[escepticos] Un poco de historia de la deuda aplicada a la crisis actual

[Pedro J. Hdez]

Una entrevista que con el antropólogo David Graeber autor del libro
Debt: The First 5,000 Years que no deberían perderse. Un fragmento
fundamental:

PP: Let’s move on to some of the real world problems facing the world
today. We know that in many Western countries over the past few years
households have been running up enormous debts, from credit card debts
to mortgages (the latter of which were one of the root causes of the
recent financial crisis). Some economists are saying that economic
growth since the Clinton era was essentially run on an unsustainable
inflating of household debt. From an historical perspective what do
you make of this phenomenon?

DG: From an historical perspective, it’s pretty ominous. One could go
further than the Clinton era, actually – a case could be made that we
are seeing now is the same crisis we were facing in the 70s; it’s just
that we managed to fend it off for 30 or 35 years through all these
elaborate credit arrangements (and of course, the super-exploitation
of the global South, through the ‘Third World Debt Crisis’.)

As I said Eurasian history, taken in its broadest contours, shifts
back and forth between periods dominated by virtual credit money and
those dominated by actual coin and bullion. The credit systems of the
ancient Near East give way to the great slave-holding empires of the
Classical world in Europe, India, and China, which used coinage to pay
their troops. In the Middle Ages the empires go and so does the
coinage – the gold and silver is mostly locked up in temples and
monasteries – and the world reverts to credit. Then after 1492 or so
you have the return world empires again; and gold and silver currency
together with slavery, for that matter.

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971
has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never
happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been
going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by
virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been
social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just
a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to
stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the
poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to
the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical
Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam
and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead
to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people
would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the
population that they would start selling family members into slavery,
or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of
overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these
grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect
creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional
economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default.
Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing
something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients
were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of
disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he
would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members
of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your
family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude
that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

PP: You mention that the IMF and S&P are institutions that are mainly
geared toward extracting debts for creditors. This seems to have
become the case in the European monetary union too. What do you make
of the situation in Europe at the moment?

DG: Well, I think this is a prime example of why existing arrangements
are clearly untenable. Obviously the ‘whole debt’ cannot be paid. But
even when some French banks offered voluntary write-downs for Greece,
the others insisted they would treat it as if it were a default
anyway. The UK takes the even weirder position that this is true even
of debts the government owes to banks that have been nationalized –
that is, technically, that they owe to themselves! If that means that
disabled pensioners are no longer able to use public transit or youth
centers have to be closed down, well that’s simply the ‘reality of the
situation,’ as they put it.

These ‘realities’ are being increasingly revealed to simply be ones of
power. Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that
debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That’s
one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a
remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the ‘Third
World debt crisis’ – what got called, rather weirdly, the
‘anti-globalization movement’. This movement called for genuine
democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal
democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance
between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF,
World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).

When thousands of people begin assembling in squares in Greece and
Spain calling for real democracy what they are effectively saying is:
“Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just
a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of
debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it
then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to
weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and
renegotiated.” I find this extraordinarily hopeful.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

saludos

-- 
Pedro J. Hernández
http://ecos.blogalia.com
@ecosdelfuturo