Debt: The First 5,000 Years

I read Debt right after The Dawn of Everything (also by Graeber), and my opinion of these two books is closely interlinked. The combination is an extensive unwinding of the sort of economic and social history I learned in school. I've had to re-imagine the ways that humanity developed our relationship with agriculture, with technology, and with the interplay of social obligations which we now categorize as money and economics.

The core insight and question isn't any of those individual revelations. What Graeber is trying to get you to think about is the stickiness of contemporary social relationships & structures, and the ways that we have lost the ability to imagine the possibility of change. No economic or political system has ever been as committed as ours is to narrowing the realms of the possible and foreclosing the ability to imagine other ways of organizing society. Historically, social dynamics have been much more fluid, with a significantly greater ability for groups to deliberately redefine the parameters of their politics, or simply to walk away from situations which no longer serve their needs.

In this sense, I'm reminded of Le Guin's famous statement that:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

In fact, Le Guin was underselling the case! The divine right of kings was a relatively short-lived novelty as a political system, which many people routinely walked away from, and which suffered umpteen disruptions and overthrows. Our contemporary political systems are at once more brittle than monarchy, and more intent and effective than any before seen at punishing defiance and making other systems seem impossible. I cannot imagine a society which aspires to total surveillance and imprisons so much of its population being anything less than terrified about the possibilities of change and people's ability to manifest that.

Truly an eye-opening pair of reads which I highly recommend.

The author enjoys upending the assumptions most people have about money without feeling like he has to stick to the assumptions that economists have built into their mathematics. One of these is the idea that during historical episodes where there was no or little cash, there was no money, pointing to the evidence for thriving credit activity millennia in the past without benefit of a system of coinage. I really liked the descriptions of non-Western cultures and what they used money for, which would lead very directly to a discussion of slavery and of the value of human life. In the last section of the book, he focuses on the modern era and the idea of the post-gold standard fiat currency based on the idea of debts which can never be retired ever. It was only when I got to the afterword that I found out that he had some first-hand involvement with the Occupy movement and specifically the proposals for debt forgiveness. This clarified earlier statements about the complicity of central governments in protecting the interests of creditors over debtors. It's a long book but it really held my interest throughout.