Debts Are To Be Paid

David Graeber may have been killed.

Crow Qu’appelle suggests his wife may have done it. There are signs he was poisoned.

But to me it’s not so important who did the dirty work, or how… but why.

And if you read Chapter One of Debt: The First Thousand Years it will be obvious to you why.

Debt was published in 2011, the same year Graeber helped to inspire and guide the Occupy Wall Street movement that had sprung up in response to bank bailouts in the wake of the 2008 depression.

If David Graeber had been a nobody like me, it wouldn’t have been too much of a concern. Let the plebes say what they like; everybody knows they’re just blowing off steam.

But he wasn’t.

He’d been active in the Global Justice movement since the early 2000s—an international resistance movement against the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, etc.—also known as the “anti-globalization” or “alter-globalization” movement.

The IMF along with the World Bank and the UN were formed in the wake of WWII to grant monetary and political advantage to a consortium of influential international financiers based mainly in the US and Britain. Graeber explains that the IMF basically acts as the world’s debt enforcers: “You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.”

Resistance to this global debt mafia has not been limited to anarchist intellectual circles in affluent countries; it has been led by the world’s poor. In 2001 alone, 76 people from poor countries were counted among the martyred—surely deemed a small price to financial dictators to maintain their hegemony, unscrupulous manipulators who see humans as mere vermin to be exploited at will.

Resistance to IMF and World Bank policies in poor countries in 2001 documents that seventy six people, including a fourteen-year-old boy, were killed, and thousands injured and arrested in protests which took place across twenty three developing countries and involved millions of poor people.

In September 2000, on the eve of massive protests at the Prague meetings of the IMF and World Bank, WDM [World Development Movement] released its first States of Unrest report. It revealed a previously undocumented pattern of protest and civil unrest in developing countries directed against the policies imposed and championed by the IMF and World Bank. It demonstrated that protests against these institutions and their policies were not limited to privileged 'students and anarchists' from rich countries, as some politicians and the IMF and World Bank themselves had tried to claim, but lead [sic] by the world's poorest people.

—“Anti-IMF Protests Sweep Developing World”, April 2002

In Chapter One of Debt, Graeber says their immediate goal had been to stop IMF restructuring policies that had severe consequences for the world’s poor—something they’d accomplished surprisingly quickly—but that their “more long-term aim was debt amnesty. Something along the lines of the biblical Jubilee.”

The mention of Jubilee isn’t incidental. Cyclical cancellation of debts, freeing of debt slaves, and even the return of land to its previous owners who’d been forced to sell under dire circumstances could be seen as legal concessions gained, not only in Hebrew law but throughout the ancient world, through centuries of experience that keeping the populace permanently shackled to debt they can never pay eventually leads to violent revolt. “As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say,” Graeber explains, “in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: ‘Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.’”

Of course, you can see why this kind of talk wouldn’t go over so well with the current occupiers of the throne of finance.

In Pirate Enlightenment (2019), Graeber says he lost his home in 2014 due to “machinations of police intelligence.”

In 2020, at age 59, he died a mysterious death. His wife blamed it on “Covid.”Of course, we all know that everybody who died in 2020 died of… er… Covid. What else could it have been?

Listen to Debt Chapter 1 below…

How many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see
…
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take 'til he knows
That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind