Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a community becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, “the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god.”

Like Republicans with Founders.

It all makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche’s initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.

What Nietzsche is doing here is starting out from the standard, common-sense assumptions about the nature of human beings prevalent in his day (and to a large extent, still prevalent)—that we are rational calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before society, that “society” itself is just a way of putting a kind of temporary lid on the resulting conflict.

It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did.

You are assuming he said it. Be a bit more skeptical

Niezsche’s account of “primeval times” might be absurd, but his description of Christianity—of how a sense of debt is transformed into an abiding sense of guilt, and guilt to self-loathing, and self-loathing to self-torture—all of this does ring very true.

Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the “redeemer”?

The Bible bears down hard on this particular point you know. Moneychangers, temple, easier a rich man?

all of them—from Zoroastrianism to Islam—arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money and the market in human life, and particularly about what these institutions meant for fundamental questions of what human beings owed to one another.

Phrasing as an exclusive concern is a bit much.

We just don’t have any idea what a political argument in a Syrian tavern in, say, 750 BC was likely to have been like. As a result, we have spent thousands of years contemplating sacred texts full of political allusions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written, but whose meaning we now can only guess at.

It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the same kinds of debt crises that had long been common in Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, as the poor became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders in the towns, they would begin to lose title to their fields and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors’ households, or even sold abroad as slaves.

as soon as Nehemiah returned home, he found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian-style “clean slate” edict—having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle.

If so, “redemption” is no longer about buying something back. It’s really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting.

No shit

one of the common acts during debt cancellation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history.22

The parable has long been a challenge to theologians.

Or it's just using an everyday situation exaggerated to extremes to explan moral concepts.

Christians practically say as much every time they recite the Lord’s Prayer and ask God to “forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.”

Sins. As we forgive those who sin against us.

When he calls on his followers to forgive all debts, refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor—is he really expecting them to do this? Or are such demands just a way of throwing in their faces that, since we are clearly not prepared to act this way, we are all sinners whose salvation can only come in another world—a position that can be (and has been) used to justify almost anything?

Somebody needs to read about Pentecost

On the one hand they are outcries against the market; on the other, they tend to frame their objections in commercial terms—as if to argue that turning human life into a series of transactions is not a very good deal.

Have you never heard of a fucking metaphor?

“Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them.” One can only imagine what those words meant, emotionally, to a father in a patriarchal society in which a man’s ability to protect the honor of his family was everything.

Some things just happen. This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history.

No it really fucking was NOT.

One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery.

What was the practical impact?

Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars.29 Rulers thus had a vested interest in maintaining their recruitment base. No doubt this was a factor; clearly, it wasn’t the only one.

What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior.

We can add that, in the ancient world, when people who actually were more or less social equals loaned money to one another, the terms appear to have normally been quite generous.

The problem was that, unlike status distinctions like caste or slavery, the line between rich and poor was never precisely drawn.

Such behavior could be justified, in legal terms, by insisting that the loan was not a form of mutual aid but a commercial relationship—a contract is a contract.

What’s more, framing it as a breach of contract meant stating that this was, in fact, a moral issue: these two parties ought to be equals, but one had failed to honor the bargain.

analogous arguments were being made in similar situations almost everywhere in the ancient world: in Athens, in Rome, and for that matter, in China—where legend had it that coinage itself was first invented by an ancient emperor to redeem the children of families who had been forced to sell them after a series of devastating floods.

Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation—the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land.

Anthropology has shown us just how different and numerous are the ways in which humans have been known to organize themselves. But it also reveals some remarkable commonalities—fundamental moral principles that appear to exist everywhere and that will always tend to be invoked wherever people transfer objects back and forth or argue about what other people owe them. One of the reasons that human life is so complicated, in turn, is because many of these principles contradict one another.

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).

curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.

For thee but not for me.

But if one examines matters closely, one finds that all human relations are based on some variation on reciprocity.

This is painfully obvious.

Yet it is extremely difficult to see the relation between parent and child as particularly reciprocal.

Depends on the timescale and culture, no?

Squaring accounts means that the two parties have the ability to walk away from each other. By presenting it, his father suggested he’d just as soon have nothing further to do with him.

I remember as a child several times being told that among the Inuit (or sometimes it was among Buddhists, or Chinese, but, curiously, never Africans)—that if one saves someone else’s life, one is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever.

Let’s try a thought experiment.

There's no anthropological lit on these stories?

In many parts of Africa, accomplished curers were also important political figures with extensive clienteles of former patients. A would-be follower thus arrives to declare his political allegiance. What complicates the matter in this case is that followers of great men, in this part of Africa, were in a relatively strong bargaining position.

I will define communism here as any human relationship that operates on the principles of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

This is ironic, since the Communist parties that ruled over the USSR and its satellites, and that still rule China and Cuba, never described their own systems as “communist.” They described them as “socialist.”

And were neither.

All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us act like a communist consistently. “Communist society”—in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project.10 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 reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.

One might even say that it’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don’t tend to operate very democratically.

Neither did most communist nations.

But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford.

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability.

The Nuer are constantly engaged in feuds; any stranger might well turn out to be an enemy there to scout out a good place for an ambush, and it would be unwise to give such a person useful information.

The main point, though, is that it requires something on this scale—an immediate threat to life and limb, terror-bombing of civilian populations—before people will ordinarily consider not giving a stranger accurate directions.

Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important—but they derive most of their power from the shared assumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one’s feelings, and it’s impossible to lie to someone who does not assume you would ordinarily tell the truth.

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.

Isn't this premised on empathy?

Conversely, the same is true if another person’s need—even a stranger’s—is particularly spectacular or extreme: if he is drowning, for example. If a child has fallen onto the subway tracks, we assume that anyone who is capable of helping her up will do so.

Exactly one page after describing his difficulties in asking for directions, Evans-Pritchard notes that these same Nuer find themselves unable, when dealing with someone they have accepted as a member of their camp, to refuse a request for almost any item of common consumption.