Today and How It Got That Way

Over here is a longish interview with an anthropologist on the origin of debt and the non-existence of a barter economy. I would like to remind everyone that in Moore's The First European Revolution c. 970-1215 he makes a similar point but emphasizes that a gift economy in which things were granted temporarily in the expectation that a sort of friends with benefits situation would result was overthrown when one participant no longer accepted the notion of gifts as conferring reciprocity. I have long argued that this reciprocity was one reason the Doges weren't allowed to accept gifts and, for what it's worth, Reif's point about the reissuing of royal orders in the early modern era strongly supports the notion that there was an cyclic nature to promises, authority and order. 

So what, you ask, does any of that have to do with the price of potatoes? Just this, insisting on economization of language, inter-personal relations, and related whatnottery destroy gift cultures and replaces them with the
Brooksian bought experience. It's not that one is necessarily better than another but rather neither one nor the other is more or less natural.

This last point indicates that all the neoliberal folderoll about how the world is how it is because that's how it is, is yet again shown to be false: the world as it is, is as it is because of the sum total of human actions over the course of time. All the lousy parts of life are the fault of the man with the stick:

In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.