Dear David, As you perhaps know, we have a book of the week program on the p2p foundation blog, and I would like to feature your important book there, THis would require a general presentation followed by 2 significant abstracts, to be published on alternate days on a given week, If you agree, we would need some of that material, Michel On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 10:03 AM, David Graeber <[email protected]>wrote:
Greetings, Everyone I've Ever Met,
I can't believe I'd ever finally get to say this but - DEBT: THE FIRST FIVE THOUSAND YEARS, is out!
(And if you don't believe it - below are some bits culled from today's Amazon Web Page:)
This is a work of scholarship, and politically engaged, but it's also an attempt to break out of the usual academic and activist ghettoes, and I wrote it that way because I think that there's a conversation we need to be having, not just nationally but also globally, that we began to have for a few months after the financial crash of 2008, and which has, since, been indefinitely postponed. We seem to hanging in this bizarre state of suspension, where most people understand that everything we thought we knew about money, markets, debts, and the role of government is no longer true and probably never was, yet there is a kind of taboo over discussing any better ways to think about them.
What better moment, it seems to me, than to start reexamining the historical record and to put our situation in a larger - much, much larger - context. So that's what I did. A few examples of what I turned up (much of which, I must admit, surprised even me):
* that virtual money is nothing new - in fact it is the original form of money
* that the first word for "freedom" recorded in any human language is a Sumerian word for debt relief
* that our current core conceptions of freedom and rights trace back to Roman slave law
* that most rebellions, insurrections, and revolutions in world history have been over issues of debt
* that rather than markets and states being in some way opposed principles, markets - particularly ones that operated on cash instead of credit - largely emerged as the side-effect of military operations, and through most of history were maintained through government policy
* that contemporary free market ideology (and in fact many of Adam Smith's specific phrases and examples, such as the pin factory) is derived from Medieval Islam
* we have every reason to believe that, as we now enter a new phase of virtual money, there will be major structural changes in the very idea of what an economy is and what it's for that determine what global society will be like for at least the next five hundred years
please forward wildly, irresponsibly, even to places where it's completely inappropriate
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