Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as “empires,” and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples.

Notice how, as in so many examples, we have a tendency to slip from imaginary savages to small-town shopkeepers.

You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter.

A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from Death.

Anyone, then, who lives a proper life is constantly paying back existential debts

Human nature does not drive us to “truck and barter.” Rather, it ensures that we are always creating symbols—such as money itself. This is how we come to see ourselves in a cosmos surrounded by invisible forces; as in debt to the universe.

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.