Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

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.

Baseline communism might be considered the raw material of sociality, a recognition of our ultimate interdependence that is the ultimate substance of social peace. Still, in most circumstances, that minimal baseline is not enough.

There will be certain things shared or made freely available within the group, others that anyone will be expected to provide for other members on request, that one would never share with or provide to outsiders: help in repairing one’s nets in an association of fisherman, stationery supplies in an office, certain sorts of information among commodity traders, and so forth.

First, we are not really dealing with reciprocity here—or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense.

What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will.

There is a peculiar tension between a common stereotype of what are called “primitive societies” (people lacking both states and markets) as societies in which anyone not a member of the community is assumed to be an enemy, and the frequent accounts of early European travelers awestruck by the extraordinary generosity shown them by actual “savages.” Granted, there is a certain truth to both sides.

This is why, for instance, the difference between friends and enemies is so often articulated through food—and often the most commonplace, humble, domestic sorts of food: as in the familiar principle, common in both Europe and the Middle East, that those who have shared bread and salt must never harm one another.

Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction—even commerce.

Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their impoverished relatives and school chums.

Exchange is all about equivalence. It’s a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets. This is why one can speak of people exchanging words (if there’s an argument), blows, or even gunfire.

Actually, there’s something of a paradox here: each side in each case is trying to outdo the other, but, unless one side is utterly put to rout, it’s easiest to break the whole thing off when both consider the outcome to be more or less even.

Hold me back bro

This element of competition can work in completely different ways. In cases of barter or commercial exchange, when both parties to the transaction are only interested in the value of goods being transacted, they may well—as economists insist they should—try to seek the maximum material advantage.

There has to be some minimal element of trust for a transaction to be carried out at all and, unless one is dealing with a vending machine, that usually requires some outward display of sociality.

The first time I visited Analakely, the great cloth market in Madagascar’s capital, I came with a Malagasy friend intent on buying a sweater. The whole process took about four hours. It went something like this: my friend would spot a likely sweater hanging in some booth, ask the price, and then she would begin a prolonged battle of wits with the vendor, invariably involving dramatic displays of insult and indignation, and simulated walkings off in disgust. Often it seemed ninety percent of the argument was spent on a final, tiny difference of a few ariary—literally, pennies—that seemed to become a profound matter of principle on either side, since a merchant’s failure to concede it could sink the entire deal.

Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is usually only pretending to have a relationship at all.

There was certainly a trace of communism here—neighbors on good terms could also be trusted to help each other out in emergencies—but unlike communistic relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly created and maintained, because any link can be broken off at any time.

On the other, things can easily slip into games of one-upmanship—and hence obsession, humiliation, rage … or, as we’ll soon see, even worse. In some societies, these games are formalized, but it’s important to stress that such games only really develop between people or groups who perceive themselves to be more or less equivalent in status.

Games like this become especially elaborate when status is to some degree up for grabs. When matters are too clear-cut, that introduces its own sorts of problems. Giving gifts to kings is often a particularly tricky and complicated business.

The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta tells of the customs of the King of Sind, a terrifying monarch who took a particular delight in displays of arbitrary power.33 It was customary for foreign worthies visiting the king to present him with magnificent presents; whatever the gift was, he would invariably respond by presenting the bearer with something many times its value. As a result, a substantial business developed where local bankers would lend money to such visitors to finance particularly spectacular gifts, knowing they could be well repaid from the proceeds of royal one-upmanship.

Exchange, then, implies formal equality—or, at least, the potential for it. This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.

relations of explicit hierarchy—that is, relations between at least two parties in which one is considered superior to the other—do not tend to operate by reciprocity at all. It’s hard to see because the relation is often justified in reciprocal terms (“the peasants provide food, the lords provide protection”), but the principle by which they operate is exactly the opposite.

Not if you're remotely familiar with history

religious traditions often insist that the only true charity is anonymous—in other words, not meant to place the recipient in one’s debt. One extreme form of this, documented in various parts of the world, is the gift by stealth, in a kind of reverse burglary: to literally sneak into the recipient’s house at night and plant one’s present so no one can know for sure who has left it. The figure of Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas (who, it must be remembered, was not just the patron saint of children, but also the patron saint of thieves) would appear to be the mythological version of the same principle:

If charitable donations become the basis for any sort of social relation, it will not be one based on reciprocity. If you give some coins to a panhandler, and that panhandler recognizes you later, it is unlikely that he will give you any money—but he might well consider you more likely to give him money again.

Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties as the framework of a relationship, and relations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer simply dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen as being regulated by a web of habit or custom.

this introduces another complication to the problem of giving gifts to kings, or to any superior: there is always the danger that it will be treated as a precedent, added to the web of custom, and therefore considered obligatory thereafter.

any gift to a feudal superior, “especially if repeated three or four times,” was likely to be treated as a precedent and added to the web of custom. As a result, those giving gifts to superiors often insisted on receiving a “letter of non-prejudice” legally stipulating that such a gift would not be required in the future.

the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy.

Ideologies of caste or race are just extreme examples.

Yeah I know that as a nerd I got shot by the cops all the time OH WAIT NO I'M WHITE. Stop conflating class and race!

If a friend is unusually generous once, we will likely wish to reciprocate. If she acts this way repeatedly, we conclude she is a generous person, and are hence less likely to reciprocate.

Kinda a dick take

To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that, in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since aristocrats don’t really do anything in particular: most spend their time simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state) and therefore should continue to do so.

On the other end of the scale, this is also how abuse becomes self-legitimating. As a former student of mine, Sarah Stillman, pointed out: in the United States, if a middle-class thirteen-year-old girl is kidnapped, raped, and killed, it is considered an agonizing national crisis that everyone with a television is expected to follow for several weeks. If a thirteen-year-old girl is turned out as a child prostitute, raped systematically for years, and ultimately killed, all this is considered unremarkable—

I wouldn't say unremarkable but it is treated differently...and again there are questions of race and sex.

Even if Medieval writers insisted on imagining society as a hierarchy in which priests pray for everyone, nobles fight for everyone, and peasants feed everyone, it never even occurred to any of them to establish how many prayers or how much military protection was equivalent to a ton of wheat.

Maybe because it was an agreed upon lie.

fans of certain Nigerian pop stars throw money onto the stage during concerts, and the pop stars in question make occasional tours of their fans’ neighborhoods tossing (the same) money from the windows of their limos.

One could, in practice, pass from here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they don’t want to (hence North American Indian chiefs’ famous skill at oratory and powers of persuasion).

Questionable

The more of one’s wealth that is obtained by plunder or extortion, the more spectacular and self-aggrandizing will be the forms in which it’s given away.

The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics—

OH DOES IT NOW

I should underline again that we are not talking about different types of society here (as we’ve seen, the very idea that we’ve ever been organized into discrete “societies” is dubious) but moral principles that always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.

Iroquois communities were based on an ethos that required everyone to be attentive to the needs of several different sorts of people: their friends, their families, members of their matrilineal clans, even friendly strangers in situations of hardship. It was when they had to think about society in the abstract that they started to emphasize the two sides of the village, each of which had to bury the other’s dead.

Similarly, feudalism was a notoriously messy and complicated business, but whenever Medieval thinkers generalized about it, they reduced all its ranks and orders into one simple formula in which each order contributed its share: “Some pray, some fight, still others work.”

Yes because societies never agree on lies.

When trying to imagine a just society, it’s hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of elegant geometries where everything balances out.

Markets aren’t real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaged in the same self-interested calculating exchange.

In other words you resent how economics MARKETS ITSELF?

The problem comes when it enables some (often these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the dictates of the market shall surely be punished—or that since we live in a market system, everything (except government interference) is based on principles of justice: that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all debts are paid.

For instance, a lot of extremely hierarchical relationships can operate (at least some of the time) on communistic principles.

Likewise, communistic relations can easily start slipping into relations of hierarchical inequality—often without anyone noticing it. It’s not hard to see why this happens. Sometimes different people’s “abilities” and “needs” are grossly disproportionate.

Communes or egalitarian collectives in the United States often face similar dilemmas, and they have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierarchy.

LOL not the white ones

In contrast, it’s notoriously difficult—often downright impossible—to shift relations based on an assumption of communistic sharing to relations of equal exchange. We observe this all the time with friends: if someone is seen as taking advantage of your generosity, it’s often much easier to break off relations entirely than to demand that they somehow pay you back.

the Maori story about a notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up and down the coast near where he lived by constantly asking for the best portions of their catch. Since to refuse a direct request for food was effectively impossible, they would dutifully turn it over; until one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.

Blood brotherhood, fatidra, consists of an unlimited promise of mutual aid. Both parties solemnly swear that they will never refuse any request from the other. In reality, partners to such an agreement are usually fairly circumspect in what they actually request. But, my friends insisted, when people first make such an agreement, they sometimes like to test it out.

The only limit is the knowledge that anything one can demand, the other one can too.

Sounds like mutually assured destruction

This is typical, above all, of what are often called “heroic societies”: those in which governments are weak or nonexistent and society is organized instead around warrior noblemen, each with his entourage of loyal retainers and tied to the others by ever-shifting alliances and rivalries. Most epic poetry—from the Iliad to the Mahabharata to Beowulf—harkens back to this sort of world, and anthropologists have discovered similar arrangements among the Maori of New Zealand and the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida of the American Northwest coast.