581 - Unmasking the Genocide of Business As Usual (The Hidden Worlds of Communism and Hierarchy)

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Episode #581 - Unmasking the Genocide of Business As Usual (The Hidden Worlds of Communism and Hierarchy)

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⌚ Sat 10 December 2011  ☻Anthony J. Hall, David Graeber (reading)

Download Hour1 Download Hour2The show this week unmasks the moral pretensions of globalized imperialism run amok. Professor Anthony J. Hall speaks on the coming home to roost of USA's history of imperialism and globalization through force of arms. In our second hour, we begin reading A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations, the next chapter of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years, on how the mentality and language of 'exchange' is used both to cloak such predatory hierarchical relations and to obscure our innate drive towards communistic relationships of mutual aid.

In our first hour, we hear a 2010 interview by Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins of interview Anthony J. Hall, author of Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism. Professor Hall speaks on a wide variety of topics, from the history of imperial globalization since 1492 to the chameleon-like nature of Obama, a triumph of image over reality. How come so many people are still behind the idea of a 'war on terror', or believe the official Sep 11^th narrative without further thought? Why do the majority of the US public acquiesce as real democracy withers, as the state usurps the right to abrogate traditional principles such as habeus corpus, the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence until found guilty? Isn't it a shrinking of the consciousness which also allows them to go about their consumer business without being concerned about how many innocent fellow humans are being killed or tortured in their name? What has happened to such people's basic sense of morality? To provide an answer, in our second hour, we continue reading chapter David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years. This week we start chapter 5, A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations. Graeber outlines the difficulty of escaping the traditional confines of economic thought, and the need to be careful our language, noting that even gift economy literature tends to presuppose that exchange is somehow the fundamental method of human interaction. Citing counter examples such as the mother-child relationship, he suggests that exchange is only one of 3 main moral principals on which economic relations can be founded: Communism, Hierarchy & Exchange. These are not mutually exclusive, indeed, all societies use all 3 principles concurrently, merely to differing extents. I find his work an irresistable, invaluable aid to escaping traditional paradigms.
Thanks to Boiling Frogs for the Anthony J. Hall interview.
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Source archive: Boiling Frogs, #34 (62 min) Jeremy Hall

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