a minute while I go wash up.)

Jose Marti, Cuban revolutionary and author of the verses that were written into the song "Quantanimera" (echar mis versos del alma)', said that we are guilty of all abjection that we do not relieve. If that is true - and I believe that it is - then the answer to "who really owes what and to whom" is easy: everyone owes everything to everyone. The same is true of my other question: Justice is the responsibility of everyone to everyone. This concept is at the heart of another Marti statement: "We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it. If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour."

Graeber said that "morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others." Who really owes what to whom?

Everything to everyone.

All justice to all people.

To a fulfilled and fulfilling life, there are no creditors; there are no debtors. This concept is antithetical to capitalism.

So, that is my point (I told you I'd get here).

Coincidentally, another book that I picked up last night and started re-reading (and I know you are not going to believe this): "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill (or was it John Stewart?)
Throughout history liberty has largely been spoken of in terms of liberty from something. Historically most of humankind (99%) has been trying to get out from under the thumb of of the rest of humankind, or in-humankind, as it were (1%)

In my government classes I give extra credit for reading a book by Justice Stephen Breyer. I am especially fond of Active Liberty. He maintains that in addition and equally important to the liberty that the founders secured from Britain was the liberty to create and be a part of and take part in government. I contend that that may even be the greater of the two liberties.

You never - except around here - here positive enthusiasm for our liberty to pay taxes. Yet, "I like paying taxes," Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "with them I buy civilization." Well, there we get back to the language of the business deal that I had just gotten us away from, but you get the point. We are at liberty to be involved and a part of something greater than ourselves (and theoretically to participate in it, but I'll leave that for another time.)

My old friend Jose was one of those humans in history who was striving to break free from some of those in-humans. He was very big on liberty.

"Liberty," he said, is "the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect." And again, "Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist."

But Jose Marti understood something - something that Justices Breyer and Holmes, and (hopefully) all of us at DU understand. "Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all."

He was positively enthusiastic about the obligations of freedom, and was eager to be a part of freedom's fulfillment: "We are free, but not to be evil, not to be indifferent to human suffering, not to profit from the people, from the work created and sustained through their spirit of political association, while refusing to contribute to the political state that we profit from. We must say no once more. Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor.

When I hear Paul and Bachman and Ryan, et al,, talk about liberty and freedom ad nauseam I become very angry, but I also cry a little inside. Libertarians twist the promise of liberty and screw freedom. They are as antithetical to true American freedom and active liberty as capitalism is to the fulfilled life.

[HiPointDem]

1. Interesting essay.

PS: "Guantanamera" = woman from Guantanamo, Cuba.

[limpyhobbler]

2. debt is bullshit.

Last edited Tue May 1, 2012, 06:38 AM - Edit history (1)

Our whole society is based around people hawking chunks of their life away to banks.

A mortgage, a car payment and a student loan. Aka the American Dream. Aka unsustainable lunacy.

And they wonder why the economy is in crisis. Jeesh.

[limpyhobbler]

3. Oh and another thing,

You mentioned the right-wing and libertarian skewed view of what it means to be free. You might also be interested in this article I posted here a while back. It's not exactly the same thing you were saying but the author makes some similar points. Here's an excerpt.

by Jason Hickel

– perhaps most importantly – we need to reclaim the idea of freedom.  We have to reject the neoliberal version of freedom as market deregulation, which is really just license for the rich to accumulate and exploit, and license for the few to gain at the expense of the many.  We have to assert that thoughtful regulation can in fact promote freedom, if by freedom we mean freedom from poverty and want, freedom to have the basic human dignity afforded by good education, housing, and healthcare, and freedom to earn a decent living wage from a hard day’s work.  Instead of accepting that freedom means unhinging the economy from the constraints of democratic society, we need to assert that true freedom entails harnessing the economy to help us achieve specific social goods that are democratically arrived at and collectively ratified.

via: http://www.democraticunderground.com/101624341

[ashling]

4. Thanks for the link

just a minor point. I didn't say that they had "skewed" freedom. I said that they ad "screwed" it. (as in screwed it up.)