Just heard David Graeber, author of ‘Debt, The First 5,000 Years’ and others has died.
‘Debt’ is worth reading, the rest, maybe not.
Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.
His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, made him famous. In it, Graeber explored the violence that lies behind all social relations based on money, and called for a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. While it divided some critics, it also attracted strong sales and praise from everyone from Thomas Piketty to Russell Brand.
— Guardian
Deirdre McCloskey didn’t like it that was good enough for me.
I would also recommend “Bullshit Jobs.” There are two unemployment problems: (1) actual unemployed persons and (2) people using energy and non-renewable resources to add nothing of value–tens of millions in the USA alone?
Exactly.
I said before and I’ll say it again; at it’s twilight, Capitalism turns into a really pitiful make-work project.
Michael Hudson has posted a long and lovely comment about his relationship with David Graeber on Naked Capitalism today. I seldom read that blog anymore but I was told that Yves Smith had put together a good post on his death. I did not know how important he was in the Occupy Wall Street movement. All I can say besides Rest in Peace is that there is a generation of thoughtful leftists coming of age. We have lost Michael Brooks and now David Graeber but they, along elders like Michael Hudson and David Harvey, have finally given rise to an analysis from the left that has been absent since – forever. I, too, am a fan of Bullshit Jobs. Have to admit that I have read a lot of reviews of “Debt..” but never read it. Michael Hudson points out that debt existed long before capitalism. Of course that must be true but I have not ever thought enough about it. It means that debt could survive capitalism doesn’t it.
[“Deirdre McCloskey didn’t like it that was good enough for me.”]
ROFLMFAO
I remember watching an INET video with her a few years ago. I was back from work, eating supper in front of the computer as usual. I also remember choking on my ****ing sandwich followed by a barely resisted urge to slam my fist on the keyboard and through my screen for how utterly infuriating this inconceivably dense amount of stupidity could somehow still get airplay.
The privilege of the comfortably silo-ed system cheerleaders I guess …
RIP David Graeber.
Now getting back once again to oil price dynamics, let us start with some simple principles. The price of oil in dollars cannot go to zero, by definition, nor can it go to infinity. Can we at least agree on that.
Alright, so if the price of oil cannot go to zero or infinity, that means at any given time that oil is a substance used and traded on world markets, its price has to be between zero and infinity. So what is that fair price? Quite simply, wherever it is trading at right now. No more, and no less.
Ok, but here is where we get into all sorts of arguments, because everybody is trying to predict the future price. But whatever that future price is, it still must be between zero and infinity, and must be the fair price at that particular time, correct? So in this spirit, I still believe that oil is going to be priced higher.
We know with absolute certainty that it won’t be produced in massive quantitites in the future. Even if demand remains low, at some point supply must continually deplete faster than demand is destroyed. This must be true; otherwise, it would be an infinite resource. And I think that everybody, even now, is treating it as such. But once you start seeing it as a valuable finite substance, it all of suddenly becomes a little bit more like gold or housing or stocks in your valuation. You see that it actually has value in and of itself, not merely being immediately used up.
It’s on this basis that I argue for higher prices. And yes, I plan to profit off of this. Otherwise there’s no point to the peak oil discussion. Academic discussion of anything is fruitless.
McCloskey, yikes, glad to have never heard of her (?) But I have never had much use for the Episcopal Church since they purged “Once to Every Man and Nation” from the hymnal. It was good mental exercise to grow up wondering whether this was the one time.
Anyway, on a lighter note, and proving that everything sounds much better in French, here is a Labor Day treat for you, comrades:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hQve0TCVH0
@sp gp
https://www.artberman.com/2020/09/03/stop-expecting-oil-and-the-economy-to-recover/
First of all, thanks for the recent back-to-back articles Steve. Always nice to pop in here and know it’s still active!
I liked ‘Debt’ a lot but Graeber I think fell into the same trap as a lot of other left folks where they identify legitimate issues but then fetishise them as the cynosure of a “new radicalism” or whatever. That leads to ideas like debtors as the ultimate damned of the earth. And “radical” proposals like a debt Jubilee, something that would be utterly useless if you didn’t have access to credit in the first place, like 90% of humanity right now and probably a good chunk of developed nation populations in the frighteningly-ever-nearer future. Worth noting too is what would be the worst possible (aka realistic) outcome of this – a mass debt refusal leading to a vast transfer of property to financial institutions – after all, wasn’t the subprime crash merely an involuntary mass debt refusal? We could even see the reintroduction of debtors’ prison or indentured labour!
The better approach is to use that understanding as a step towards a broader systemic critique against capitalism as a whole, and not merely the disparate parts of it that affect downward-mobile upper-middle and upper class youth. Take veganism for example, they have great arguments against the cosmically wasteful and cruel industrial slaughter of animals for food. Yet instead of expanding that perspective to include industrialism and fossil-powered agriculture, which would be the logical next step anyway, they want to tell you why eating shrimps is like the holocaust.
Anyway, RIP to a real one. Although there might be a certain irony to this passing because we could be entering an era when a lot of debtors, eg the shale industry, are about to be “forgiven”.
Good points. If we have a debt jubilee here, only those who already are in the club will partake. Everyone else will be screwed. That’s been the America Way my entire adult life and I see nothing from Trump or Biden, the vast majority of congress, the supreme court, or anywhere else in this country that could even begin to consider any other options.
I was born in 1947. Shortly several billion young people, around the world, will realise that my generation have stolen everything from, not just them, but from every generation yet to be born.
All the oil, coal, nat. gas, topsoil, aquifers, clean rivers and oceans, clean air, biodiversity, antibiotics, stable social stuctures, sound money, even a stable climate. Once someone points this fact out to them expect extraordinary, continent-wide intergenerational warfare. And it won’t matter one jot what books you have read, what links you have clicked on or how many hours you have spent in your favorite echo-chamber when they come looking for you. And all it will take is a little organising. Would the PTB pull off such a stunt to give everybody something to do once the current entertaiment/distraction has passed?
The President of the USA has the disease coronavirus. This disease is known to cause acute breathing troubles in healthy young humans due to a combination of, among other things:
>Lung and heart damage caused by both the virus itself and the body’s immune system overreacting to its presence.
>Hypercoagulation or thick blood that circulates at a lowered rate to and from the heart, hence absorbs proportionately less oxygen when you breathe which in turn causes even more hypercoagulation. Additionally, causes clots in various places around the body, which can kill you all by themselves.
>Alternating phases of high and low blood pressure, diabetes and hypoglycemia, in many cases afflicting patients for the first time in their lives, which exacerbates all of the above. Also, can kill you all by themselves.
In patients who are old, fat and religiously adhere to the Twinkie-Coke-coke diet, the effects of both breathlessness and its bodily causes pose a very high risk for mortality.
But never mind all that. Imagineer with me, if you would, the contours of an entirely non-violent and hypothetical Orange Funeral. Obama’s speech. W and Hillary singing a sad but uplifting duet. Pour one out for the horse that has to drag that carcass across DC. Mike Pence visibly sweating from standing too close to both Melania and the horse.
Will Kim Jong Un attend? Will Mike Pence fuck the horse?
Disgraced secret service Praetorians doing ritual suicide. Ginsburg parachutes in and reveals it was all a hoax but then dies for real anyway when one of the locusts hovering around Kissinger bites her. Juan Guaido begging to be buried with his master, pathetic, snot dripping, weeping in the streets until ICE arrests him.
Amerikkka grieves the only way it knows how, by trying to invade Iraq again.
Hi Steve,
I’m sure that I speak for many others when I say it sure would be good to hear from you at this time.
The energy markets are reeling, the political scene is beyond description, the headline economy has completely disconnected from the plight of the average citizen and behind the forebearance dam is a tidal wave of unpaid rents, mortgages, credit card balances, loans of varied varities and deferred personal and corporate taxes. At some point in the not too distant future there must be be a day of reckoning OR maybe not. Suspended animation indefinitely.
I for one, would love to hear your thoughts on some or all of these matters or anything else that you deem worth contemplating.
While it’s great to read new stuff from Steve in its own right, there isn’t much else to say about collapse that hasn’t already. Besides, collapse is ongoing! Shale won’t recover and even before the pandemic it needed to produce and sell the last decade’s worth of oil just to get out of debt. There is even less interest across the board in productive investment, and the primary cause of that is the rising costs of extracting, circulating and using finite resources because well, they starting to become more finite by the quarter. Complacency on the part of capital is a factor, but a secondary one, derivative of the former. Corona hasn’t done more than inject some momentum into that extant process.
I think we will also see a series of crises enveloping the global south which provides raw materials and food to the first world for next-to-free. If people in those countries manage to get themselves governments who won’t play the international finance/fx game with the OECD anymore, we’re all kinds of fracked. It’ll be a repeat of the 50s-70s national liberation wave which is precisely why Bretton-Woods had to evolve into what is called “neoliberalism”.
It’s all so volatile right now just like you said. Short term (next 2-5 years) predictions are a fool’s errand!