Call out to Local Artists!

A call out to local artists: our right-side window is available to display your work! Click here to submit a proposal to our artists in the window series!

David Graeber Interview - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Excellent interview with anarchist anthropologist David Graeber about his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

read more....

Bonus Graeber essay: Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Suprise You! :)

Welcome Back Students!

Welcome back students! Best of luck in this upcoming semester - remember: Food For Thought Books is here for you whether it's finding a book, helping you with a project, or just a comfy couch on a rainy day.

Come by & visit us soon - we've missed you!

Bookfessions

read more: Bookfessions

Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives

Check out this new cooperative board game being developed by one of our awesome volunteers, Brian Van Slyke!

Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives is a creative and exciting educational game about the growing co-op movement. In order to survive as individuals and to
strive for the success of their cooperative, players make tough choices while putting their teamwork abilities to the test. This is a game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everybody loses.
read more...

Like A Girl at Food For Thought Books

Thank you, Food for Thought Books Collective, for letting us film at your bookstore!

Thank you Blurred Divide! It was fun having you here!

Charles Mann's new book: 1493

Check out this article in the Amherst Bulletin about local author Charles Mann's upcoming book: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

A consistent theme throughout Mann's work is the idea that the trade of animals and plants between the Eastern and Western hemispheres led to a series of dramatic biological changes that forged a new world, both ecologically and economically.

These changes also gave Europeans an advantage over the native peoples they encountered in places like the Americas, Mann contends. The introduction of European crops and animals made the Americas more comfortable to Europeans colonists while also making it harder for indigenous people to continue their traditional ways of life, he said.

That idea plays a central role in "1493." He writes that Spanish explorer Miguel Lopez de Legazpi managed to accomplish something that Columbus tried but failed to do - establish overseas trade with China. In 1571 Legazpi founded Manila in the Philipines and from there traded silver mined by African slaves in South America for Chinese silk and porcelain.

The event is notable because it marks the first time that the world economy was completely intertwined, Mann said. But it also had a larger, unintended effect.

In the 1590s a Chinese merchant, Chen Zhenlong, brought sweet potatoes, introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish, to China. Until that point Chinese agriculture had been rice-intensive and centered around the deltas of the Yangtze and Huang He rivers. The vast majority of the country was dry and unsuitable for such crops, Mann said.

But the sweet potato changed that. The tuber thrived along dry hillsides. Its arrival coincided with the introduction of maize to China, which entered the country through Portuguese traders at Macao. The crop proved similarly suited to China's dry climate.

"Suddenly, not only are you growing stuff in the areas where you couldn't grow anything before, but it's fantastically productive," Mann said. "It was always a populous place, but this was the moment when China became China, the watchword for huge numbers of people. And it had a whole lot to do with the introduction of the sweet potato and maize."

Yet the Chinese made a series of beginners' mistakes in planting the new crops, Mann said. They planted them vertically along the hillsides, instead of horizontally. They deforested much of the land to make way for new crops. The result was erosion and massive flooding. Mann said he talked to one researcher who likened the situation to "one Katrina a month for 20 years."

The flooding helped weaken the Qing Dynasty, Mann said, opening the door for the British to essentially walk into the country unopposed before the dynasty's ultimate fall in 1911.

"That's what I mean when you talk about the biological consequences outstripping the financial consequences. It was important for China to have the silver trade," Mann said. "But the sweet potato and maize had far greater consequences." --read more

We'll be hosting a reading for 1493 with Charles Mann this upcoming October - Thursday, the 27th. Be sure to mark your calendars!

Michelle Tea at Food For Thought Books

Michelle Tea browsing at Food For Thought Books - we love this photo.

James Scott on The Art of Not Being Governed

Excellent talk by the author of the amazing and provocative The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

We need more historians willing to re-vision the tired tropes of royal agency and the magic of the state. History doesn't need to follow the centralized lines of formal political organization and, as Scott shows, it misses so much when it does.

Book Porn

For those of you who not only love books for what they contain, but books themselves as objects of beauty and artistic expression, please check out the extraordinary online collection: Publishers Bindings, 1815-1930: The Art of Books.

Everything from slave narratives to suffragists, art deco to rococo revival. A feast of beautiful book design!

FFT Volunteers in the News

Check it out! Noalanii Karakashian (pictured) & Nathara Bailey, two valiant volunteers here at Food For Thought Books, are on the front page of the Amherst Bulletin!

Race's role at Amherst Regional: How the high school is tackling a touchy subject.

... Some of the students, like senior Nathara Bailey, thought teachers' expectations for students like them would rise if they were trained in dealing with a racially diverse student body. Peyton suggested that administrators and School Committee members come and talk to their group.

"We can try to make it better and brainstorm tactics that can make the high school a better place," he said

For senior Noalanii Karakashian, a key issue is the small number of nonwhite teachers, which gives her few role models to look up to. "I don't see people who look like me," she said, adding that she doesn't feel comfortable being the only nonwhite person in a class.... read more

Farewell Black Sheep Books!

Very sad news: Black Sheep Books, a wonderful collectively-run radical bookstore and community space up in Montpelier, VT is closing up shop.

On Saturday, May 28th, we will be closing our beloved bookstore. We have had a tremendous six and one-half years and we thank you for your support and involvement in this project. The fact that a radical, anti-profit organization like this has thrived this long is inspiring, especially these last 2 and one-half years in the heart of downtown Montpelier. We thank all the volunteers, friends, supporters, and collective members — past and present — for helping to create radical space in a small town. ... read more