Seminar notes: Stone Age economics

The kula trade

 

A ceremonial exchange system

Economic

  • but also social, political, and spiritual

A “kula ring”

  • two types of ceremonial items: red shell necklaces (soulava or soulawa) that travel clockwise around the ring,
  • white shell armbands (mwali) that move counterclockwise

Neither are useful in a practical sense but carry immense social value and prestige

  • signifies wealth, status, and social bonds

Heavily ritualized

  • specific ceremonies, languages, and practices associated with the giving and receiving of kula valuables
  • the objects are imbued with history and stories
  • the rituals and the journeys are as important as the exchange itself, symbolizing social ties, mutual respect, and the maintenance of inter-island relationships

The politics of it …

leaders who are successful in Kula exchanges can leverage their success to gain or consolidate power within their own communities

  • facilitating the leader’s ability to mobilize resources, settle disputes, and govern more effectively

The point of trade

  • not just an economic relationship
  • social and political too
  • the importance of reciprocity
  • symbolic capital

Contemporary relevance

  • remains an essential aspect of the culture and social organization of the communities within the kula ring
  • the system has shown remarkable resilience, adapting to changing circumstances while maintaining its core values

 

 

Potlatch

 

A ceremonial feast and gift-giving festival practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States

  • the Haida, Tlingit, and some others
  • social and economic exchanges that serve to reinforce community ties, social hierarchies, and personal status

Held on special occasions

  • the celebration of marriages, the naming of chiefs, the mourning of the deceased, and the commemoration of significant events
  • could last several days, bringing together multiple communities in a display of wealth and generosity

Wealth redistribution

  • mechanism for establishing and maintaining social status within the community

Prestige in potlatch cultures often gained through the giving away of wealth

  • leaders and persons of high status demonstrate their wealth and power not by hoarding resources but by distributing them to guests in a display of generosity and abundance
  • food, animal skins, crafted items, and, in more recent times, manufactured goods

The feast itself

  • rituals and ceremonies, including speeches, dances, and the display of family crests and totems
  • recount family histories, validate social statuses, and transmit cultural and spiritual knowledge

Potlatch ban in Canada — 1884 to 1951

  • in the US too
  • it was perceived as antithetical to the capitalist values being imposed by colonizers
  • many communities continued to hold potlatches in secret, preserving the tradition for future generations

Today

  • remains a vital aspect of cultural identity and social organization among Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples
  • serves as a powerful expression of Indigenous sovereignty, resilience, and cultural continuity

 

Moai

David Graeber, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”

Myth of barter:

  • challenges the traditional economic narrative that money evolved from barter systems among individuals lacking a common medium of exchange
  • credit systems were the original form of economy in human societies
  • money and coinage emerged much later — as a way of accounting and paying armies
  • exchange belongs to the people — money belongs to the state

The role of debt in society:

  • how debts and credits have shaped human relations, social structures, and power dynamics
  • money represents an acknowledgment of debt – a promise to pay that could be transferred among people
  • requires trust

Debt and violence:

  • links the coercive mechanisms of debt repayment to state violence and warfare
  • military conquest and the subjugation of peoples have often been driven by the desires to collect debts and redistribute resources

Critique of capitalism:

  • a critical view of the way that debt has been used to enforce inequality and social control

Moral implications of debt:

  • questions the ethics of repayment and the societal expectation that debts must always be repaid
  • debt forgiveness as a viable and ethical alternative

How exchange is a social mechanism

  • how violence is used to impose monetary debts on people

In what sense is money debt?

Credit theory of money

  • states create money by imposing taxes
  • since taxes are levied in the state’s currency, it creates a demand for that currency, which citizens must obtain to settle their debt to the state
  • the currency is a representation of the debts citizens owe to the state
  • the state’s acceptance of that currency for tax payments is a recognition of its role as a creditor

Money as an IOU:

  • money can be seen as an IOU (I owe you) that circulates within an economy
  • when a bank issues money, it is essentially creating a promise to pay – a debt that can be used to mobilize resources
  • banks can create money through lending, effectively issuing more IOUs
  • money is created through the extension of credit or the creation of debt

Money is not neutral

  • but a question of morality, trust, and social obligations
  • we prioritize debt repayment above social welfare and economic stability
  • moralization of debt that compels individuals and nations to prioritize repayment even at great social cost, advocating instead for a reevaluation of how debts are structured and enforced

Why should we not repay our debts?

  • debt is a way to organize society
  • debt jubilees
  • the debts were created through violence or coercion — a consequence of an inegalitarian society — they are not just

The interview

  • why do you have to pay your debts?

The morality of debt

  • debt and guilt are associated
  • people who are in debt feel that they did something wrong

Cancel debts

  • one type of promise
  • impersonal debt

This is what money is — circulating debt

Standard history by economists

  • how money came to be
  • the Menger mythology

Barter

  • you never just exchange with
  • you don’t deal with your neighbors as a spot-trade

Praise object that others have

  • nice to have people in your debt
  • but it is never quantified
  • people are not just thinking about stuff

A vague sense of owing people

  • it becomes quantified in legal situations
  • people start counting when it matters — money is introduced
  • Mesopotamia — temples markets develop

Everything is put on a tab

  • coinage in usage when soldiers need to be paid

Why did kings demand taxes in silver and gold?

  • as a way to pay soldiers
  • taxes forces everybody in the country to help pay the soldiers

Money lenders

You have to repay your debts

  • what is sacred is not to repay debt but to forgive them

Justifying relations of force

  • you will get your debt back by force

Revolts are often fueled by debt

Colonization

  • ends up in debt to the colonizers
  • Haiti

Governments and markets

  • intimately tied to each other
  • tax policies to create markets and pay for the colonization
  • teach them the value of work

Have to have them in debt in order to make them work harder

Slavery

  • get people into debt traps
  • sell members of the family off

Marriage

  • bride price/ bridge wealth
  • but you couldn’t sell your life
  • blood money, ceremonial recognition, but not a payment

Rich vs poor debtors

  • two wings in a debtor’s prison
  • poor are treated as skum
  • the rich are treated as gentlement

Cf. the financial crisis of 2008 when the debt of the rich just disappeared

Third World Debt

  • IMF loans
  • rich countries treat each other differently

US state debt to China

  • something like 782 billion dollars

“If you owe the bank 1 million dollars, you bank own you; if you own the bank 100 million dollars, you own the bank”

  • defaults in Argentina — IMF has to leave

Occupy Wall Street

  • markets are not self-sustaining
  • markets aren’t even that good
  • we learned that debts don’t have been repaid

We can’t run out of money

  • money are promises — we can make any kinds of promises

Debt cancellation

  • jubilees etc — usury laws

People are working way too much

  • we don’t need expansion — we need to take more care of each other

Students loans

  • we can’t repay since the world economy has been blown up

Americans are paying 20 percent of their income to the financial institutions

Anarcho-primitivism

What is anarcho-primitivism?

  • critique of civilization
  • technology and industrialization
  • reconnection with nature
  • direct action
  • primitive living and self-sufficiency

Interview with John Zerzan

Books

Anarcho-primitivist

How factory labor doesn’t radicalize workers but domesticate them

  • critique of industrial society
  • critique of civilization

The left always opposed to individual action

  • originally a Maoist — but too collectivist
  • local unions are the property of the international
  • anti-left from the get-go

AP, anarcho-primitivism, green anarchism

  • “anti-civ”

Anthropological literature

  • hunters and gatherers

Anti-capitalism implied

Climate anxiety

Eco-fascists

  • quoting the UNA bomber
  • whiteness, racism and hierarchy
  • Timothy McVeigh

Groups

  • Green Anarchy Magazine
  • Black Could Messenger
  • Disorderly Conduct

Civilization and domestication

  • a natural force? — evolution and collapse
  • or can we change things?
  • there has always been resistance against Leviathan

Civilization as a “death machine”

  • keeps on getting worse until the whole thing collapses

Revulsion against technology

  • smart phone addicted
  • quitting social media
  • technological detox
  • we have never been so lonely
  • looking at small screens or large screens

I’m anti-tech, but I can’t get off of it

  • I-pad generation
  • don’t get high on your own supply

Luddites

We don’t have hobbies anymore

  • hobbies as a form of estrangement
  • not they don’t even have hobbies

Primitivism

  • gestures and words as forms of domestication

Sascha Engel, Plant Anarchy

Rewild

  • reanimation of the world
  • reject a materialistic mind-set

Aboriginal wholeness

  • a sense of unity with the world around us
  • live as if animism is true

William Morris, News from Nowhere

UNA Bomber’s Manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future“

Technology is a More Powerful Social Force than the Aspiration for Freedom

125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “Okay, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.

126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long- distance communications…how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59–76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.[21] The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).

129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.

130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform.

131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda[14] or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.

132. It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progressed would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.

133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangement that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain, waiting. Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.

134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. If such a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

Christopher Warren and the gold watch