Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

When objects of material wealth pass back and forth between superiors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to quantify—the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts.

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.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children.

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. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon.

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.

It’s not that the tendency for communism to slip into hierarchy is inevitable—societies like the Inuit have managed to fend it off for thousands of years—but rather, that one must always guard against it.

Heroic chiefs and warriors tended to talk themselves up just as consistently as those in egalitarian societies talked themselves down.

A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won’t be equals any more.58 The law does recognize a bit of a problem here; that’s why it insists that you cannot sell off your equality permanently. Such arrangements are only acceptable if the boss’s power is not absolute, if it is limited to work time, and if you have the legal right to break off the contract and thereby to restore yourself to full equality, at any time.)

It seems to me that this agreement between equals to no longer be equal (at least for a time) is critically important. It is the very essence of what we call “debt.”

Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.

This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the situation, we wouldn’t be calling it a “debt.”

During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy takes hold. There is no reciprocity. As anyone who has ever been in jail knows, the first thing the jailors communicate is that nothing that happens in jail has anything to do with justice.

This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.

just as a criminal owes a debt to society, a debtor is always a sort of criminal.

A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.

debt is strictly a creature of reciprocity and has little to do with other sorts of morality

All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are.

exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is canceled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other. Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality.

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 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.

If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.

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.9 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,

I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.”

they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible.

Money, then, begins, as Rospabé himself puts it, “as a substitute for life.”14 One might call it the recognition of a life-debt.

So here again, money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.

Money does not wipe out the debt. One life can only be paid for with another. At best those paying bloodwealth, by admitting the existence of the debt and insisting that they wish they could pay it, even though they know this is impossible, can allow the matter to be placed permanently on hold.

money can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid.

The value of a human life could, sometimes, be quantified; but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear.

Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful.

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.

if one is simply trying to imagine the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone, surely, being forced to dine on the mutilated corpses of one’s own children would, anywhere, be pretty high on the list.

What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare. Instead, all the same institutions—fees for initiations, means of calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies, debt pawnship—were turned into their opposite; the machinery was, as it were, thrown into reverse; and, as the Tiv also perceived, the gears and mechanisms designed for the creation of human beings collapsed on themselves and became the means for their destruction.

In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others.

This is why I think Rospabé was right to emphasize the fact that in such economies, money can never substitute for a person: money is a way of acknowledging that very fact, that the debt cannot be paid.

to make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another, for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. This requires a certain violence. To make her equivalent to a bar of camwood takes even more violence, and it takes an enormous amount of sustained and systematic violence to rip her so completely from her context that she becomes a slave.

Groups like the Aro Confederacy represent an all-too-familiar strategy, deployed by fascists, mafias, and right-wing gangsters everywhere: first unleash the criminal violence of an unlimited market, in which everything is for sale and the price of life becomes extremely cheap; then step in, offering to restore a certain measure of order—though one which in its very harshness leaves all the most profitable aspects of the earlier chaos intact. The violence is preserved within the structure of the law.

The African slave trade was, as I mentioned, an unprecedented catastrophe, but commercial economies had already been extracting slaves from human economies for thousands of years. It is a practice as old as civilization. The question I want to ask is: To what degree is it actually constitutive of civilization itself?

I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement.

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It’s still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It’s just that we can no longer see that it’s there.

This is because there is every reason to believe that slavery, with its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.

All societies based on slavery tend to be marked by this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.

most people saw slavery much as we see war: a tawdry business, to be sure, but one would have to be naïve indeed to imagine it could simply be eliminated.

So what is slavery? I’ve already begun to suggest an answer in the last chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one’s context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being. Another way to put this is that the slave is, in a very real sense, dead.

one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died.

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).

the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.

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.

For us, the notion that the sanctity of a priest or the majesty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand haircuts is simply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification. If Medieval Irish jurists felt otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to acquire eggs or haircuts.28 It was the fact that it was still a human economy, in which money was used for social purposes, that made it possible to create such an intricate system whereby it was possible not just to measure but to add and subtract specific quantities of human dignity—and in doing so, provide us with a unique window into the true nature of honor itself.