A Few Words on David Graeber’s Guardian Article














Author: Jehu Eaves
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3 Responses to “A Few Words on David Graeber’s Guardian Article”

  1. JulianWest Says:

    MMT has plenty of issues, and is hardly revolutionary (it is basically just a form of post-Keynesiaism), but I think you are misinterpreting what its proponents claim. They just state that governments can’t literally run out of money when they are the fiat issuers of it: a truism, and one that counters the popular austerian argument that “oh noes the state is going to go broke better spend less on public services.” The corollary to this is that, according to MMT, you don’t need taxes to pay for things, so conservatives shouldn’t complain that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent on welfare moochers or whatever.

    But MMTs don’t think you should just issue debt willy-nilly and get rid of all taxes, they are still worried about inflation: they just want the taxes to be based on how much is needed to control inflation, not how much is needed to “pay for” stuff. Their message is: spend as much as you want, state, as long as you keep inflation under control. Being Keynesians, they aren’t too worried about inflation when consumer demand is low, and so generally support spending more during capitalism’s downturns. While their policy proposals aren’t revolutionary in themselves, they do often support things like a basic income guarantee, which would help limit the extent to which the commodity form is imposed on workers’ time and give people more free time to learn and organize (which was, if I recall, part of the reason radicals supported the struggle for an eight-hour work day).

    Also, you misinterpret what MMTers believe about the Eurozone crisis. They don’t think the problem there is “too little” debt. Actually, MMT doesn’t apply to Europe at all: it is a theory about how fiat currency works when the state is the monopoly issuer of it. No state in the EU is a monopoly issuer of Euros. No matter how much the US spends, it can make more dollars, but Greece can’t make more Euros. The MMT interpretation of Europe’s problems is that they are essentially in the same situation as in the days of the gold standard: states are stuck using a finite currency they have almost no control over. Most MMTers that I’ve read advocate turning the EU into a sort of “United States of Europe” to fix this, they don’t think Greece should take on limitless debts.

  2. Jehu Says:

    I am pretty sure you do not grasp my argument in the least. Let me revisit it for you:

    1. David Graeber is an anarchist, which means he is opposed to all forms of the state

    2. Modern money theory is a theory of how the state can use counterfeit currency to manage capitalism — it is a variant of fascist theory.

    3. An anarchist should not be employing MMT in his argument, since Graeber has, on several occasion, already clearly stated how anti-statists view the resolution of this crisis: reduction of hours of labor and abolition of all debts public and private.

  3. JulianWest Says:

    I agree that 3 would be the best solution, but I think you are being unfair to MMT supporters. Its not a theory of “what is to be done,” it is a theory of how fiat money works. You don’t need to be a fascist to endorse it; one could accept the basic premise of MMT and be a “libertarian” right-winger or a Keynesian social democrat or a democratic socialist. It might seem a little untoward for an opponent of the state to advocate MMT, since currently states monopolize the role of fiat currency issuers, but the basic MMT idea, if accurate, would still hold even if the issuer of fiat currency was a democratically run commune or voluntary federation of communities or mutualist-style credit union or whatever.

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