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As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

In 1982 the IMF lent Mexico $4 billion, which went straight back out of the country to pay western banks - a perfect mirror of what is happening with so-called bail-outs to Greece and other Eurozone countries today.

Former Colombian Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo calls the bail-out responses "an excellent way to deal with the US banking crisis, and an awful way to deal with the Latin American debt crisis".

Then as now, bailout money was used to repay reckless banks, whilst austerity has served only to shrink economies and increase the relative size of the debt.

The future of Europe’s economy, indeed the world economy, will be decided by a battle between the financial masters on the one side, and the peoples of the most indebted states in Europe on the other - Greece first. We either retake control of our economy from the banks, or we deepen an economic experiment which has had an incalculable cost in terms of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.

Graeber’s alternative is to recognize the diversity of motives that guide people’s economic interactions. He proposes that there are three “main moral principles” at work in economic life: communism, exchange, and hierarchy.

but principles of interaction present in all societies in different proportions: for example, capitalist firms are islands of communism and hierarchy within a sea of exchange.

The most simplistic renditions of neoclassical economics may reduce all human interactions to self-interested exchange. But the idea that society is made up of different but interdependent levels is hardly new in social theory. Neither is Graeber’s view that to talk of a society as a unit may be misleading, since people are involved in social interactions across multiple horizons that may not fit together into a coherent whole.

The greed of the Europeans is contrasted with the inscrutable warrior honor of Moctezuma, who would not object when he saw Cortés cheat at gambling. Also, Cortés and his fellows were drowning in debt, and so was Emperor Charles v, who sponsored his expeditions.

English villagers were quite happy with market transactions in their place, as part of a moral economy of mutual aid.

It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal – and often vindictive – power of the state.

For Braudel, capitalism is the domain of the big merchants, bankers, and joint stock companies that feed off the market and reorganize it. For Graeber, the easiest way to make money with money is to establish a monopoly, so “capitalists invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market.”

In place of a materialist economic history, Graeber’s 5,000 years are organized according to a purported cycle of history in which humanity is perpetually oscillating between periods of “virtual money” – paper and credit-money – and periods of metal money. The emergence and rise of capitalism up to 1971 has to be shoehorned into this quasi-mystical framework as a turn of the wheel back toward metallism.

What do these units of measurement measure? Graeber’s answer is: debt. Any piece of money, whether made of metal, paper, or electronic bits, is an iou, and so “the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”

et it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to monetary theory. Texts have no problem acknowledging that money is not a commodity, and then going on to claim that money exists because barter is inefficient.

The reason, to be blunt, is that unlike Graeber’s critique, not much of monetary theory itself rests on the historical origins of money. Economics deals with the operation of a system.

As for arguments that money is essentially about debt, or essentially a creature of the state: this is to make the mistake of reducing something involved in a complicated set of relationships to one or two of its moments. Economics has generally met the challenges of credit and state theories of money not with fear or incomprehension, but with indifference: if credit or the state is the answer to the riddle of money, the wrong question may have been posed.

But to call its value a social convention seems to misrepresent the processes by which this value is established in an economy like ours – not by general agreement or political will, but as the outcome of countless interlocking strategies in a vast, decentralized, competitive system.

But however far credit may stretch money, it still depends on a monetary base: people ultimately expect to get paid in some form or other.

Graeber’s general reading of Smith’s worldview is quite tendentious: Smith was blind to the flourishing credit economy of mutual aid all around him, had hang-ups about debt, and “created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin.” The gold standard was a strategy by the powerful to undermine the informal rustic credit economy.

The value of gold acted as an anchor for the value of any currency convertible into it. This was not due to any inherent goldness to money, and people didn’t have to believe in any such thing to support the gold standard. There was a big difference, as Schumpeter put it, between theoretical and practical metallism, a difference which does not register in Graeber’s picture.

In the modern period, state after state committed to metallic anchors as strategic decisions to enhance trust in their national currencies.

The ultimate killer of the gold standard in the twentieth century was not changing minds about the nature of money, but the rise of the labor movement and collective bargaining: deflations became more painful and politically unacceptable.

Pierre Berger, a French economist responding to a previous incursion by the anthropologists, wrote in 1966: “With no disrespect to history, one is obliged to believe that an excessive concentration on research into the past can be a source of confusion in analyzing the present, at least as far as money and credit are concerned.” He meant that economics studies a system, and the origins of its parts might mislead about their present functions and dynamics.

Focusing on student loan debt too easily slides into the language of attacking higher education already prominent on the right.

The construction of debt as a problem can easily elide with right-wing attacks on deficits, the national debt, too much government spending, etc. The mistake is to treat government debt as the same thing as individual and household debt, and vice versa. 

when we contrast debtors with proletarians: the former consume, the latter produce. Admittedly, in the face of CDOs, debts become a kind of production--but it's fake, empty, a ponzi scheme, production without production. 

The most pressing common issue in the present is climate change. This affects everyone. The rich are currently dispossessing the people of our collective wealth, positioning themselves so that they are mobile, comfortable, defended, impermeable.  The rest of us will face the ravages of weather, drought, flood, famine, shortages, disease. The only way to deal with any of this is collectively -- beginning from the premise that food, shelter, health, and knowledge belong to all in common. Anyone who thwarts this is an enemy of the people.

A politics that focuses on debt seems to treat people as failed capitalists -- even if debtors are not shopaholics or spendthrifts, that is, even if debt is a matter of self-investment, or purchasing in order to benefit one's self, children, household, the model seems too close to the one that treats people as human capital, the homo economicus of liberal and neoliberal theory.

Raymond Aron explained the emergence and the nature of modern anti-Semitism by the coincidence of the Jewish emancipation from the ghetto and the social turbulence caused by modernization.

Claude Levi-Strauss said that there were only two ways of dealing with the presence of difference, one was anthropophagic and the other anthropoemic. The anthropophagic strategy consists of “devouring” and “digesting” the stranger, transforming thereby an alien substance body into a cell of one’s own organism. In short, in “assimilation”: renouncing whatever distinguishes you from the “genuine stuff”. If you want to be a French citizen you have to become a Frenchman in your behaviour, your language, the way you act, your ideas, preferences and values. The other strategy, anthropoemic, means exactly the opposite: rejecting – “vomiting”, incarcerating people in camps or ghettoes, or rounding them up, packing them back into a boat or into a plane and sending them back “where they came from”. None of the two strategies are truly “working” in our globalised world. Assimilation makes sense as long as people believe (or are powerless to contradict such a belief imposed by the dominant power on the rest of the world) in a clear hierarchy – superiority and inferiority - of cultures, and one direction of progressive evolution – from “inferior” to “superior”… In our multi-centred world however few people are daring, adventurous or arrogant enough to maintain that there is a cultural hierarchy and to enforce such an idea upon reality.

I think it is one of the merits of Europe that it does not promote one model Europeans are obliged to adopt. On the contrary - Europe thrives on the very diversity of its population, on diversity of ideals, customs, traditions, cultures… This is precisely the secret of the unique European creativity.

In the US, it began with the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act, enacted on 8th October 2008. On the basis of this, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme was created. In the UK, there were two significant bank rescue packages in 2008 and 2009, totalling at least £550 billion. This did not represent a sudden mass conversion to Keynesianism among the world’s elites, but a panicked attempt to prevent a complete global meltdown. It is easy to forget in retrospect just how much panic there was about the coming disaster.

In April 2009, at the Conservative Party conference, the Tory leader David Cameron announced an ‘age of austerity’. He suggested: ‘Over the next few years, we will have to take some incredibly tough decisions on taxation, spending and borrowing – things that really affect people’s lives.’[3] Without being too specific, he tried to link the drive for ‘significant savings’ to a democratic desire for more transparent, honest government.

What Elliott reported as brute fact was, I would maintain, inescapably an ideological proposition. But the power of it as ideology was the fact that it appeared perfectly natural and inevitable.

what a senior civil servant thinks is in ‘the national interest’ is unlikely to be identical to what his driver or valet thinks is in ‘the national interest’. Thankfully, O’Donnell explained his motives very bluntly: a minority government ‘would not have had the strength in parliament to be able to pass the tough measures that would be needed to get us through this problem’.[10] This view was absolutely consistent with civil service orthodoxy – the unelected leaders of the British state, and this was particularly so of O’Donnell, are fully assimilated to the neoliberal orthodoxy that colonised that state during the 1980s.[11] So, for the civil service leadership, ‘the national interest’ meant a strong executive implementing austerity.

Far from austerity encouraging business to invest and generate a windfall of growth and good times, companies are sitting on a large quantity of cash – the proper collective noun is ‘shitload’[17] – which they refuse to invest due to there being a dearth of good profit-making opportunities. From this vantage point, it looks as though austerity in the narrow sense of immediate fiscal retrenchment is a losing bet.

However, as I’ve said, it is far more to the point, and far more interesting, to understand the rational core of this ideology, because that is what makes it resonant

The Treasury is stacked with eager experts, all more or less trained in the same neoclassical economic theory. It is part of a state dominated by a civil service elite that shares the broad precepts of this thinking. It is linked with a series of institutions, from academia to the City, which reinforce it. The Rogoff/Reinhart debacle does not significantly alter the balance of ideological forces within British elites. Short of a more severe crisis, a profound social disturbance, or a more concerted challenge from the political left and labour movement than has been seen since the poll tax, the most likely result is that the Treasury will prudently adapt its course in response to fluctuating events while remaining within the same broad paradigm.

The dominant ideology, the ideology of the ruling class, is not a malign conspiracy, but nor is it stupidity. The ruling class lives this ideology, because it resonates with its interests, its experience, and its accumulated expertise.