Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

New York: Melville House, 2012, 534 pp.

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years does precisely what its title promises, offer a history of its titular subject, and in a broader sense than this reader might expect--not least, because of how much more the word can mean than they might guess, which is in fact Graeber's starting point, as Graeber goes on to show. The first half of the book is a meditation on the idea of debt itself--both how deeply the idea suffuses our moral and religious ideas, our social relationships and language, all around the world; and at the same time, how varied and how (to modern people) strange the thinking about it has been. Indeed, much of it consists of lengthy discussions of comparatively exotic cultural notions about it, and in particular the idea of a "human economy" as manifested in societies ranging from the Irish to the Tiv.

Still, rather than just cataloguing this variety Graeber does advance a number of bold theses. Particularly important among them is that indebtedness, rather than the unfortunate and disreputable position we now think of it as being, may have been regarded as a normal, natural condition, and even a cement holding society together by connecting individuals together, an attitude reflected in the protections traditionally afforded debtors--like the Biblical "Year of Jubilee" which periodically canceled debts. Important, too, is his subversion of the most basic thinking about markets, money, debt. Where conventionally (in Adam Smith, for instance) a "natural" human tendency to exchange for comparative advantage is held to have made markets intuitive, and these are supposed to have led to money, and money to debts, with states generally outside the process, he contends that it was the rise of large, complex institutions--the temple complexes of ancient Mesopotamia identifiable as its state structures--that led to debt. By way of the need for units of account debt led to money, rather than the other way around, while it was states that fostered markets for the sake of mobilizing economies behind military endeavor, and the same rationale led to the transformation of by that point long familiar precious metal-based money into coinage--the standardized little pieces of those metals being handy for paying soldiers on the move.1

The second half of the book, building on many of these ideas, shifts to a systematic history of the development of debt across what might be thought of as the Eurasian "rimlands" over the past three millennia--the Mediterranean region, southern Asia, China, and eventually Western Europe. As noted earlier, Mesopotamia, and southern Asia more generally, were crucial scenes of the development of thinking about debt, and provide early examples of its abuses (like debt slavery) and the revolt against such abuses (in the form of the flight or rebellion of the victims, with profound implications for personal relations, quite observable in such works as the Bible).

That conflict between rapacious creditors and more humane policies, came together strikingly in the "Axial Age" (which he treats as roughly extending from 600 BCE to 600 CE). Conventionally thought of as an era of moral progress, because of its foundational ethical and religious developments (this was the crucial formative era for the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths, from the Biblical prophets to Buddha, as well as the speculations of Greek and Chinese philosophers), Graeber emphasizes that this was in substantial part a reaction to another dimension of the era, its ruthless materialism, in economic matters above all, where society shifted away from a reliance on credit, toward "hard cash," commodity, typically metallic, money. This was epitomized by the vast empires that prevailed across most of the continent's more densely peopled spaces--the Roman, Mauryan and Han Empires especially--which functioned as expanding military-slavery-coinage complexes (where armies were used to make conquests and capture slaves and mines, the former to work the latter, to pay for more armies and more conquests in an ongoing cycle). Unsurprisingly this period saw creditors obtain substantial legal and political advantages relative to debtors, on whom debt burdens weighed much more heavily; and whose disadvantages were at times moderated by reformers (often, a matter of the spoils of empire relieving the poorer members of a dominant group, like Rome's citizens) but never eliminated.

Such a change awaited the end of the period, and of its empires. As these exhausted the possibilities of their expansion within the limits set by geography and their technological bases, they simply collapsed, eventually resulting in less militarized societies where slavery was of less economic importance, with the same going for metallic money--increasingly, a virtual matter in what were in general less materialistic, more idealistic societies (in the epistemological sense of the term, of course). Emblematic of the shift was the way in which much of Eurasia saw usury banned outright in what he characterized as not merely the Western, but the Eurasian, "Middle Ages."

However, if the Medieval era was not exclusively Western, the West was an outlier in important respects--in the depth of its imperial collapse (this was no Dark Age elsewhere), and the extent of its embrace of the "corporate" type of institution in the aftermath--pioneered a return to the old stress on tangible, metallic money; and on imperial military-slavery-coinage complexes designed to maximize the supply of it. The very rationale underlay the era's mercantilism and associated voyages of discovery and colonization efforts, which once more produced a worldwide system of empire. This was, of course, the Europe-centered colonial system, turbo-charged by the emergence of full-blown, labor time-commodifying, M-C-M-circit-running capitalism that defined Modernity.

This prevailed until what had become the leading Western and world power, the U.S., abandoned the gold standard in 1971, which Graeber identifies as a return to virtual money. Curiously the era has so far seen creditors retain their advantage, and indeed, become central to the system, their trading in debt and their use of debt forcing governments to accept their program at the core of the neoliberal project dominating the last half century (ironically, as the bailing out of insolvent financial institutions testifies to the extraordinary leniency toward the biggest debtors of all), with the contradictions all too apparent in the confusion, unease and dissent of the moment.

As the description just given shows, Graeber sets the nature and implications of debt and indebtedness, the advent of those most basic economic concepts and institutions, the significance of the Axial Age, and our grasp of the ancient-Medieval-modern division of history, all on their heads. Often I was reminded of Karl Polanyi's classic debunking of the "myth of the market" so beloved by free-market theorists, but Graeber's work is grounded in a far greater wealth of data, and its argument is more intricate and wider in scope (while along the way, enriched by numerous, fascinating smaller theses--like the idea that the chivalric knight-errant in seach of fortune and glory was a Medieval sublimation of the merchant's activity into that of the feudal warriors it sung).

In fairness, much of Graeber's reconstruction of the politico-economic history of Eurasia and the world struck me as counterintuitive. However, that our ingrained assumptions about such matters are historically contingent is partly Graeber's point--the reason why he spends so much of the first half of the book lingering on (to contemporary Western readers) obscure and bizarre customs and beliefs, past and present; while on continued reflection I saw nothing to show the basics of his argument were really implausible, or inconsistent with the known facts. In fact, some of his more seemingly radical statements fit quite well with what we know. (For instance, while I reserve judgment on the matter in regard to China and India, whose histories I know less well, the Roman Empire, as described by Joseph Tainter, among others, accords well with his model of a military-slavery-coinage complex.) And the longer I thought about his case, the more, not less, sense it made.

All this is a very great achievement, enough so as to amply justify the work, though as might be expected given the note on which the history ends--that strange and uncertain phase into which we have entered in the past half century--Graeber is not merely explaining the past, but explicitly interested in the implications of this reading of history, this understanding of economic and social life, for the economic and social life of the early twenty-first century. That extends as far as the harsh and punitive conventional wisdom regarding the repayment of debt as one of the most basic moral obligations, in the name of which politicians have in recent decades inflicted enormous misery on populations from Mexico to Malaysia.

Reflecting on all this Graeber makes clear that an older way of understanding and living in the world is, if you will forgive the unintended pun, bankrupt, but a new one yet to emerge. Indeed, he suggests that contrary to the much maligned and yet (in the mainstream) virtually uncontested "end of history" school, we may be looking at the end of not just a particular attitude to debt, but capitalism itself, perhaps within a generation. That a book presenting this thought, so heretical to orthodox opinion that it has not had a real mainstream hearing for generations, is getting the attention it has (even contemptuous attention from the guardians of that orthodoxy) would seem to say a great deal about how the range of ideas that can be spoken in public has widened. By and large, it has been the right that has been more conspicuous, raising the profile of overt racism within the mainstream as talking heads treat the likes of Steve Bannon with deference on their shows. Still, however resistant elites remain to the ideas of the left, it is undeniable that much of the public does not regard the word "socialism" as the anathema it seemed such a short time ago.

That said, one need not accept Graeber's position regarding our contemporary political and economic life to find interest or value in his understanding of the past. However, those willing and able to at least engage with his ideas about them may be interested to know that in discussing our present discontents in this book he introduced an idea he developed at geater length in an article in Thomas Frank's The Baffler, "Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,". Specifically he holds that neoliberalism has not been about a more efficient, fast-growing capitalism, but mere preservation of that system's social relations--an idea he has since developed even further in his essay collection The Utopia of Rules (reviewed here), and further than that in his more recent Bullshit Jobs (reviewed here).

1. Lest the simple-minded get confused--as one reviewer of this book who (clearly devoted to the old myth of the market) foamed at the mouth with hostility and intent on treating Graeber's argument as a straw man did--money, and its use as a unit of account, is one thing; and physical money handled and transferred by one to another as a matter of course in daily economic transactions still another thing; with the advent of coinage still not necessarily implied in even the latter. Equally, it is one thing to speak of barter or exchange, another to speak of private exchange in markets as a central organizing principle in economic life.

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