capitalism is just a really bad way of organizing communism.

neal rockwell in conversation with david graeber

Transcribed by Bridget Moser Yan Basque Danielle St Amour Neal Rockwell Layout by Danielle St Amour Photo by Neal Rockwell Edited by Danielle St-Amour and Tess Edmonson Published by PALIMPSEST palimpsest.ca Printing by PAPERPUSHER PRINTWORKS paperpusher.ca /50

INTRODUCTION: David Graeber holds the title of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London. He recently published a book entitled Debt: The First 5000 Years, which is a refutation of commonly held ideas regarding the history of debt, markets and the economy. David is a self-professed anarchist, a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and an outspoken social and political activist. David was an early member of the Occupy movement, which he described as The opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Neal Rockwell is a photographer and journalist living and working in Montreal. He spoke to Graeber at the American Anthropological Associations annual meeting in Montreal in November of 2011.

CONTeNTs 1. GIFTs 2. CURReNCIes 3. MARKeTs 4. FReeDOMs 5. UTOPIAs

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PART ONe: GIFTs

N - So, I read your essay Give it Away, which is about the Maussians, and Marcel Mauss [a radical anthropologist from the earlier part of the 20th century], where you compared a lot of gift economies, and economies from primitive civilizations wherewait is that the right word to use? Whats the right word to use for that D - For what? Oh, well actually Marcel Mauss didnt believe in primitives, except for Australia, where he said they were the only people who were sufficiently cut off that you could call them primitives. Everybody else is what he liked to call archaic civilizations because theyve been caught up in waves of influence, back and forth, in trade over the years so I dont know people? Usually we just talk about stateless societies, societies without markets N - Yeah, stateless. Okay that sounds good. So, we hold a common belief that theres something naturalistic about markets and about the economic system that we have today. I find that theres something radical in investigating and describing these alternative societies and how they functioned. In the article Give it Away, you state that [Mausss] The Gift (1925), was perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind economic theory ever written. Can you speak a bit to that? D - Well, first of all, the one thing that has recently been destroyed, among anthropologists anyway, is what we call the Myth of Barter: the idea that once upon a time people used to simply swap things back and forth, and gradually it became inconvenient. You can still find this story in any

economics textbook. Im trying to swap my arrow heads for your beaver pelts and maybe you dont need arrowheads right now and I dont have anything you want, so we cant make a trade. There are a lot of problems in this story, including logical problems. For example, why would we all be dealing in the spot-trade when were neighbours, and Im going to eventually have something you want? What Mauss did was went systematically through all the literature that existed on what actually happened in societies that didnt have forms of money or markets, and discovered that in almost every case, people denied that they were exchanging things directly at all. They framed everything as a gift. Gift economies, as he called them, take an enormous variety of different forms, but the one form they basically never took was barter. Its not that there isnt competition, for example, but where you have very competitive gift economies, what people are actually competing over is who can give the most away. So, in a lot of the first nations in the northwest coast, what people were doing was accumulating things so that they could throw gigantic feasts where they would give these things, these huge amounts of wealth, to their rivals and enemies especially. I mean, to everybody, but there was this sort of mocking giving where you could belittle people by flooding them with wealth and showing how little you care, and implicitly how materialistic they are. And there are enormous numbers of variations on these [systems], but what he said was that there was always a sense that you had to return a gift, that there was an obligation, that you are somehow reduced and belittled [if you dont]. Theres one story he found in Posidonius, a Greek author from the Roman period who was actually in France looking at ancient Gauls, and noting that they would have these festivals where they would duel and engage in all these contests, but one of the contests was who could give who the most wealth. And it was like a chess gameI give that to him, he gives this to me and if you ever just definitively loseyoure put in a position where youre given such a huge amount of wealth you couldnt possibly give a sufficiently magnificent return giftthe only honorable thing to do is to kill yourself. And people would, you know, cut their throats, and the wealth would be distributed to their followers. And that was the ultimate repose.

Another example, sort of the other side of the same thing, that I like to quote is an Icelandic saga about two Vikings, if I can remember, named something like Inar and Igul, who were both poets. One was old and one was young, they used to sit around making kennings together, and one of them showed up one day at the others hall with this beautiful shield which was jewel-encrusted and had all these subtle runes in it, and no one had ever seen anything like it. Hed got it on a raid. So he left it as a present, because Inar wasnt there. Inar comes home four hours later, sees the shield hanging there and goes, My god, what is that? And someone says, Oh, your friend Igul left it. So Inar takes one look at it and thinks, Right. This guy expects Im going to spend the rest of the night sitting around writing a poem about how generous he is. To hell with him, Ill kill him. So he rides out after him, but the guy had a head start, so Inar has to ride back home. He gets home and he says, Alright, I couldnt kill him. Ill write a poem saying what a great guy he is. And it expresses the humiliation that you have in not being able to return a gift. And in a way thats the question that Mauss is asking that I think is most pointed. We still have this if someone takes us out to dinner, we feel this obligation to return or take them out to someplace possibly even better, or certainly as good, and if we dont, we feel somehow reduced as a personand why is that? Because it completely contradicts our theories of human nature that all of us claim to hold. If Im Milton Friedman, who is an economic theorist that says people are trying to maximize their advantage with minimal output, and that explains all human behaviour, which is what economists say How do you explain the fact that if I took Milton Friedman out to dinner, he would feel he has to take me out? According to his theory, he should say, Great, I got something for nothing! and go home. But he doesnt. N - You mentioned how most of our relationships are fairly communist. D - Ah, yes. Thats another level.

N - You suggest that even within this framework, for some reason we throw away a lot of the evidence that would suggest this and take selfinterest as being the most important. D - Indeed. And as Mauss points out, the very notion of self-interest is a phrase you cant even really translate into most human languages. Its not a self-evident concept at all, because most people assume that when you do something, you have multiple motives, and that lives and human relationships are inherently ambivalent, complicated things. So, if I give something to somebody in a non-market society, partly its because I want them to have something, partly its because I want to show off, partly its because I want to humiliate somebody else, who I hate, or to impress a specific person. Theres a million different motives, but theyre not contradictory, theyre all caught up in one another. This idea that you either have purely self-interested, selfish motives or purely selfless motives would just never have occurred to anybody. This idea of communism, I actually got that from a different book by Mauss, a series of lectures that most people dont read, where he made this very interesting point. He came up with this idea of individualistic communisms. We have this assumption that communism means collective property rights and arrangements, but actually, the original definition of communism, which comes from Louis Blanc, was From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. Well, individual people have relations like that all the time. In fact, for anybody who has a close friend or family member, thats how you act. You dont count how many of one thing you get or how many of another. If somebody needs something, you provide if you can because you know theyd do that for you. From this perspective, any society is threaded through with a complex web of relations of individualistic communism. Any given person has four or five people like that who they know they can always draw on, whether its their brother, their best friend, their husband or wife. To which I added, All societies are based on a certain minimal communism. I call it Baseline Communism. Put it this way: look again at that phrase and at property relations. As Mauss points out, you can

have a place in theory where there are collective property arrangements, but in fact one guy is really in control of everything, and you can also have a place where in theory you have private property, but people have access to other peoples stuff in all sorts of circumstances. So we really do need to look at its rights of access, who has a right to demand what of whom, and under what circumstances. Theres always what I call baseline communism in the sense that if people have any kind of amicable relations, if theyre not enemies, theres an assumption that if the need is great enough (like, Im drowning), or if the cost is small enough (like, do you have a light, could you stop and give me directions?), then obviously, communistic principals apply, you dont count who has given what to whom, you dont even really think about it, you just do something for someone because they need it, under the assumption that there will always be someone who will do that for me. And in many societies, the level is much higher than our own. Its pretty minimal in large urban societies, for example. But if youre in a smaller scale society, its pretty much the case that a request for food is pretty much impossible to refuse, if youve got the food and everybody knows it. N - Even in small towns in say, America or Canada D - This would be the case. Theres a famous Maori story that I like to tell, about this guy named Tereringa [spelling unconfirmed ed.], who was a notorious glutton and this kind of lazy guy who didnt do much fishing. He would always walk around on the beach, and when people came back with their catch of the day, he would kind of look over and say Oh my god! Squid! I love squid. Its one of my favorites! And of course youd have to give him the squid. And hed just do this all day long. Oh look! Yeah! Tuna! Mmm, very good. And when hed praise something youd have to give it to him. So, after about four years of this, people got sick and tired and formed a little war party, ambushed him, and killed him. Because its actually easier to smash someones head in than it is to say, No, Im not going to give you the squid.

N - So what does this parable mean for contemporary society? Is this something we should carry on, something we emulate D - Well I think its here. I mean, communism exists. Rather than think about communism as this imaginary stateOnce upon a time, people owned things in common, someday it might happen againwe need to reformulate how we think about these things and realize that communism always exists. All societies are, in a way, based on it. And its also not going to be the only way that people relate to each other. Theres always going to be exchange, where people keep track of who gave what to whom and things can balance out. Theres going to be hierarchical relations, and were always going to behave like a feudal lord when youre dealing with small children in a human society. The question is how they mix together, and which one people seize upon when they think about what humans are basically about. And I think that was the point that Mauss made that was the most powerful, and I think the most overlooked. He says, its not that these other things have disappeared, its that we no longer see them because were obsessed with the idea that humans are basically acquisitive exchangers. We try to reduce everything to exchangeand not even the sort of exchange based on fairness as much as exchange based on what we call selfinterestthis weird idea that only really came into existence a couple or three hundred years ago. N - Which is a concept very difficult to translate into other languages. D - Yeah, he points that out, that if you wanted to say self-interest in classical Greek or classical Arabic or Sanskrit, youd have to write a paragraph of explanation, because [it wouldnt have been] an obvious concept. Theres this sort of anthropological classic that comes from Peter Freuchens Book of the Eskimos. Hes this Danish guy living in northern Greenland with the Inuit, and they used to go off on hunts. He wasnt a particularly good hunter, but if he didnt catch anything and other people caught a walrus, the guy who was successful would come and drop a large amount of walrus meat there. At first he would always say thank

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you. And he records this one occasion where the guy got very upset and because he said thank you, and the fellow said, Look. Up here, were human, and because were human we do things for one another, because thats what humans do, but we dont like to hear people say thank you for that, because that implies theres a debt. Up here, we say, Gifts make slaves like whips make dogs. So their definition of humanity is not calculating, not remembering who gave what to whom, just the way our definition of humanity is exactly the opposite. N - I wanted to talk a bit more about the market, and what a market is. Theres another Mauss quote, regarding his attitude toward Russia, where he states, The market couldnt be legislated away. The market seems to be somewhat implicit in our society what do we mean when we say the market? D - Thats a lovely concept, because if you ask an economist, hell quickly point out that a market isnt a real thing, its a model. Its an equilibrium model, its a series of equations. Then, of course, theyll turn around and say, Well, if you dont abide by the dictates of the market, you only have yourself to blame, and theyll treat it as if its a living thing. What Mauss was talking about when he wrote The Gift was something he seemed to formulate in the years before, in reaction to Lenins new economic policythe fact that the Soviets first tried to legislate markets away, realized this was a problem, brought back elements of capitalism temporarilyand Mauss, who was a socialist, was very enthusiastic at first, although very suspicious of the Russian revolution and the direction it was taking because he was a cooperativist, and something of an anti-authoritarianhe was struck by this. Because he thought, Russia is the least monetized European society. If they cant just get rid of this stuff, clearly we need to think again about what it is, what role it plays, and what it is we dont like about it, and what alternatives to it might actually look like. And thats when he started pulling out all this anthropology, even though, as he admitted, because anthropology had only really started to get under way. The sources available to him at the time were not very good. There were a few

good ethnographies, but a lot of it you had to sort of piece together from missionary accounts and so forth. So, in terms of markets, historically, one of the things thats really striking is that there are a lot of problems with the account that considers a barter-to-monetary-market or Adam-Smith version of history, and one of the biggest ones is: why did ancient governments demand taxes and money at all? And it seems like the answer should be obviousas in, they wanted the money. But in fact, if gold and silver just naturally became money through spontaneous popular need, the obvious thing for a government to do, or ancient king, would be to grab the gold and silver mines and then you have all the money you want, right? But then you need to, like, take the gold and silver, put your picture on it, stamp it, give it people and then say, Okay, everybody give it back now? It doesnt make a lot of sense. But indeed they did grab the gold and silver mines, so whats the motive? It seems that insofar as an explanation is possible, it has to do with war. Most of these kings had standing armies either mercenary armies or conscript armiesbut either way, you have to feed these guys. And under ancient conditions, if you have 50 000 people sitting aroundthey cant be campaigning all the timefeeding them becomes a problem. Theyre going to eat everything edible within the surrounding 15-20 mile radius, probably in a couple weeks. And then you have to have another 50 000 people just to get them food. Well, theres one way to get around thisarmies tend to have gold and silver anyway, because its easy to loot, already valuable and is already used as the basis of complex credit arrangements. The logical thing to do is to take these bits of gold and silver, stamp them, give them to the soldiers, and say, Okay, everyone in the kingdom has to give me one back again. Because by doing so, youve essentially hired your entire population as people who provide things that soldiers want, because thats the only way that people can get these coins from them. So marketsor impersonal cash markets, anywaytend to crop up on the edges of military campaigns, forts and encampments, and thats what you see throughout antiquity.

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D - It coins the money itself. N - it coins the money itself. Its like the real purpose for that, which a lot of people dont seem to understand, is to keep people dependent on using that currency. D - Right. Its what makes it currency, essentially. Because what paper money is, modern paper money issued by central banks, is circulating government debt. This is what people dont understand, and there are a lot of good reasons that they might not want people to understand it, so obscure the matter with endless smoke and mirrors and jargon. But I always give the example of the Bank of England. Bank of England was created in 1694 when King William wanted to fight some sort of war in France. Theres always a war involved. N - A lot of wars with France. D - Yeah, a lot of wars with France, but like, basically, the government debt, it tends to be war debt. American debt began as the Revolutionary War debt. It really wasnt paid down, ever. Now, so he borrowed 1.2 million pounds from some merchants, and in exchange he gave them the right to incorporate themselves as a bank, call themselves the Bank of England, andthis is the key thing to take the 1.2 million pounds that he now owed them and lend that to other people in the form of bank notes. Thats what British currency is. It is royal debt to the Bank of England that then gets circulated onto other people. And if you look at a 10-pound note, for example, theres a picture of the Queen and it says, I promise to pay the bearer the sum of 10 pounds. So it is a debt owed by the Queen to you. How do you... Well, what do you get for it? You know, there was a time you could get silver. Now you cant, but now you can cancel it against your debt to her by paying taxes. US currency is the same thing. Thats what the Federal Reserve basically does, with the difference that the original loan to the King of England was actually in the form of gold. Or silver, I cant remember, but it was in bullion form. Whereas the Fed, you know, they just wave their magic wand and make money appear, lend it to the government and then circulate the debt back to people again. And they pass on that right to generate money to banks. I mean, the Fed is

PART TWO: CURReNCIes

N - Its sort of interesting, you were talking about making people pay... [the process of] minting money and then making [civilians] pay it back in that currency. It seems like thats sort of an important idea these days, too. Like, what would that debate about the debt in Americahuge debt, and sort of the idea, like, what does it mean to... why we are paying taxes? Ive read certain places that you basically pay taxes in order to... that its a fiat currency. It can essentially print as much money as it wants except with the risk of hyper-inflation and that... D - Well, credit currency. I like to make the distinction. Yeah, I mean, even in the ancient world, when they were using gold and silver, at no point did those coins circulate at bullion values. You know, the economists say, Ooh, these bad governments are debasing the currency! But in fact, you know, according to economic theory, if you debase the currency it should cause inflation. It did cause inflation, but it took about a hundred years. And the reason why is, you could still pay your taxes with these things. So it only really inflates in foreign trade, which will gradually have some effect. And you see the same thing in American history, for example. You know, the US went off the gold standard internally quite quickly, but externally, American dollars were still redeemable in gold until 1971. And they didnt need to do it internally because dollars were good in taxes. So as long as they were, you could keep the system rolling. N - Theres this idea that we need to pay down the deficit and the government needs to collect taxes because it needs money, but really it seems like...

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actually a consortium of banks itself. But then it lends its own money that it made up in the form of government debt to banks, which then through the fractional reserve system can make up, I think at this point, 17 dollars for every one they hold. So, you know, when you have a mortgage, its not like thats some grandmas life savings that theyre lending out to you and it would be a terrible thing if you default. The vast majority of it, 93% or 94%, is money they just made up. N - Which is interesting. I mean, it seems like quite a racket that the banks have gotten to have that nearly exclusive right to generate money. Why is it that banks have that right, but it seems like other, average individuals... I dont know if this is a stupid question, but... D - No, it used to not be that way. N - Right. I think that there were many different currencies in the 19th century in the United States. D - Yeah, I mean, a currency is just an IOU, thats all it is. I mean, theres no reason I cant write an IOU to you and you cant give it to a third party, except for the fact that they try to make such things illegal so as to maintain the banks monopoly over the right to generate money. But thats all it would be. If I, like, owed you five dollars worth of services, I could just give you a note saying, Heres five dollars. I owe you five dollars, and you could give it to somebody else, and as long as everybody believed that I was good for it, it could circulate generally. And in many periods of history, that did happen. In England in, I believe, the 18th century, most coins that people were using, they were mostly tokens of leather or wood, which were put out by shopkeepers to give in change that were good in that shop, but as long as they were good in some place, then you could use them as change. There were even things like widow currency. You know, widows would darn your socks or things like that, then they would issue change in future services, and people would sort of circulate them almost as a form of charity. But anybody could generate money. N - It just sort of requires trust in the person or the... It requires a certain amount of community trust.

D - Exactly. I mean, people do that with checks. I have a friend who was a British soldier in Singapore, and he wrote a check out to pay his bar tab. And I think he said that six months later, he was in the bar and he saw it - a different bar - and he saw it on the table, you know, with like 27 different counter-signed merchants whod passed it one to the other as money. N - So weve talked about what cash markets are, but it seems like not all markets are cash markets. D - Indeed. In fact, the original markets mostly werent. Thats another fascinating question. Because we have the idea that virtual money, the kind we have now, which is basically a credit system, is somehow new. Weve entered this brave new world of computers and electronic money. And, you know, the electronic element is new, but the idea of virtual money is not new at all. In fact, its the original form of money. If you go back to Mesopotamia, people were not going to market and buying eggs and cheese using tiny, tiny pieces of silver. In fact, while silver was in theory the currency, they didnt even make scales accurate enough to weigh the tiny pieces of silver they wouldve had to be using to buy a dozen eggs. Instead... Its not that people werent buying things in markets, they were. So it seems the only possible explanation, and this is what all our evidence seems to indicate, is that they were basically putting everything on the tab. You have a relation with a merchant, you come in, they total up. We also have evidence of expense accounts, of all sorts of complex credit arrangements, fluctuating interest rates, compounded interest rates. All of this 2000 years before the invention of anything we would call currency. N - Im kind of interested in this, because it seems like, in a sense, theyre counting everything in a specific way, in the way that we might do with cash, so that things seem to have exact equivalencies between each other, but I was wondering how this is different from, say, using money, if youre tallying things up in the same... D - Well, its complex, because somebodys dependability and honour is part of their worth. And all those expressionseven in English this used to be the case thats why they have words like Worthies and Men of No Account or people who not only have no cash but you

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wouldnt trust. So that kind of financial language and the language of honour, responsibility and respectability overlap. As Pierre Bourdieu says about North Africa now, in a way, you can get money using honour, you cant get honour using money. So, in those societies, ones reputation is ones ultimate capital. N - So if money was rarely ever exchanged, how are things reckoned finally? D - The word reckoning, actually, in English, goes back to a habit people had back in the period when an English village... You know, 95% of all transactions were credit, where they would just cancel things out against each other. Youd have a general reckoning. People would all sit down, and theyd say, Okay, I owe two schillings to you, you owe two schillings to him. Theyd do it all in a big circle back to you and then theyd cancel that out. And then theyd do it again. And gradually the idea was you could whittle it down to who actually owes what to whom, once you cancel all the other stuff out, and say, Okay, you actually do owe three schillings to him. You want a pig? Okay. Ill give you... Maybe I can rustle up some currency, whatever it is. So there would be these communal meetings where they just cancelled out the debt.

PART THRee: MARKeTs

N - You also talked about how markets can be non-capitalist, non-cash, but that they could actually work to prevent capitalism or to prevent something like capitalism. I would like to talk about this more. How can you use markets to prevent capitalism, or to prevent the alienation or exploitation of capitalism? D - Well, I was really thinking of what happened in the Middle Ages. Because, in Ancient Mesopotamia you have a virtual money system. Around 600 BC in India, China, the Mediterranean, you have the invention of coinage, pretty much simultaneously. By about 600 AD, everybodys giving up on the coinage, because its really a function of empire, and when the empires go away, its no longer needed to pay soldiers, and the coins disappear. So, in the middle ages you go back to credit systemand there are different ways that people go with this and to some degree, markets in certain areas become autonomous from governments, but in very interesting ways. In the Islamic world theres this idea that the sort of first populist free market ideology, which is closely tied to Sharia law because it provides civil courts where people dont have to go to the government to enforce contracts. Y have this idea that markets are ou ultimately based on trust and are a form of mutual aid. So, you have the idea that everything should go by the market, and in fact, Adam Smith took a lot of his ideas and even some of his best lines from Medieval Persian sources, but in China, they have very strong state of course, they kind of go the other way. Governments are there to regulate markets to make sure they dont turn into capitalism and thats very, very interesting because, well in either case it seems to me that

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the best way to understand what was happening was to turn to the work of Fernand Braudel, the famous French historian who made a distinction between capitalism and markets. It was meant to be provocative and its a little stark, but I think it kind of works. What he basically says is that there are three levels you can distinguish in most civilizations, and one is the level of gifts and help/mutual aid and people sort of getting on in life. Then there are the markets, but markets, he says well, he takes this Marxist idea of the difference between CMC and MCM, which means N - Commodity-money-commodity or moneycommodity-money. Errrrrr D - Exactly, yes. So markets, he says, are commodity-money-commodity. Thats the basic logic: Ive got some chickens, Im a farmer, I need candles. I dont have any bees; I cant produce my own wax. Im going to trade some of my chickens, get some money and buy some candles. So thats ultimately what its about. Its about different people with various goods that they need and various goods that they need to get, and money is just a medium. And indeed thats what Medieval theorists kept saying, that using money as an end in itself is an abomination. Its wrong because money is supposed to the way you get from one thing to another, and thats it. If its not moving, its not doing its job. Now, MCM on the other hand means Ive got some money, Im going to buy some stuff and use it to get even more money (thats actually MCM Prime, MC and a larger number of M). So that, he says, is the basis of capitalism. But heres his clever move: he says markets can exist autonomously on their own, but you cant do capitalism unless you set up some kind of monopoly, its parasitic of markets. You know, you have to have markets to play the capitalist game. But using money to make more money, really you need to line up with government authorities in one way or another. And that happened in Europe for various historical reasons. You have lots of tiny little states that are always at war with one another, the guys with the money manage to grab their own autonomous enclaves in Northern Italy and Switzerland and the Hanseatic League, wherever it might be, you know, they had their own autonomous citystates. In most of the world, that didnt happen.

So then in China what you really have is what he calls the sort of ultimate anti-capitalist market state. The Chinese government loved markets because they wanted peasants to be able to, you know, market their goods and get things they couldnt produce themselves. They encouraged markets, but they also put in all these mechanisms to make sure that capitalists couldnt take advantage of markets to accumulate vast amounts of money because they thought that was a subversion of the logic of the market. So they thought that certain industries had to be under state control, they had warehouses where they stockpiled goods when they were cheap and released them when they became expensive to keep the prices from fluctuating too much. So they intervened in the market so as to keep the markets running the way they thought they should be running, and to prevent certain people from amassing money and using that to gain power to end up extracting everybodys wealth. So they were an anti-capitalist market state. In a way, the Islamic Sharia stuff was also anticapitalist market stuff because, I mean they liked capitalism technically becausewell, they liked capitalistsbut they also believed that the aim of accumulating was ultimately to keep things running and those people should not have anything to do with the government or use coercion to extract anything, which, you know, gave extreme limits on the degree to which capitalists could behave in the ways that we dislike. They couldnt really enforce contracts through coercion; everything had to be voluntary. N - Well and thats verysorry to interrupt you thats very interesting because obviously its part of kind of conservative doctrine that states and capital are D - Are somehow opposed to one another. N - are opposed to each other. But, in fact, in our society its necessary to have violence to maintain them and that, as you talk about in your book, as you were beginning to describe these kind of Middle Eastern markets and the sort of the peace that was kept around the Indian Ocean D - Ah yes. N - that, that we have a system that truly has a free market and that this, its kind of a little

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bit mind-bending because it, on the one hand it seems like its the utopia of conservative market thinking, but at the same time its really kind of the opposite of that, so D - Exactly, thats whats so fascinating about it. Of course the modern conservatives would be especially freaked out that it comes from Sharia, which is the very thing they hate. N - Very humourous. D - Yeah. But it does, because the way I put it is you cant have cutthroat competition where theres nobody stopping you from actually cutting each others throats. So when there is no state enforcing contracts, when you know, you could just as easily steal peoples stuff or bump them off and do almost anything, well anybody whos going to be a successful trader has to develop a reputation for being a person who would never do anything like that or else nobody would want to trade with them. So honour does become capital, and in fact in Islamic law, honour was a form of capitalism, the most important one in a lot of ways. So you have this far-flung you know, you could write cheques (and cheques is an Arab word originally, people already in Basra in 1000 AD were using cheques for most of their transactions) you could write cheques or credit notes, you know, in Somalia or Mali and have them cashed in Indonesia, and it was all based on trust. There was no government enforcing these things. Its just, if you lost your reputation as an honourable person no one would extend credit to you, and youd be out of business. And as a result, the ideology was that governments have to be kept out of markets. But it was also that markets are ultimately notI mean, they thought competition had a role, these guys werent egalitarians, they thought it was important that there should be a division of labour, and rich and poor were part of that division of labourbut, they also said that ultimately, what markets are is an extension of mutual aid. Division of labour allows us to help each other in way. So, in a weird way, its an extension of communism, in that its an example of From each according to our abilities, to each according to our needs. Which, if you think about it, supply and demand, its not an entirely different

concept, or need not be. Now, a lot of Adam Smiths writings, he takes ideas directly from these guys. [Smiths] pin factory example, which we all remember is the example of division of labourapparently Al-Ghazali, writing around 1100, has a needle factory where it takes 25 operations to make a needle. Its clear Adam Smith got it from there, probably through the French encyclopedists. There, what are some other examples? You never saw two dogs exchanging a bone, a famous line from Adam Smith comes from Tusi. Even Muhammad is supposed to have said in a hadith that its impious to set prices because under free market conditions, prices are set by God. He was a merchant in his earlier life. Now, all that stuff gets adopted in the west, but in a completely different environment. In Medieval Islam, there was an idea that the ocean, for example, is zone of peace. We can fight our wars on land, thats fine, but on the water, were all brothers, because thats the zone of trade. Compare that to the Mediterranean where people often point out that the Venetians or the Genoeseyou know, whether a Venetian galley was a trading ship, a pirate ship or a crusaderreally depended on the balance of forces at the moment. You know, what they thought they could get away with. N - Theres that sort of very famous quote about Alexander the Great and the pirate D - Oh yes thats right. N - Alexander the Great is talking to him and asks him why hes a pirate or something and the pirate says, Well, I have one ship and I go raiding and that makes me a pirate. Y have an entire army ou and you go raiding and that makes you an empire. D - Yeah, exactly. Thats pretty much the same thing. There was no real distinction made between trade and warmerchants were very active in war. I mean, they used to do war by subscription in Genoa. You know, you could actually contribute money to outfit a military expedition as an investor and get a percentage share in the loot. So, in that environment where war, competition and trade were all seen as variations on a themeclosely interlinked. Well, when you import that free market ideology, it takes on an entirely different color.

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N - What do you think we could learn from that? How do you think we could employ markets in our contemporary society to not further capitalism but hinder it? D - Well, I mean, if you make the capitalists play by the rules they claim to believe in the whole thing will come tumbling down, wont it? I mean, there is a deep market populism and its hard to deal with, because I am anti-capitalist in the extreme and I am suspicious of markets because I think that they open the door to capitalism. N - As I was, too. That was one of the things that I found very striking about your book. I had always been very wary of markets, but then I read your book and then it made me, not necessarily lose that wariness, but at the same time... D - Its more complex than you think, yeah. Ultimately I dont know. Its possible that a market of some kind could exist in a free society and its possible it couldnt. Id like to find out. But I think that we need to focus on what the real problem is and there is this sort of market populism in the US, which would be very hard to convince people to completely overcome. But you know it can be used... I mean, lets try it out, lets see what happens if we really do a market. It seems to me if you do go by genuine market principles it would completely undermine capitalism, but it would also start marching very quickly into some else that we dont recognize, because once people do have to establish relations of trust it will look very, very different from anything we think of as a market right now. N - Do you think that will require things being done on a smaller scale or do you think that they that we could involve these sort of trustbased market systems on the mass scale that our society... D - Well, I think that on a mass scale we would have to have a very complex division between different types of institutions based on different principles. I dont think market-based ones are the best ways to organize, I dont know, you know, a space program. N - Right. D - Or something like that.

N - No, not at all. D - Some people dont think we should have [a space program]. But you know, I dont know if a government is the best way to do that either. I think you can have large institutions based on cooperative principles, which are neither based on state nor market. N -Yeah, I guess that would be something more like an anarchist syndicate, or something like that? D - Something like that. I dont think youre going to need, like, top down bureaucratic hierarchies to do it either. Youre going to need to be creative about organizational principles if theres going to be complex organization involved. But as I always say about anarchism: an anarchist organization is any one that would not ultimately require people with weapons to show up and say, I dont care what you say, shut up, do what youre told. You know, any institution that wouldnt require that as a backstop could be an anarchist organization.

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that would foster autonomy, cooperation, egalitarianism, rather than trying to create ones that will foster hierarchy and having them occasionally backfire, who knows what kind of things they would come up with. I personally believe that at the moment capitalism is overall technologically extremely regressive. I think that, you know, theres all sorts of inventions and developments that probably could have happened, that if not consciously repressed, that theyve put so much of their investment in, basically, technologies that they think will foster social controlmedical technologies, information technologies, things that are conducive to creating greater labor discipline and away from technologies that would eliminate certain types of labor entirely, which was starting to happen in the late 60s and 70s. Everybody was sort of thinking that that was about to happen, and suddenly instead they de-industrialized and moved to much lowertech production in the third world. I think, you know, Im kind of developing the theoryits a rather crude form of Marxismthat Marx was right, that mechanizing production will eventually destroy the basis of the profit system. The declining rate of profit is directly related to mechanization. Capitalists figured this out and they simply stopped mechanizing. N - Yeah, I mean thats interesting because Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 60s were really into technology being a liberating force. D - Yeah, everybody was in the 60s. They thought that the robot factories were going to replace human labor and wed have androids that would do the laundry and capitalism would fall apart and maybe the capitalists decided they were right. N So, earlier on you were mentioning how you can have communism in theoretically capitalist societies or say, authoritarianism in so-called communist societies and all of that. It seems like a very important part is not so much taking part in actions, which obviously I think is very important as well, but in reframing how you think about where you live right now and the off-shoots of that. I thought one of the interesting reframings that you have in the book is where you talk about the word liberty...

PART FOUR : FReeDOMs

N - Do you think that when you have a high level of technological sophistication that requires a lot of things to be integrated really intricately and neatly, that sort of breeds a certain kind of fascism in itself? Do you think anarchism... D - It can. I think that, you know, as in any system, you have to be aware of the dangers and put in mechanisms to head them off. But any communistically organized system has a certain danger of slipping into hierarchy because if you base yourself on From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, there is still the fact that some peoples abilities are really different, and the same with needs. You have to have fail-safe mechanisms of various kinds, and thats what you find in actually existing egalitarian societies. Its not like everybodys the same, its not like everyone believes everybodys the same. They are aware of the dangers of one thing slipping into another, and they create institutions to make sure that doesnt happen. Wed have to do that on a more complex level for more complex organizations, but that doesnt mean we cant. N - So you feel that a very high level of technological integrationmachines and mechanisms and computers and all of thatis compatible... D - Absolutely. I think the problem we have is that the technologies that we have, have been developed under incredibly hierarchical circumstances so as to foster sort of workplace obedience and social control. We have no idea. And even then in some ways theyve been forced despite themselves to come up with technologies that are in a lot of ways very subversive and liberating, like certain elements of the internet. If we were actually trying to develop technologies

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D - Oh yeah. N ...or freedom in English, which has its root as Freunden, which means friend in German. I think this is important, especially talking about, I guess, anarchism, because, I dont know how it is in other places but at least in Montreal theres this sort of Insurrectionary Anarchism... D - Oh, is it still going? N ... its sort of a strange idea to me - they sort of start bringing up words like total freedom or total liberty and it seems interesting how you have this discussion where people are talking about freedom or liberty, but then never really discuss what we mean when we say freedom or liberty. Its interesting how that very notion the liberal notion of libertythat comes from the Roman law, Dominium... D - Which has to do with private property. This is why Marxists often critique anarchists as being, you know, essentially liberals, and mostly theyre not right, but there are strains of anarchism that are more influenced by those ideas than others. I think its very important for us to remember where these concepts come from. Theres no contradiction between individualism and communism, as Marcel Mauss pointed out. But in order to remember that, in order to understand why thats true, you have to understand the pernicious effects of not only the market, but also forms of extraordinary violence that have really shaped our concepts and our legal codes and our ideas of what freedom actually is to people. The idea of liberty and its relation to private property, conceptions of freedom that get enshrined in law, that seems like a really telling case because, as you say, the word free derives from the same root as friend, because freedom was always contrasted with slavery. Slaves have no moral relations; free people are people who can make promises and commitments to others. Slaves on the other hand cant because they have no liberty. Thats a nice idea, you know. Freedom doesnt mean not having commitments or responsibilities, freedom means being free to decide for yourself what of commitments you want to make, what kind of promises youre going to make to other people, which slaves cant do.

Now, in a fascinating way, if you look at the Roman concept of freedom, which is the one that really influenced the one we use today, it does a kind of back-flip. It starts like that. It starts that freedom is not being a slave. Slaves are socially dead. If you are enslaved its as if legally you are dead. If a Roman is enslaved in another country and he comes home, theyve had a funeral for them, they have to go and remarry their wife and reestablish themselves as a living person. Its like you literally came back from the dead. Now, dead people have no relations. So if you become free in ancient Rome you automatically become a Roman citizen because a free person is by definition part of a community. Thats what freedom is, being able to make commitments, have contracts, so forth and so on. Now, it subtly shifts, and one of the key points at which it shifts is around this idea of Dominium, which is absolute private property. It seems fairly clear that this idea which shows up fairly late in Roman law, its not on the twelve tablets, it shows up in the late republic at exactly the point that Rome is becoming a slave and all households, even middle-class people, have slaves who are technically people who have been conquered and have no rights. They are basically non-people. They developed this notion of private property as a relation between a person and their property where you have absolute power over your property. Its not even a right, its pure power. Now this is a weird notion first of all because, and people have had trouble with it ever since, because how do you have a relation with a thing or how does a relation with a thing have legal standing? I mean, as people were quick to point out in the Middle Ages when they tried to revive Roman law, if you are on a desert island you might have a deeply personal relationship with a tree thats there but thinking about it as a property relationship, why would you do that? It doesnt matter if you own the tree or not, nobody else is there. Property is a relation between people about thingsagreements between people, understandings between people about the disposition of things. But they had this idea, no its a relation between me and my thingheres my coffee cup, Im having a relationship with that and its a relation of total power. And again thats silly because what does it mean to have total

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power over a thing? In fact, you dont anyway because, you know, say I own a chainsaw; I dont really have the right to do anything I want with my chainsaw or my machine gun or whatever it might be. In fact, there are very few things that I have the right to do with my machine gun, according to law. N - Well, to the extent that other people have total power over you up to some vague notion of a sovereign, I guess. D - Yeah, well sovereignty and Dominium, its actually the same concept. So its a silly idea, but it makes sense if youre thinking about slaves because there it is a relation between two people where one becomes a thing because one party has total power over the other. Now that idea becomes the new basis for a new concept of freedom where freedom is identified with the power of the slave owner and by extension the property owner. This is where it becomes really curious and subtle. You have this sort of yesbot, where it says, Well, property is my total power over my objects, my possessions where I can do anything I want with them, except that which is forbidden by force or law. So, freedom therefore becomes my ability to do anything I want in general, except when forbidden by force or law. Again, when they revived this stuff in the Middle Ages the first thing that people said was, That doesnt make any sense, because, you know that would mean a slave is free because a slave can do anything they want except things they cant do. Youre not saying anything here. But thats the notion of freedom that we have. Its essentially based on a marketa slave market in the first case, where you get these things, where in theory the one right that you do have is the right to exclude anybody else from doing anything with them. So it allows you to imagine freedom as this abstract power you have over the world around you, which is ultimately based on complete violence and force. The Romans acknowledged that. Where, you know, youve conquered these people, you have this stuff. You can do whatever you like and nobody can stop you, except insofar as people can stop you. It directly traces back to these forms of violence, which dont make any logical sense. I mean, saying, I have the right to do anything I like with my chainsaw except those things which I cant do, or which

I am forbidden to do is a little bit like saying the sun is blue except insofar as its yellow. Its incoherent but thats our basis of our notion of freedom, and its a notion of freedom that can only be maintained through the marketyou know, where you dont realize that you have to make promises or commitments explicitly to other people to get stuff, it just seems to come out of nowhereso you can imagine that social relations dont exist, and its just my ability to do whatever I like with the stuff that somehow I acquired, came into my possession. N - So yeah, just in a nutshell, it seemed like such an obvious thing that you should ask, What do you mean by freedom? as opposed to just asking whether were free or whether were not free or whether its possible to be free or its not possible to be free. Theres this other level to it and I feel like thats very important for thinking some sort of alternate kind of social relationship. That word gets misused, or I dont know if misused its taken on a very specific kind of watered-down meaning. D - Yeah, its very easily abused. You know, people throw it out all the time without really thinking about what it could mean. So I actually end the book by asking, Well maybe what we should be asking is what kind of promises would genuinely free people make to one another. We dont really know.

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PART FIVe: UTOPIAs

N - Exactly. I guess last question. I mean these are, maybe, sort of exciting political times I think. You were sort of an integral figure in starting the Occupy Wall Street D - I happened to be in the right place at the right time, I didnt do that much, but yeah I was there. N - So very last question. So all of these things that weve been talking about you made an interesting comment about utopias before I started recording. I dont know if youd like to repeat that? D - Oh yes, I always like to say about utopias that theres nothing intrinsically wrong about utopias. The problem is if you just have one of them. We need as many utopian visions as possible and the more we have, the more options people have when of what they would actually like their society to be like. N - So can you give a few examples of what we might D - I like to start by saying a lot of what we want to create is already here and so, Im not one of those guys who says, No, I refuse to even talk about what a free society would be like, because thats obnoxious and it opens the door to terrible things. But I also dont like to lay out blueprints. Id rather focus on looking around us. Well, you know, 50% of the labour we do, according to one study, isnt even aimed at getting money. Think about that. When you consider just how intense the pressure is on us is to make money in order to survive, the fact that thats still the case, even in these hyper-capitalist societies, tells you something. I kind of like the Gibson-Graham

approach where they point out that all sorts of different economic systems co-exist and I think this was the point that Mauss was making too: were already living in communism to a certain degree. Were already living in anarchism to a certain degree. Insofar as you go out there and arrange things with one another in some way that does not need to be enforced by coercive state power, then you are behaving like an anarchist. So the first thing we need to do is look around us and think about what were already doing how things are already organized in relatively egalitarian ways and how that egalitarian element can be enhanced, rather than creating grandiose models. I mean I think it would be very interesting to juxtapose different utopian visions. If you want to have a market utopia let those guys have a community; if you want to have a more communistic one, where the communist sector of our lives is greatly expanded. You know what I always say: if you look at anthropological examples, what would be sensible would be to sort of expand that baseline communism to fill basic needs and then allow people to decide for themselves how they want to pursue values beyond that. The question is what sort of Everybody has a different conception of what is ultimately valuable and important in life. What is the sort of economic arrangement we could have, a coordinative mechanism, whereby resources are distributed, which would make people most free to pursue those forms of value which make sense, or are most compelling to them? Which might be the pursuit of art, which might be the pursuit of sports, which might be the pursuit of hanging around being really comfortable all day, which might be the pursuit of, you know, of trying to go to another galaxy. I mean everybodys got a different idea of whats important in life. I think that the market is one such mechanism for coordinating, I think its not a very good one. Capitalism is a terrible one, I think that capitalism is just a really bad way of organizing communism. But the real question is, what sort of overarching form of distribution can we set up which will make people most secure in their basic needs and free to pursue those forms of value which really mean something to them?

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FURTHeR ReADING
FRee WORDs DAVID GRAebeR ON MAUss DebT - THe FIRsT 5000 YeARs THe GIFT

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capitalism is
just a really bad way of organizing communism.
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