Fancy Forms of Paperwork and the Logic of Financial Violence

[Tuuvi]

So I was reading this interview with anthropologist David Graeber last night that was pretty interesting and I thought it would be fun to discuss it here:

https://roarmag.org/magazine/david-g...w-debt-occupy/

I remember some Italian journalist who was asking me which I thought was the better course to take: the German industrial model of capitalism or the American financial one. And I said, well, it’s not like these are options available to everyone! We have this fantasy that Wall Street or the City rake in the money because somehow people around the world are dazzled by the brilliance of their financial instruments. But what are these “financial instruments” really? They’re just fancy forms of paperwork. In fact I’ve argued that they are the very pinnacle of this newly bureaucratized form of capitalism we have now, where it almost makes no sense even to make a distinction between public and private bureaucracies because they’ve totally merged, and where we’re all supposed to think that value emerges from the paperwork rather than from whatever it is the paperwork is regulating or assessing.

What these new bureaucratized forms of capitalism are really about is making state power an intrinsic element of the extraction of profit: you collude with government to create a regulatory regime that will guarantee widespread debt, for instance, then you use the court system to enforce it. There’s a perfect synthesis of public and private power to guarantee a certain rate of profit to those who essentially fund the politicians. But it all ultimately comes down to a monopoly of coercive force inside the country.

I think there’s a very interesting essay to be written about the whole notion of “unelectability.” It’s quite fascinating to see so many people, thousands and thousands, on blogs proclaiming how no one else will vote for Corbyn. It shows something profound about the nature of contemporary ideology, which I’m becoming increasingly convinced is not based on convincing the public that the system is good or fair, but only on convincing them that other people think the system is good and fair. Everyone is sitting there saying: “it’s all a scam, but people are sheep, they actually buy this shit!” — whereas in fact the only people being fooled are those who believe everyone else is.

What are your thoughts?