Tag Archives: Debt

David Graeber’s Debt Reading Group – Session Four

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(Notes on Chapter 6 – ‘Games with Sex and Death’)

This chapter is something of a turning point within the overall argument. To date, we have been witnessing the work of ground/throat clearing: we’ve heard about the problems with mainstream economics, the problems with primordial debt theory, the problems with theological accounts of debt and the problems with secular moralisations of indebtedness – insofar as each of these frameworks mistakenly claim the truth of debt. Now, finally, Graeber is getting on with saying what debt really is. His account hinges upon the distinction between an obligation which can be hypothetically re-paid, and one which hypothetically cannot. As was already argued towards the end of the previous chapter:

Debt…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 who there is some way to set matters straight…Even when we speak of a criminal “paying his debt to society,” we are saying that he has done something so terrible that he has now been banished from that equal status under the law that belongs by natural right to any citizen of his country; however, we call it a “debt” because it can be restored, even if the cost may be death by lethal injection (120-1)

When we get the opportunity to engage with Graeber’s own account of debt, which we finally begin to do around this point in the book, we are reading an account of debt which is thoroughly grounded within anthropological investigation. Following the work of the “French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabé” (131) and in particular his account of primitive money, Graeber tackles the distinction between debts which can be hypothetically repaid, and those that cannot [recalling the primordial debt theorists of Chapter 3, albeit with some qualification (136)], by distinguishing between human economies and their associated social currencies, on the one hand, and commercial-market economies, and their associated currencies, on the other. ”Money”, for Rospabé, and hence for Graeber, “can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid” (136).

With respect to market economies, Graeber insists, human economies are relative newcomers. “For most of human history, human economies predominated” (130) This chapter anthropologically demonstrates how the transition from the earlier to the latter form of economy occurred in a variety of cases, and then underlines how the replacement of human economies with market economies is often simultaneous with the violent replacement of an idea that we are bound to one another in all sorts of ways, with one in which we are no longer thought of, nor think of ourselves as being, eternally reciprocally entangled.

Everything here, for Graeber, is a matter of anthropological context or, more precisely, everything about the transition from human to market economies is a matter of “people ‘ripped from their contexts’” (162). The violence implied in the term ripping is to be understood non-metaphorically. To bring attention to the violence inherent within market economies is, for Graeber, to bring attention to nothing less than historical-anthropological reality itself:

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 (164)

The questions we mainly focused upon within the meeting were as follows:

1) How literally are we to take the notion of people being ripped from their context as a spatially and temporally identifiable feature of the transition from human to market economies? This ripping is presented as a demonstrable empirical claim here with recourse to select anthropological contexts. To what extent, however, can it be taken as a general claim concerning the birth of market economies in all times and all places?

2) What is a people’s context and on what basis can it be understood as separate from a context which it is not?

3) Isn’t people ripped from their context a demonstrable feature of any advanced society which requires a complex division of labour? Hasn’t contextlessness become the context?

4) How separate are human and market economies, spatially and temporally, and at what point does one cease to become itself in order to become its other?

5) Why has the tendency been for market economies to replace human economies, despite the many violent problems underlined here? Is the process reversible? Has it been reversed and if so how?

6) What is the point being made about women in this chapter? Is Graeber using anthropological accounts of the role of women in primitive societies in order to make his broader empirical point or is there a feminist project running hand in hand with the anti-economic project?

7) The title ‘Games with Sex and Death’ suggests psychoanalysis, yet does not deliver. Psychoanalytic accounts of debt, indeed, have not been given any notable treatment to date. Is this primarily our problem, given some of our interests, or is it a problem which Graeber is duty bound to address in offering a general account of debt?

I suspect many of these questions will be addressed during our procession through the remaining six chapters.

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David Graeber’s Debt Reading Group – Session Two

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Notes to the discussion of Chapters 3 & 4

Graeber’s main issue with mainstream economics so far is with its opportunistic and disingenuous proliferation of the barter-myth. The problem, as Graeber sees it, isn’t simply that there is no evidence for the often-repeated claim that money was the solution to the problem of the double-coincidence of wants problem supposedly characterizing barter societies. The real problem is rather that it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative to the naturalisation and perpetuation of the view that human relationships are mere matters of economic exchanges, with our minds so monetarily predisposed.

It’s money that had made it possible for us to imagine ourselves in the way economists encourage us to do: as a collection of individuals and nations whose main business is swapping things (45).

The barter myth has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy and so, in his attempt to topple it, Graeber is involved in a myth-busting exercise which has its eyes on a prize higher than the rewards of disenchantment. For Graeber, the toppling of myths concerning money is simultaneously the clearing of the way for a re-imagination of what human relationships could be like. The nature and scope of Graeber’s project is indeed becoming clearer and by the time Chapter 3 opens, the barter myth, at least, should no longer hold sway. Much of these two Chapters consider alternatives to the barter-myth and also finds them wanting.

In particular, Graeber considers the claims made by State and Credit Theories of money – roughly speaking the notion that money is not a commodity but a unit of account generated and guaranteed by the state. Such theories fly in the face of  mainstream economics, obviously, which would have money as a spontaneous and natural development by insisting upon the inherently planned, inherently managed, inherently artificial, birth of money. So which is it to be? Money as an inevitable response to everyday human interaction, or money as a state enforced and state sanctioned institution?  Arguments for the former view – the barter myth – persevere. And they persevere, according to Graeber, largely because anthropologists have been unable to replace it with a better one. Graeber hence gathers myths from the other side by considering how Keynes addressed the question of money and of how, guided as much by Keynes as by Comte and Durkheim, the ‘primordial debt theorists’ Michel Aglietta and Andre Orelans, produced ‘primordial debt theory’. Myths abound, then. But for what purpose?

Are primordial-debt theorists describing a myth, have they discovered a profound truth of the human condition that has always existed in all societies, and is simply spelled out particlarly clearly in certain ancient texts from India – or are they inventing a myth of their own? Clearly it must be the latter. They are inventing a myth (62) 

One myth in place of another, then – which story should we believe? According to Graeber,  this very dichotomy between a state theory of money and a market theory of money is precisely the  problem. We have become so accustomed to thinking of debt either in terms of the state, or in terms of the market, he argues, that we have become fundamentally incapable of narrating it along any other line. Both views of money, however, have to be seen as 2 sides of the same coin – pun intended – it isn’t the case that money is either state or market, it is rather the case that money is both state and market.

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we  would recognise today (71).

Chapter 4 proceeds to topple yet another myth – the Nietzsche myth – the idea that the economic notion of debt is nothing other than a pacification of mankind’s inherent capacity for cruelty – it is cruelty masquerading by other means. Graeber accuses Nietzsche of simply taking up Smith’s ideas about the naturalness of economic exchange relationships – the bourgeois account of the human subject – and putting them into a mythical historical context. Nietzsche, on this reading, doesn’t so much question economic relationships as much as he reactively presuppose their naturalness. Since at this stage we are no longer supposed to be convinced by the idea that economized human relationships are actually natural, it presumably follows that we are supposed to read Nietzsche with scorn, or at least as a mythologist.

At this stage, Graeber is still stacking his straw men onto the bonfire. What, we speculated, is likely to flourish after the earth has been scorched? Perhaps Graeber is giving us a hint for where he wants to get to when he argues the following:

Our guilt is not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place (68).

We’ll find out over the next few weeks, no doubt.

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