Debt: Five thousand years

A new way to pay the national debt: Via Wikimedia Commons.
Artwork via Wikimedia Commons.

David Graeber
Anarchist anthropologist.

In studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call the economy. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.

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Slavery, violence and the history of debt. David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist.

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