I dare not comment on David Graeber’s monumental anthropological investigation into the role of debt in human relations in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Any attempt by this hard sciences guy would almost certainly prove embarrassing. My motivation for reading the 400 page text (plus 62 pages of end notes) stems from a desire to understand the axioms that underlie modern concepts of indebtedness and money. Perhaps my recent interest in this subject is a natural consequence of middle age. Or maybe my heightened curiosity manifested from living in a social system whose very existence seems more precarious with each passing day.
What exactly is money anyway? What is a debt? How did these ideas come about and why do we adhere to them? Can communities function without monetary exchange? Graeber provides compelling answers to these questions by connecting a myriad of observations from cultures around the world throughout history. Connections that can explain universal, recurring trends such as the cycle of slavery to mine metals to produce coins to pay soldiers (who, in turn, captured more slaves). This “slavery-coinage-military complex” prevailed in the Axial Age (800 BC – 600 AD) in Europe, India and China that coincided with great unrest in each. If you are a human being living on planet Earth, you should read this book. The extended quote below from the last chapter provides an apt summary:
If this book has shown anything, it’s exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it’s even possible to imagine that that’s what life is really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it. As I’ve emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations—that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call “love”—but there’s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it. These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous. Still, what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of exchange, founded on precise calculation. As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor and owing someone a debt is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demands equivalence. And such equivalence—especially when it involves equivalence between human beings (and it always seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ultimate values)—only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: “seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother,” “one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred and fifty bushels of grain.”…
This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of exorcising this uncomfortable truth. But even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and immediately assess them only in terms of what he could get for them in the market? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver—melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women’s ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history—could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or, nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.
It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt. I know my use of the word “love” here is even more provocative, in its own way, than “communism.” Still, it’s important to hammer the point home. Just as markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love, and trust back into numbers once again.
Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014. pp 386-387
A bit further down, Graeber explains a false, but ubiquitous, idea that by simply being alive we are in debt–a debt so great that we can never even hope to repay:
It’s hardly surprising that the end result, historically, is to see our life itself as something we hold on false premises, a loan long since overdue, and therefore, to see existence itself as criminal. Insofar as there’s a real crime here, though, it’s fraud. The very premise is fraudulent. What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one’s existence? Of course it isn’t. Insofar as it is indeed possible to come into any sort of relation with the Absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time, or human-scale time, entirely; therefore, as medieval theologians correctly recognized, when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.”
Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014. p 387.
Below, Graeber captures the potential paradox that I have felt–but have not been able to articulate–that has long fueled my contempt for the rampant materialism and iniquity that so plagues our modern age, especially in post-WWII United States. Bank-imposed FICA scores come to mind here:
For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money–and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.
Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014. pp 389-390
Though Graeber’s aim in Debt was not to offer “concrete proposals” for change, the last line of the text is the crucial take away for this 21st century malcontent:
What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014, p 391.