A Certain Amount of Madness by Murrey Amber;

Author:Murrey, Amber;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

THE SEMANTICS OF DEBT

According to Davidko (2011: 81), the word debt entered into English language, through its metamorphosis from Latin and French, with two distinct meanings: ‘moral duty and pecuniary obligation’. How do we come to this ‘moral’ consciousness that one ought to pay one’s debt without enquiry of what exactly is meant by debt? The force of the debt maxim sits deep in our consciousness. Graeber aptly dubbed this the ‘moral confusion’ in his well-researched treatise on debt: thus (like democracy, which is also a darling concept), everyone talks about debt but only few understand precisely what it is.

Graeber’s (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years traces the myth of bartering and the primordial debt theory through history. For him, debt is a myth. Reeled into consciousness over time, barter and state tax theories are but mythical attempts to rationalize the market, money, tax and, by extension, debt. Like John Commons (2005), Graeber shares Sankara’s belief that ‘debt’, in its historic formulation, cannot be repaid. Not only because debt is odious (that is, its accumulation does not elicit the consent of the population) but because paying it will cause real physical harm in the debtor countries, even as default will not harm the lenders (cf. Millet, Munevar and Toussaint 2012: 8). Commons distinguished between ‘releasable’ and ‘unreleasable’ debts: the former can be discharged but the latter cannot be repaid. He observes, ‘historically it is more accurate to say that the bulk of mankind lived in a state of unreleasable debts, and that liberty came by gradually [substituting] releasable debts’ (Commons 2005: 390). Commons, however, associated unreleasable debts with taxes requiring regular payments from citizens, from which redemption is tantamount to cessation of one’s membership from the community (Saiag 2014: 573; cf. Graeber 2011: 119; Mauss 1967).

Debt is not only ideologically laden but is also social and therefore cannot be considered in isolation of the larger purposes it serves (Foucault 1972; Davidko 2011). Debt is ideological because it is founded on a set of beliefs that gives meaning to and makes meaning of the world: you need money, you do not have it, you borrow from someone and you look for the money to pay back later. This scenario is determined to be ‘how the world works’, period. The fact that the dominant stance on debt remains largely unchanged, Davidko argues, ‘gives us every reason to believe that the meaning … is not only highly ideological as it is loaded in favour of political, economic, religious interests of institutions which generate these discourses but also conventional since institutions “make a caveat” to treat a given phenomenon in a particular way’, and treat them differently from time to time as deem fit by the author of such consciousness (Davidko 2011: 80–81).

Words are couched in such a way that they are reflective of the norm, morality and acceptable forms (Davidko 2011). The norm of imperialism is to expand and its morality is to maximize profit everywhere. Words are social and the meanings they

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.