This was my favourite book from 2022. Towards the last part of the book, Fromm writes, “The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell“. An insightful remark for today, but here’s the kicker – this book was published in 1941! And though the book seeks an explanation of the psychological-social conditions that led to the rise of Nazism, the historical and psychological constructs it uses ends up answering a lot more.
I remember the early days of Covid and the curfew, when we ran to shops to stock up on food and essentials. I also remember the fear and the uncertainty that came from having no idea when it would end. This was a foe we didn’t understand, which didn’t even have an intent. Now imagine doing this intentionally to an entire population. That’s the 90s Kashmir Farah Bashir writes about through the lens of her teen self in Rumours of Spring. A war with no end.
Growing up in the 80s in India, it was impossible not to have experienced the Cold War in some way – from listening to adults discussing it to having USA vs USSR wrestling matches between us kids! So this was nostalgia to some extent. And even though not by design, this was an opportune time to read this. To understand the direction and extent of the US hegemony in the last three decades and its impact on contemporary geopolitics, and to read it at the specific time when the Russian military invasion of Ukraine is bringing out a world order that is not just US-centric.
The Cold War is about not just about philosophy and politics, but people, places and the events that were either cause or effect. Ideologically, it was a contest of how the world and its citizens should be organised and into that whirlpool a lot of countries, policies and people were sucked. And in the end, as Depeche Mode sang, “The dawning of another year…one in four still here”.
It is interesting to note that this level of bipolar conflicts are quite rare in world history, barring say Spain’s Catholicism vs English Protestantism. Though the Cold War can be seen as a confrontation between capitalism and socialism from 1945 to 1989, its roots exist even before World War 1. And its impact can be seen in contemporary politics – from the state of Afghanistan to authoritarian China to unhinged North Korea.
Socialism as a thought had existed since the French Revolution but its acceleration and the start of the Cold War happened in the context of two processes – the emergence of new states (50 in 1900 to 200 by the end of the century) and the transfer of power to the United States during the world wars. This combined with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state as an alternate to the US brand of capitalism set the stage. The socialists considered the war a creation of capitalism and saw it as a war between robbers and thieves who had nothing in common with the soldiers fighting the war. The only thing that could benefit the common man was socialism and communism. Lenin set up Comintern in 1919 to which a bunch of nationalists and anti colonialists flocked. Towards the end of WW2, Churchill used “an iron curtain” despite the Soviets being an ally.
And thus began the tussle that saw historic personality clashes and alliances – FDR, Stalin, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Brezhnev, Johnson, Khrushchev, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Gorbachev as well as Latin American, East European and African dictators, Chinese autocrats, South Asian, Middle Eastern and “non aligned” leaders like Nehru and Sukarno. Not to mention China playing the superpowers and sometimes getting played. The Cold War had places as far away as Berlin, Brazil, Baghdad and Busan all becoming a theatre of war. When one looks at the dictatorships that the US propped up in Latin America, it is easy to wonder whether it’s really different from what the USSR did in Eastern Europe. The book also takes us through the context in which organisations like the UN, IMF and NATO were formed and how they became the arenas of the Cold War. Multiple spurts of arms races, events such as the Korean, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, the Suez Canal clash, Cuban missile crisis, and even an ‘internal’ event like Watergate all left their mark.
It is fascinating to think about how the world might have been different if Gorbachev had decided not to take his annual vacation in Crimea in August 1991. Would there have been a coup at all, or would he have been able to put it down and steer the Soviet into a democratic coalition of independent republics? Would they have been part of the EU now? Would there be Putin, or even Donald Trump? Odd Arne Westad does a great job of making this narrative of contemporary history accessible and engaging. It is not an easy task to map time, places and people and cover everything that deserves a spot, but he does a fabulous job. if you’re even slightly interested in history, this should be in your reading list.
Side Notes 1. Denmark in 1899 was the first country to have an agreement of annual negotiations over wages and working conditions. Probably explains its quality of life now. 2. Capitalist Norway has more state ownership of companies than China 3. Hilarious Soviet Russia jokes on pg 368, 535 4. Romania was so poverty-stricken that when Ceausescu visited Queen Elizabeth in 1978, the palace staff removed all valuables from guest rooms because he and his wife Elena might take them back with them! 5. One does feel sad for Gorbachev and how under-appreciated he was by his own people. For a Communist leader, Glasnost and perestroika were extremely liberal initiatives with the good intent of providing more freedom and a better quality of life for the people of USSR 6. An entire chapter is devoted to Indira Gandhi and boy, she was strong! In intent, speech, and action. To stand up to the might of the US when surrounded by Pakistan and China is no mean feat. “My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not.”
As the old joke goes, ‘Truth will prevail’, but no one said whose truth! I think if there is one book you should read to understand the sociopolitical information warfare on social media happening daily, this is it. From Mexico to Manila and London to Kiev, there is a playbook that is being followed to distort reality. The same tools that were originally used to create revolutions are now being used by autocrats to gain and hold power. More information was supposed to be more power, but it also provided new ways to silence dissent. Censorship through noise. And where did it all begin? In Russia. Peter Pomerantsev has a first-hand experience of how it all started. Forty years ago, his parents were forced out of Kiev (then part of the USSR), and their journey since then serves as a great narrative guide.
The book is divided into six parts. The first part uses examples like Rappler vs Duterte (Philippines’ version of Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil) and Lyudmilla Savchuk, who exposed Russia’s troll farms, to show how new instruments of information are being used to break people. Russia denies connection with the troll armies, like every other state – Turkey, Bahrain, Azerbaijan etc – that uses similar means.
The second moves to Latin America and EU to show how entire resistance movements have been dismantled. Clever rulers have found ways to remove the clarity around the ‘enemy’ by coopting the language and tactics as those who fight oppression. Srđa Popović knows a thing or two about the original playbook. A Serbian political activist, he was a leader of the student movement Otpor!, which was instrumental in toppling Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. He has since then trained activists in Georgia, Ukraine and Iran. It’s an irony that his manuals and courses are being used against the very purpose for which they were created, and it’s now come down to an arms race of tactics and technology between guys like Alberto Escorcia and Mexico’s corrupt politicians. Russia invaded Estonia in 2007 without setting foot in it by mimicking the entire playbook and using Estonia’s own pro-Russian citizens in protests. Another trick is to state that genuine protesters are being paid by the US. From Facebook to Discord there are people being recruited and systematic strategies being used to undermine pro-democracy efforts.
The third part is on how one nation is able to ‘invade’ another without real contact by blurring the idea of war vs peace and domestic vs international. War is no longer in just physical space, it is hybrid, non-linear, full-spectrum (all terms used by experts) and is focused on decaying the opposing group/country from within. Information warfare is the first play and the military follows, if required. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014 is the classic example. “Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.”
The fourth explains how, without a tangible idea of the progress and future, anything goes! When Putin invaded Crimea, he first said there were no Russian soldiers there, and then later casually said there were. Replaced one reality with another. Another example – 76% of Trump’s statements in the election were mostly false or untrue! The case made for these distortions is that objectivity anyway doesn’t exist. Related to this is the glorification of the past. ‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterised by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias’. And in the era of ‘soft facts’, we can know everything happening in Aleppo and pretend to not see it.
Pomerantsev sets a prelude for Chapter 5 with his own confused identity in childhood – British or Russian? When old notions of identity around demographics and religion get blurred, all politics now revolves around ‘identity’ they can create and use for their own ends. The story of Rashad, one of the founders of Hizb in the UK, who was early into this game but now works to dismantle it, is fascinating. This part also has the working of the Brexit campaign. Eighty types of targeted messages for 20 million people. Animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights, potholes all somehow made to connect with Brexit. And it all began in Russia. Starts by Pavlovsky for Yeltsin, but polished by Putin.
The final part is about the future – China, but begins with Nigel Oakes, founder of SCL, whose game was repurposed by one of its other founders to create Cambridge Analytica. China is well on its way to target people with demographic, psychographic and behavioural patterns. The book ends with a brilliant closure – of the subject as well as the personal history.
While the wiring is clear, what remains to be seen is the second order consequences of this combination of trolls, psyops, dark ads, bots, soft facts etc. Not just at an individual or societal level, but at a species level. The book is extremely well-researched and has a narrative and language that is easily accessible. The interweaving of the personal narrative is at once sharp and seamless. This is a book I’ll hugely recommend.
P.S. I wish he had also covered India too, the playbook is being religiously followed here!
If it doesn’t upend deeply held beliefs and origin stories, it isn’t really a Graeber book! The story goes that from money came debit and credit, but in Debt, he argues, with excellent evidence as always, that long before money came into the picture, we had ‘human economies’ which were imprecise, informal, and had a community-focused and shared ecosystem approach. An ‘everyday communism’ in which people owed favours to each other. And then the favour was converted into a mathematically precise entity, mostly thanks to the machinations of war, and sponsored by the state. Cash, barter, and every other method of financial transaction came later, and began exclusively for scenarios where there was low trust. Debts cannot be stolen, gold and silver can. Favours are relationships. Debt is a transaction. And thus ‘the history of debt is also the history of money’.
He begins with the morality of debt and the paradox of two popular views – paying back what one owes is moral, and lending money as a habit/profession is evil. In the fantastic section on ‘primordial debt’, he traces the cultural narrative of humans owing debts to the God who created them, and how sacrifices were a means to try and pay a debt that could never be repaid. People also owed a debt to society in general, and governments became the custodian of it.
Using evidence (or the lack of it) he shows how the common story of barter leading to a common currency is a myth and that it stemmed from a narrative of ‘the economy’ that was ‘separate from moral or political life’. Barter is a very recent phenomenon, and the correct order is actually credit systems (‘virtual money’ – not to be confused with digital!) – money – barter. And when money came into the picture, it served as a yardstick – of debt. A coin was an IOU. And one that the state was interested in because they wanted uniform systems of weights and measures across their kingdom. He proposes that there are three moral principles on which all economic relations are founded – communism (or love if you don’t want to sound political), hierarchy, and exchange. The first was based on expectations and responsibilities from/to each other. Then there is exchange based on equality and reciprocity (these don’t lead to a ‘market’). The hierarchies, over a period of time, formalised inequalities into castes and related customs and behaviour.
In early civilisations – India, Sumer – there were ‘primitive money’ mechanisms, such as the ones which were used to arrange marriages, resolve blood feuds ans other social interactions where there was a debt, but which was not easy to quantify. It was common for people to get into levels of debt that forced them/their family to get into ‘peon service’, which resulted in slavery. But they could work their way out of debt. Also, early kings did a reset on a regular basis by canceling all debts. But when violence got into the picture, things changed. War converted ‘human economies’ into ‘market economies’. In war, a person ‘owes’ his/her conqueror his/her life, and the conqueror can extract anything he wants. Humans became slaves, a commodity that could be bought and sold. To be a slave was to be ‘not free’ and in debt, forever.
All of this last part began in the Axial Age (800BC to 600AD) when markets first started appearing as a side effect of government administration. But this soon got mixed up with war. When wars abounded, being a soldier became a profession. Coinage was a way to pay these soldiers/mercenaries. Gold and silver were mined by slaves and/or acquired during a war, and states started insisting that they serve as legal tender for all payments. A sort of ‘military-coinage-slave’ complex. This was the time that coinage was invented. First by private citizens and then appropriated by the state. Alexander was apparently responsible for killing the old credit systems. Precious metals, owned by temples and rich people thus far, started making its way into the life of common folks.
In parallel, historic all-time greats such as Pythagoras, Confucius and Buddha co-existed (with little knowledge of each other) and humans started reasoned enquiry into the nature of things, and practically every major religion in the world was born, trying to find new ways of thinking about ethics and morality. They rejected the violence of politics, and tried using the knowledge from impersonal markets to create a new sense of morality. But except in China, religion and market couldn’t stay together for long. In the Middle Ages (600-1450 AD), when old empires collapsed and new ones began to form, hard currency began to be less commonly used, but the system of accounts and credit continued to be used. Even Europe did not revert to barter. And elsewhere in the world, new financial systems and instruments began to emerge – promissory notes and paper money (China, where the empire survived), and letters of credit and cheques (in the Islamic world). The roots of most of the worldview in finance can be traced back here. First, China’s less-than-appreciative view of capitalism. ‘Merchants were greedy and immoral’ and ‘if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good.’ There is a very interesting part about Buddhism turning to high-interest loans and altering debt-contracts to fuel its expansion! In the Islamic world, the merchant was a respected figure, pursuing honourable adventures in far lands, sealing transactions with ‘a handshake and a glance at heaven’. Despite this capitalism in its current form didn’t emerge there because the government was kept away from the markets, and the merchants ensured profits were the reward for risk. Guaranteed returns (fixed rates of interest) were a concept frowned upon in Islam. Interestingly, over in Europe, this was when Roman law was revived and ‘interest’ began to be seen as ‘a compensation for losses suffered due to delayed payment’. It was also when the Jews started getting a bad rep for charging high interest rates. Interesting side journeys include the Crusades as a way to create new markets, and Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ being a guilty projection of terrors directed the other way around.
We finally get to the Age of the Great Capitalistic Empires (1450-1971 AD) – the Atlantic slave trade and the mining of gold and silver in the Americas, which was mostly used to trade in China, India and the Far East. This prompted the return of the bullion economy and the emergence of Italian city-states which ignored the Catholic Church’s ban on usury and ultimately led to the current age of great capitalist empires. Also, a reemergence of military endeavours – ‘when Vasco da Game entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, the principle that the seas should be a zone of peaceful trade came to an immediate end’. In the Axial Age, money was a tool of the empire. When the latter collapsed, the former went with it. But now, money was autonomy and political and military powers were reorganised around it. Municipal bonds were first introduced by the Venetian government as a way to levy a compulsory loan on taxpaying citizens to fund a military campaign. It promised 5% annual interest and these bonds were negotiable, creating a market for government debt. The beginning of paper money in the Western world. But it was the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and its bank notes that truly made paper money mainstream.
In 1971, Nixon announced that foreign-held US dollars would no longer be convertible to gold. And that was the end of the gold standard. Since then, American imperial power is based on a perpetual debt – a promise to its own people and nations across the world! Fiat money backed by public trust. When it needs money, it prints it! And the premise that some of us have to pay our debts and some of us don’t.
Thus, a book that has world history, religion, the state and the military, and yes, the origin of money. It isn’t as though I can absorb or understand all the contexts and perspectives that Graeber offers in his books. But I read it for three things – one is that he provides view that is starkly original, different and thought-provoking as compared to prevalent narratives, the second is that his research quality is so good that even though I may not comprehend everything, there are bits that are amazing information/insights, and the third is that is that he is incredibly empathetic and earnest about how things should be better for everyone.
