Friday, October 23, 2020

Comment on David Graeber's Excellent Essay "Despair Fatigue" from 2016

There are endless things to like about this long article by David Graeber in 2016 titled "Despair Fatigue."  He nails so many complex things that are misunderstood almost everywhere else.

What I like best is vivid portrait of Austerity Thinking in Britain and the pervasive mind control media which makes it a lock, when professional Economists, the IMF, and even the Bank of England disagree with austerity, how-much-austerity remains the only thinkable thing in the media, from the Daily Telegraph to the BBC.  (The IMF gave UK a warning to cut out the Austerity thing in 2012.  This never made it through British Media.)

What I like second best is how Graeber reinforces the post-Keynesian view of money creation.  Post-Keynesians have proven than money is created by private banks when they make loans.  Money is therefore created out of debt.  Graeber excellently references this finding, but not well enough that it would convince my goldbug friends.

QUOTE

The divorce between consensus and reality has grown so extreme and unworkable that even the technocrats charged with running the system have started to cry foul. In 2014 the Bank of England—its economists apparently exhausted by having to carry out economic policy in a made-up, topsy-turvy world designed only to benefit the rich—issued a statement on “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” that effectively destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money, they noted, is not created by governments, or even central bankers, who must be careful not to make too much of it lest they spark inflation; it’s actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there would be no money. The post-Keynesian heterodox economists, regularly denounced as a lunatic fringe by those commentators willing to acknowledge their existence, were right.

UNQUOTE

But there's more, way more.  Graeber explains how (in several ways) the British economy actually operates.  In the end, Britain sells out its subservient working class to the global elite.  Which currently means the US global elite.  They know they can have good townhouses and butlers in London, with not even the slightest chance of proletarian revolution. 

Graeber captured the hopeful moment at the beginning of Corbynism when new things seemed possible, and people were thinking out of the box for the first time in generations.  But he also suspected that the likely downfall of Corbyn would be sabotage by the Blairites, though he didn't predict how it would happen (false and endless accusations of anti-semitism).

No comments:

Post a Comment