Tribute to David Graeber · 1:00am Sep 26th, 2020
Fuck, man. Fuck.
David Graeber's "Debt" was one of the most influential books I've ever read, his articles "Where's our Flying Cars?" and "The Bully's Pulpit" for the baffler inspired some of my best pieces - for the last two years of my life, he has been the giant on whose shoulders I have stood on the most often.
A full 10% of my internal monologue is just Graeber quotes. It's been making it really hard to think anything without little twangs of pain.
Here, I'll show you. At least as much as I can, here.
Debt is Graeber's magnum opus, and I'm going to pull some excerpts from it for you here now.
Forgive this for being long, because so's Debt. The book's five hundred pages. This is no substitute for the original work, which is rich with specific examples and stories from folklore all over the world and from all time periods, but I'm not trying to be a substitute for it. I want to give you a glimpse of the mind that has passed.
There's so much in here that's hard to encapsulate in the quotes. The first time the word 'freedom' is used in recorded language was in the context of debt forgiveness. The long history of 'perpetual endowments' and how Buddhism dominated early cultures through the power of compound interest - until they had to be suppressed, their treasuries seized, because they had come to own all the precious metals in medieval China. The Mamluke slave-kings. There's just too much here.
But I didn't re-read this not to try.
To argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language.
On the one hand, insofar as all human relations involve debt, they are all morally compromised. [...] On the other hand, when we say someone acts like they “don’t owe anything to anybody,” we’re hardly describing that person as a paragon of virtue. In the secular world, morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others, and we have a stubborn tendency to imagine those obligations as debts.
What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? [...]
On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious. A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal—which, in turn, allows them to be transferable. If one owes a favor, or one’s life, to another human being, it is owed to that person specifically. But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn’t really matter who the creditor is; neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing—as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude. One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest.
The story [of barter], then, has become the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn’t imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about.
The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.
For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter—none with success. [...] They discovered an almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”
Why did [early kingdoms] make subjects pay taxes at all? This is not a question we’re used to asking. The answer seems self-evident. Governments demand taxes because they wish to get their hands on people’s money. But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn’t the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines? Then the king would have all the money he could possibly need.
In fact, this is what ancient kings would normally do. If there were gold and silver mines in their territory, they would usually take control of them. So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one’s picture on it, causing it to circulate among one’s subjects—and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again? This does seem a bit of a puzzle. But if money and markets do not emerge spontaneously, it actually makes perfect sense. Because this is the simplest and most efficient way to bring markets into being.
Let us take a hypothetical example. Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem. Such a force would likely consume anything edible within ten miles of their camp in as many days; unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and animals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one’s entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.
I'm not going to explain this one, it's too perfect in a vacuum:
It all makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche’s initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.
Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful [Inuit] hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly: “Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”
The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.
Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question (one knows one is in the presence of received wisdom when, if one challenges some tenet of it, the first reaction is to treat one as simply ignorant—“You obviously have never heard of the Laffer Curve”; “Clearly you need a course in Economics 101”—the theory is seen as so obviously true that no one exposed to it could possibly disagree). What’s more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to “scientific status”—“rational choice theory,” for instance—start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment—curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.
As a side note, one of the pioneers of the field is Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural psychologist whose key focus of study was in 'optical illusions of the mind' - charting a map of all the ways humans are irrational actors, make irrational decisions, and are operating on fundamentally faulty hardware. This isn't to disagree with Graeber's point, but to underline the irony in what he's saying being true in my experience, as well.
Almost everyone follows [the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"] if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs.
[...]
The same goes for small courtesies like asking for a light, or even for a cigarette. It seems more legitimate to ask a stranger for a cigarette than for an equivalent amount of cash, or even food; in fact, if one has been identified as a fellow smoker, it’s rather difficult to refuse such a request.
It also helps to emphasize that sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of all things we consider fun.
The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so.
Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches.
God, this is going to be a huge one, but it's one I think about a lot.
Our own habits of civility are not so very different. Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying “please” and “thank you.” To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society—teachers and ministers, for instance—do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.
Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kind of democratization of what was once a habit of feudal deference: the insistence on treating absolutely everyone the way that one used only to have to treat a lord or similar hierarchical superior. Perhaps this is not so in every case. Imagine we are on a crowded bus, looking for a seat. A fellow passenger moves her bag aside to clear one; we smile, or nod, or make some other little gesture of acknowledgment. Or perhaps we actually say, “thank you.” Such a gesture is simply a recognition of common humanity: we are acknowledging that the woman who had been blocking the seat is not a mere physical obstacle but a human being, and that we feel genuine gratitude toward someone we will likely never see again.
None of this is generally true when one asks someone across the table to “please pass the salt,” or when the postman thanks you for signing for a delivery. We think of these simultaneously as meaningless formalities and as the very moral basis of society. Their apparent unimportance can be measured by the fact that almost no one would refuse, on principle, to say “please” or “thank you” in just about any situation—even those who might find it almost impossible to say “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.”
In fact, the English “please” is short for “if you please,” “if it pleases you to do this”—it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). Its literal meaning is “You are under no obligation to do this.” “Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!” This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies).
When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word “please,” you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is. In English, “thank you” derives from “think.” It originally meant, “I will remember what you did for me”—which is usually not true either—but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English “much obliged”—it actually does mean, “I am in your debt.” The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor’s power—since a debtor is, after all, a criminal.
Saying “you’re welcome” or “it’s nothing” (French de rien, Spanish de nada)—the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true—is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying “my pleasure”—you are saying, “No, actually, it’s a credit, not a debit—you did me a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!”
Decoding the tacit calculus of debt (“I owe you one,” “No, you don’t owe me anything,” “Actually, if anything, it’s me who owes you,” as if inscribing and then scratching off so many infinitesimal entries in an endless ledger) makes it easy to understand why this sort of thing is often viewed not as the quintessence of morality, but as the quintessence of middle-class morality. True, by now middle-class sensibilities dominate society. But there are still those who find the practice odd. Those at the very top of society often still feel that deference is owed primarily to hierarchical superiors and find it slightly idiotic to watch postmen and pastry chefs taking turns pretending to treat each other like little feudal lords.
At the other extreme, those who grew up in what in Europe are called “popular” environments—small towns, poor neighborhoods, any place where there is still an assumption that people who are not enemies will, ordinarily, take care of one another—will often find it insulting to be constantly told, in effect, that there is some chance they might not do their job as a waiter or taxi driver correctly, or provide house guests with tea. In other words, middle-class etiquette insists that we are all equals, but it does so in a very particular way.
On the one hand, it pretends that nobody is giving anybody orders (think here of the burly security guard at the mall who appears before someone walking into a restricted area and says, “Can I help you?”); on the other, it treats every gesture of what I’ve been calling “baseline communism” as if it were really a form of exchange. As a result, like Tiv neighborhoods, middle-class society has to be endlessly recreated, as a kind of constant flickering game of shadows, the criss-crossing of an infinity of momentary debt relations, each one almost instantly canceled out. All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying “please” and “thank you” first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—among those very middle classes who were largely responsible for it. It is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five hundred years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one token of a much larger philosophy, a set of assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them.
[W]hether Iroquois wampum, African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, [one] discovers that such money is used almost exclusively for the kinds of transactions that economists don’t like to have to talk about. In fact, the term “primitive money” is deceptive for this very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this is precisely what we don’t find.
Often, such currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all. Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry. Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.” By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.
This, in turn, explains why it’s invariably the exact same kind of money that’s used to arrange marriages that is also used to pay wergeld (or “bloodwealth,” as it’s sometimes also called): money presented to the family of a murder victim so as to prevent or resolve a blood-feud. Here the sources are even more explicit. On the one hand, one presents whale teeth or brass rods because the murderer’s kin recognize they owe a life to the victim’s family. On the other, whale teeth or brass rods are in no sense, and can never be, compensation for the loss of a murdered relative. Certainly no one presenting such compensation would ever be foolish enough to suggest that any amount of money could possibly be the “equivalent” to the value of someone’s father, sister, or child. So here again, money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.
Graeber goes on to elaborate on the consequence of this - we agree that a life is only worth as much as a life. But there are times when a life can't be repaid, and so values have to be put on things in these economies. But this creates indirect means for which a life can be purchased with commodity, with something that isn't a life. He arrives at this summary:
We have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, in a human economy, one needs to first rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of any sort. This is why they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their owners.
Most of us don’t like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world “out there” as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I’ve often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance—or at least the frequency—of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies”—even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own.
The slave trade, of course, represented violence on an exponentially different scale. We are speaking here of destruction of genocidal proportions, in world-historic terms, comparable only to events like the destruction of New World civilizations or the Holocaust. Neither do I mean in any way to blame the victims: we need only imagine what would be likely to happen in our own society if a group of space aliens suddenly appeared, armed with undefeatable military technology, infinite wealth, and no recognizable morality—and announced that they were willing to pay a million dollars each for human workers, no questions asked. There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation—and a handful is all it takes.
To underscore some of the paradoxes surrounding the concept and bring home what’s really at stake here, let us consider the story of one man who survived the Middle Passage: Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia.
Equiano’s further adventures—and there were many—are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years’ War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners—who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word—until he passed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his liberty. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
Readers of Equiano’s book are often troubled by one aspect of the story: that for most of his early life, he was not opposed to the institution of slavery. At one point, while saving money to buy his freedom, he even briefly took a job that involved purchasing slaves in Africa. Equiano only came around to an abolitionist position after converting to Methodism and making common cause with religious activists against the trade. Many have asked: Why did it take him so long? Surely if anyone had reason to understand the evils of slavery, it was he.
The answer seems, oddly, to lie in the man’s very integrity. One thing that comes through strikingly in the book is that this was not only a man of endless resourcefulness and determination, but above all, a man of honor. Yet this created a terrible dilemma. To be made a slave is to be stripped of any possible honor. Naturally, Equiano wished to regain what had been taken from him. His problem was that honor is, by definition, something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place.
It strikes me that this experience—of only being able to restore one’s lost honor, to regain the ability to act with integrity by acting in accord with the terms of a system that one knows, through deeply traumatic personal experience, to be utterly unjust—is itself one of the most profoundly violent aspects of slavery. It is another example, perhaps, of the need to argue in the master’s language, but here taken to insidious extremes.
This is because honor is not the same as dignity. One might even say: honor is surplus dignity. It is that heightened consciousness of power, and its dangers, that comes from having stripped away the power and dignity of others; or at the very least, from the knowledge that one is capable of doing so. At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword (violent men, as we all know, are almost invariably obsessed with honor).
This I usually condense down to; "Honour is surplus dignity that must be defended with violence". I carry that sentence with me to a lot of places.
But what does all this have to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly: everything. Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to have been used precisely as measures of honor and degradation: that is, the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.
This one I've chopped down a bit, but it's still very good:
What was so unusual about Celtic systems—and the Irish one went further with this than any other—was that honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person had his or her “honor price”: the price that one had to pay for an insult to the person’s dignity. Here too there was a graded scale. The honor price of a king, for instance, was seven cumals, or seven slave girls—this was the standard honor price for any sacred being, the same as a bishop or master poet. Since (as all sources hasten to point out) slave girls were not normally paid as such, this would mean, in the case of an insult to such a person’s dignity, one would have to pay twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of silver.
The honor price of a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows, of a minor lord, that, plus half a cow additionally for each of his free dependents—and since a lord, to remain a lord, had to have at least five of these, that brought him up to at least five cows total.
Honor price is not to be confused with wergeld—the actual price of a man or woman’s life. If one killed a man, one paid goods to the value of seven cumals, in recompense for killing him, to which one then added his honor price, for having offended against his dignity (by killing him). Interestingly, only in the case of a king are the blood price and his honor price the same.
There were also payments for injury: if one wounds a man’s cheek, one pays his honor price plus the price of the injury. (A blow to the face was, for obvious reasons, particularly egregious.) The problem was how to calculate the injury, since this varied according to both the physical damage and status of the injured party. Here, Irish jurists developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with different varieties of grain: a cut on the king’s cheek was measured in grains of wheat, on that of a substantial farmer in oats, on that of a smallholder merely in peas.
Finally, one had to pay the honor price if one simply insulted someone of any importance: say, by turning the person away at a feast, inventing a particularly embarrassing nickname (at least, if it caught on), or humiliating the person through the use of satire.
Mockery was a refined art in Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close to magicians: it was said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to death, or at the very least, raise blisters on the faces of his victims. Any man publicly mocked would have no choice but to defend his honor; and, in Medieval Ireland, the value of that honor was precisely defined.
I should note that while twenty-one cows might not seem like much when we are dealing with the honor of kings, Ireland at the time had about 150 kings.
At first sight it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman or king should be measured in slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was zero. But if one’s honor is ultimately founded on one’s ability to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave is that of the honor that has been extracted from them.
In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life.
Here we go.
This is one of the bits I was specifically looking for. I've been tearing through the 180 pages before this bit looking for it again.
On the effect the change of social economies to market economies had:
Some of this must have been an effect of slavery: while actual slaves were rarely numerous, the very existence of a class of people with no kin, who were simply commodities, did make a difference. In Nuzi, for instance, “the brideprice was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value of 40 shekels of silver” ’—to which the author drily adds, “there is some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl.”
Still, the really critical factor here was debt. As I pointed out in the last chapter, anthropologists have long emphasized that paying bridewealth is not the same as buying a wife. After all—and this was one of the clinching arguments, remember, in the original 1930s League of Nations debate—if a man were really buying a woman, wouldn’t he also be able to sell her? Clearly African and Melanesian husbands were not able to sell their wives to some third party. At most, they could send them home and demand back their bridewealth.
A Mesopotamian husband couldn’t sell his wife either. Or, normally he couldn’t. Still, everything changed the moment he took out a loan. Since if he did, it was perfectly legal—as we’ve seen—to use his wife and children as surety, and if he was unable to pay, they could then be taken away as debt pawns in exactly the same way that he could lose his slaves, sheep, and goats. What this also meant was that honor and credit became, effectively, the same thing: at least for a poor man, one’s creditworthiness was precisely one’s command over one’s household, and (the flip side, as it were) relations of domestic authority, relations that in principle involved a responsibility for care and protection, became property rights that could indeed be bought and sold.
Again, for the poor, this meant that family members became commodities that could be rented or sold. Not only could one dispose of daughters as “brides” to work in rich men’s households, tablets in Nuzi show that one could now hire out family members simply by taking out a loan: there are recorded cases of men sending their sons or even wives as “pawns” for loans that were clearly just advance payment for employment in the lender’s farm or cloth workshop.
Here we go. What an absolute statement Graeber just put on the table there. The chapter goes on to double down on this assertion: The origins of waged or contract labour were loans where people were put up as collateral, then intentionally defaulted on.
Again, for the poor, this meant that family members became commodities that could be rented or sold. Not only could one dispose of daughters as “brides” to work in rich men’s households, tablets in Nuzi show that one could now hire out family members simply by taking out a loan: there are recorded cases of men sending their sons or even wives as “pawns” for loans that were clearly just advance payment for employment in the lender’s farm or cloth workshop.
I'm going to skip ahead a lot more now that I've found it:
[Greek aristocrats] also struggled with the fact that their own high-minded pursuits, such as chariot-racing, outfitting ships for the navy, and sponsoring tragic dramas, required the exact same coins as the ones used to buy cheap perfume and pies for a fisherman’s wife—the only real difference being that their pursuits tended to require a lot more of them.
We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire.
In Roman law [from which our own law is largely derived], property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing. This definition has caused endless conceptual problems. First of all, it’s not clear what it would even mean for a human to have a “relation” with an inanimate object. Human beings can have relations with one another. But such relations are always mutual. How could one have a mutual relation with a thing? And if one did, what would it mean to give that relation legal standing?
A simple illustration will suffice: imagine a man trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the palm trees growing on that island. If he’s there too long, he might well end up giving them all names and spending half his time having imaginary conversations with them. Still, does he own them? The question is meaningless. There’s no need to worry about property rights if no one else is there.
Clearly, then, property is not really a relation between a person and a thing. It’s an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things. The only reason that we sometimes fail to notice this is that in many cases—particularly when we are talking about our rights over our shoes, or cars, or power tools—we are talking of rights held, as English law puts it, “against all the world”—that is, understandings between ourselves and everyone else on the planet, that they will all refrain from interfering with our possessions, and therefore allow us to treat them more or less any way we like. A relation between one person and everyone else on the planet is, understandably, difficult to conceive as such. It’s easier to think of it as a relationship with a thing. But even here, in practice this freedom to do as one likes turns out to be fairly limited. To say that the fact that I own a chainsaw gives me an “absolute power” to do anything I want with it is obviously absurd. Almost anything I might think of doing with a chainsaw outside my own home or land is likely to be illegal, and there are only a limited number of things I can really do with it inside. The only thing “absolute” about my rights to a chainsaw is my right to prevent anyone else from using it.
[...]
If you think about it, this really is an odd place to start in developing a theory of property law. It is probably fair to say that, in any part of the world, in any period of history, whether in ancient Japan or Machu Picchu, someone who had a piece of string was free to twist it, knot it, pull it apart, or toss it in the fire more or less as they had a mind to. Nowhere else did legal theorists appear to have found this fact in any way interesting or important. Certainly, no other tradition makes it the very basis of property law—since, after all, doing so made almost all actual law little more than a series of exceptions. How did this come about? And why? The most convincing explanation I’ve seen is Orlando Patterson’s: the notion of absolute private property is really derived from slavery. One can imagine property not as a relation between people, but as a relation between a person and a thing, if one’s starting point is a relation between two people, one of whom is also a thing. (This is how slaves were defined in Roman law: they were people who were also a res, a thing.)
The most insidious effect of Roman slavery, however, is that through Roman law, it has come to play havoc with our idea of human freedom. The meaning of the Roman word libertas itself changed dramatically over time. As everywhere in the ancient world, to be “free” meant, first and foremost, not to be a slave. Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity to make and maintain moral commitments to others. The English word “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals. This is why freed slaves in Rome became citizens: to be free, by definition, meant to be anchored in a civic community, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entailed.
By the second century AD, however, this had begun to change. The jurists gradually redefined libertas until it became almost indistinguishable from the power of the master. It was the right to do absolutely anything, with the exception, again, of all those things one could not do.
This is a tradition that assumes that liberty is essentially the right to do what one likes with one’s own property. In fact, not only does it make property a right, it treats rights themselves as a form of property.
For much of human history an ingot of gold or silver, stamped or not, has served the same role as the contemporary drug dealer’s suitcase full of unmarked bills: an object without a history, valuable because one knows it will be accepted in exchange for other goods just about anywhere, no questions asked. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal. What’s more, while predatory lending goes on in every period of human history, the resulting debt crises appear to have the most damaging effects at times when money is most easily convertible into cash.
The origins of interest will forever remain obscure, since they preceded the invention of writing.
It’s well known that the Rosetta Stone, written both in Greek and Egyptian, proved to be the key that made it possible to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Few are aware of what it actually says. The stela was originally raised to announce an amnesty, both for debtors and for prisoners, declared by Ptolemy V in 196 BC.
The phrase "The Axial Age" was coined by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. In the course of writing a history of philosophy, Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others’ existence.
[...]
Whatever the reasons, the result, Jaspers argued, was the first period in history in which human beings applied principles of reasoned inquiry to the great questions of human existence. He observed that all these great regions of the world, China, India, and the Mediterranean, witnessed the emergence of almost exactly the same collection of philosophical tendencies, from skepticism to idealism—in fact, that philosophers in each managed to simultaneously develop all the major positions on the nature of cosmos, mind, action, and the ends of human existence that have remained the stuff of philosophical debate ever since. As one of Jaspers’ disciples later put it—overstating only slightly—“no really new ideas have been added since that time.”
This makes the Axial Age [800BCE to 600CE] the period that saw the birth not only of all the world’s major philosophical tendencies, but also all of today’s major world religions: Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam.
The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper’s Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What’s more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity: the kingdoms and city-states around the Yellow River in China, the Ganges valley in northern India, and the shores of the Aegean Sea.
Alexander’s army, which numbered some 120,000 men, required half a ton of silver a day just for wages.
Alexander was also the man responsible for destroying what remained of the ancient credit systems, since not only the Phoenicians but also the old Mesopotamian heartland had resisted the new coin economy. His armies not only destroyed Tyre; they also dethesaurized the gold and silver reserves of Babylonian and Persian temples, the security on which their credit systems were based, and insisted that all taxes to his new government be paid in his own money. The result was to “release the accumulated specie of century onto the market in a matter of months,” something like 180,000 talents, or in contemporary terms, an estimated $285 billion.
In China, while many of the founders of the “hundred schools” of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn’t even have leaders, like the School of the Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and fissures between states. The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems to have been urban artisans, not only were philosophically opposed to war and militarism, but organized battalions of military engineers who would actively discourage conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the aggressor. Even the Confucians, for all the importance they attached to courtly ritual, were in their early days mainly known for their efforts in popular education.
There were decades in Chinese history when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings was roughly 1.8 per hour. What’s more, such uprisings were frequently successful. Most of the most famous Chinese dynasties that were not the product of barbarian invasion (the Yuan or Qing) were originally peasant insurrections (the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming). In no other part of the world do we see anything like this.
It’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
What jumps out, in comparison with the Muslim world, are these links of finance, trade, and violence. Whereas Persian and Arab thinkers assumed that the market emerged as an extension of mutual aid, Christians never completely overcame the suspicion that commerce was really an extension of usury, a form of fraud only truly legitimate when directed against one’s mortal enemies. Debt was, indeed, sin—on the part of both parties to the transaction. Competition was essential to the nature of the market, but competition was (usually) nonviolent warfare. There was a reason why, as I’ve already observed, the words for “truck and barter” in almost all European languages were derived from terms meaning “swindle,” “bamboozle,” or “deceive.”
When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, the term he used was symbolon—from which our own word “symbol” is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for “tally”—an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. So our word “symbol” traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. This is striking enough. What’s really remarkable, though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for “symbol,” fu, or fu hao, has almost exactly the same origin.
It's about here that my Kindle copy refuses to let me copy more, and typing these out by hand would be brutal. But the book just keeps going, this is only about three fifths of the way through at this point, and it keeps bouncing between incredibly specific examples and broad connections between them in compelling and super interesting ways.
Look. Sometimes Graeber got stuff wrong, and when he got stuff wrong, he got stuff really wrong. Bully Pulpit, for instance, is a string of galaxy brain takes on bullying, intermixed with absolute baffling takes on war. But sorting his takes out was always worth the effort to pan for the gold, because there was no shortage of it in there.
But writing this helped, a little, to appreciate him one last time.
- well, good writer/thinker can be re-read multiple times ...
My condolences. Thank you for sharing, and I'm glad said sharing also helped you.
He sounds like an extraordinary thinker, I’m sorry to hear you’ve lost something so foundational to you. It sounds like I may have to read some of this myself.
Dang, these snippets are indeed as exceptional as they are hard to summarize. May he rest in peace.
2020, everybody, the year Akira is set.
This bit probably hit me the hardest. That the exploitation of the needy by those with power has literally been a part of most societies longer than the accurate storage of information really says something.
I usually get physical copies of books like this, because I tend to dogear and scribble in the margins. So I checked the prices and... yikes! Looks like I will have to get used to kindle's way of glossing and bookmarking.
I've always been weirded out by people's attitude toward money, particularly their uncritical acceptance of any bizzare construct involved in the lending/trading thereof. Most stuff I've read on economics has been hardly better grounded than religious dogma. I think this will be a refreshing read for me.
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One thing Graeber covers, which is hilarious to me, is how much of modern economic ideology - especially that derived from Adam Smith - is just Islamic theology. I covered it in part here
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Okay, I'm already half in love with this guy!
my favorite thing about mainstream economics as a field is how literally all its assumptions about human behavior are wrong
Debt's kind of a funny book that way, revealing with burning clarity that the old assumption that humans started out with barter economies as just plain false, because it turns out that bartering is actually kind of a pain in the ass, and people don't tend to do it unless society's collapsed or their city's under siege.