Update 2:

Some anti-Zionist activists, like the ones at Veterans Today, are taking the OW protests seriously, and don’t see the lack of interest in talking about 9-11 as  a red flag. I am not sure what to make of this. Again, I should say, at this point it scarcely matters if a national infrastructure program is instituted, since things are so bad. Except, of course, the usual corporate cronies will fatten off the contracts, making them even more powerful. And it will create more dependency, more demands, more constituencies, a bigger political class, distort the market further, postpone and thus prolong the process of correction.

Update:

To be clear, I write from the perspective of an eclectic or syncretic Christian whose views would be rejected by most fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholics etc.

ORIGINAL POST

David Graeber is one of the mouthpieces of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A Marxist academic and the son of a working class family, his father fought in the Spanish Revolution, Graeber himself is a Yale graduate and a leading light in anthropological theory. His mentor is another Marxist anthropologist Maurice Bloch, of the LSE, who has argued that religion is nothing special, but still central, surely a most revealing assertion. Bloch believes that the development of “imagination” in prehistoric man is what allowed the idea of “god” to emerge in human thought. That is, God was imagined in the same way that nations are imagined.

Is there a hint here that, like nationalism, religious beliefs are now going to be taken down by the powers-that-be, in the interests of universal humanity, world government, and the salvation of non-existent souls?

Bloch’s protege continues in the same vein of adolescent iconoclasm.

He argues – ambitiously, given his age – that all previous histories of money are wrong. Menger and the Austrians, especially, are wrong (Bob Murphy has critiqued this, in his usual modest fashion at the Mises forum).

Barter did not arise first, to be followed by money and credit. Instead, credit and debt arose first.

In the beginning, man lived in a kind of primitive community in which money played no role. Then came war and conquest. Debt and debt bondage arose from the victor’s impositions on the vanquished.

Whatever merit one might detect in such a sweeping starting point is quickly erased when we find that the author’s destination is the all too familiar territory of greenbackism (i.e. debt jubilee and debt-free money).

Next, we are told that modern Anericans are no better than the chattel of by-gone years. Of course, the slaves of old, who were whipped, sold on blocks, manacled and deprived of all rights, might argue the point. But college professors routinely make up in rhetoric what they lack in knowledge and rationality, and we see no need to hold Professor Graeber to standards that have long vanished from academia.

Americans are slaves, and Graeber is Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks combined. Or do I mean, Marx and Lenin combined? For while Graeber somehow feels the need to turn to Christianity for his rhetorical flourishes (forgiveness of debt is sacred in Christianity, quoth he), it’s still communism that is the real force behind his manifesto, as the video above indicates.

Notice the subversion of language in his claims here, and elsewhere.

The sacred essence of Christianity – the salvation of the soul and the resurrection of the body – is eliminated. In its place, he focuses on the mechanism of salvation.… and misconstrues it.

Claiming that both words, debt and sin, have a common origin, Graeber conflates them and discovers in the conflation the means to transform the unique moral act of a particular being (forgive them, father) into a diktat of communism (cancel all debts).

In the Christian world view, Christ’s redemptive substitution for sinful humanity on the cross is a “forgiveness of sin” that only the “sinless one” could accomplish precisely because he was sinless.

Secondly, even if sin and monetary debt are equated, “forgiveness of debt” is enjoined on Christians only because debt itself, like sin, is of such paramount consequence.

Debt is consequential because to take without giving is a form of theft. The Old Testament law, on which Christ’s teachings were based, would not have countenanced borrowing with no intention of repaying, any more than it would have countenanced lending in the hope of default, able-bodied idlers, mass gambling, improvidence, shiftlessness, profligacy, or any of the moral sins endemic in society today.

Not content with mutilating Christian doctrine to suit his communist agenda, Graeber then foists his slogans on economic activity. For him, normal cooperation between human beings is a feature of “communism.”

Thus he can argue that capitalism is a method of organizing “communism” (since, even at work, human interaction proceeds without economic considerations).

From there, he can argue that the economy should be driven by “altruistic” considerations.
The confusion is so enormous that a book would be needed to fully explore the ways in which the man has misunderstood these terms.

In the first place, capitalism – or better, free markets – has never denied altruism or any other psychological trait its place in human life.

Nor has any intelligent free market theorist equated the whole of life with economic interaction. {Although, I’m not entirely sure that we would be worse off if  they did. Certainly, there is a great deal to be said for contracts, even within families, witness the rise of prenuptial contracts, living wills, family trusts, guardianships,  and so on, which certainly have smoothed many aspects of family life.

Nor does anyone outside academia assume “rational” actors or “economic” men.

Men act from all sorts of reasons. They run companies for all sorts of reasons, and money is often the least of them.

In short, Graeber, after having first assumed a model of capitalism that would be an embarrassment in a freshman essay, devotes his energies to refuting it with anecdotal evidence, which he then mysteriously dubs communist.

Is it not possible to behave decently to another person without being a communist? Who made communism – a theory about economic production and ownership – a system of ethics?

I would be puzzled, except for the leveraging of Christianity in Graeber’s polemic.

Now it is clear.

When you forbid divinity anywhere in the universe but in man’s imagining, it follows that you will restrict paradise to man’s own creations.

Stripped of all obfuscation, Graeber’s language betrays the covergence of the binaries – capitalism and communism – characteristic of the arbiters of the New World Order.