Richard Murphy writes-
David Graeber was the anthropologist
i.e. ignorant cretin
who re-framed economics by showing that its most basic assumptions were myths.
It has no basic assumptions. It has theories which only apply under very restrictive conditions.
Where conventional economists traced money to barter and exchange,
They didn't. Legal tender is stuff you can pay your taxes with. If you don't pay your taxes, the Government beats or incarcerates you and grabs all your cool shiny stuff.
Graeber traced it to trust and relationships.
Like that which obtains within a family. Baby trusts Mummy. It pays her some cash so as to suckle at her breast. Mummy trusts Daddy she pays him to put some sperm into her. Sadly, my wife refused to do any such thing. She threw me out of the house.
He argued that the origins of money lay not in markets but in morality: in obligations, promises, and the human capacity for cooperation.
None of which involve handing over cash. But being mugged does. You hand over your wallet to the guy with the knife and beg him not to stab you.
But he also showed how those promises were corrupted: how debt, once a symbol of mutual responsibility,
Debt was never any such thing. Where there was mutual responsibility, the burden was shouldered by those better able to do so. That's why though small children may help their parents with the chores, less is expected of them.
became a mechanism of domination.
Either there was domination based on being able to break the debtor's legs, or else the debt was uncollectable.
Hence the David Graeber Question: if money began as a promise of mutual trust,
it didn't. You may say 'the State formed the expectation that it could buy what it wanted with 'legal tender'' but an expectation is not a promise. Nor is it based on trust. The State may not trust its people but it expects them to pay their taxes because the people have a well-founded expectation of being sent to jail and having their assets seized if they don't pay.
when did it become the instrument of control that imprisons us?
Never. This is a fairy story. On the other hand, it is true that language imprisons us. Why are we forced to learn language by Mummy and Daddy? How come we were taught foreign languages in School? The answer is obvious. Shape-shifting, neo-liberal, lizards from Planet X have secretly taken over all the positions of power and influence on this planet.
The false origin story
Economics, Graeber noted, begins with a fable.
No. It begins with data. It takes off when a theory fits the data and has predictive power.
The claim is that there were once isolated individuals trading goats for grain.
Grain is traded for grain and goats are traded for goats. There are 'futures markets' in both.
Then
arbitrageurs (market-makers) appeared. They dealt with each other. They found Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. This involved a range of 'units of account' and 'stores of value' with varying properties. An economic model may simplify things by treating money as homogenous and exogenously determined, but it isn't really. What matters is whether you make better predictions than the other guy.
money evolved to simplify that exchange, after which states and banks came later. This story, told in some way in almost every economics textbook, is almost entirely untrue.
D'uh!
Instead, in every known society, people first organised economic life through relationships of credit and trust. “I owe you” came before “I pay you.” Money began as memory and not as a metal coin.
Nonsense! There were plenty of societies with no money. Now they may be fewer. The point about money is that it has no memory. There may be some people with a memory of who a particular piece of money belonged to. Suppose I get a fifty pound note from a client. When I pay it into my Bank Account, the serial number is flagged. It turns out the money was stolen. The police come to question me as to how I got the fifty pound note. I remember it was given to me by Joe Smith in return for some work I did for him. The police question Joe Smith. It turns out he was the robber.
However, had the serial number not been noted down and if I hadn't remembered who gave it to me, there would have been nothing tying Joe Smith to the crime.
Money can be 'laundered'. That's why some countries have 'know your customer' rules.
Graeber's anthropology restored the social dimension that economics had erased: people do not trade because they are selfish, but because they live together.
People who don't live together trade. Even in ancient times, Chinese silks would end up in Imperial Rome. The commodity would have passed through many hands before reaching its destination.
Debt and domination
Graeber traced the long arc of civilisation through cycles of credit and violence.
Both are based on 'Expectations' not love and mutuality and braiding each other's hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.
Periods of trust and mutual obligation gave way to eras of hierarchy, slavery, and debt peonage, when the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment.
Debt peonage, like slavery, was based on being able to fuck up the peon or slave. The logic of coercion has to do with having a superior threat point. You can kill the other guy. The other guy can't kill you.
Debt then became a weapon.
I would often ask Graeber to lend me fifty quid. He would then have a weapon which he could use to threaten Amartya Sen. Sadly, Graeber told me fuck the fuck off. Admittedly, I was drunk at the time and may have been talking to some other LSE Professor.
Kings, priests, and empires used it to bind the powerless to the powerful.
No. Kings killed people who didn't do as they were told. Priests merely threatened them with eternal damnation unless the King, very kindly, leant them some troops to kill heretics, blasphemers, and guys who complained about being sodomized by the Bishop.
Today, that same dynamic persists: in the relationships between banks and households, creditors and governments, the global north and the global south.
Fuck off! I owed my Bank a lot of money. They sold the debt on and some Debt Recovery firm used to phone me and threaten me with legal proceedings. I laughed so hard I almost shat myself. The global south was equally recalcitrant once the age of gunboat diplomacy ended. If the foreigners can't take over your Custom House, they can whistle for their money. It is a different matter that you might play 'extend and pretend'.
Debt is not merely financial; it is moralised subordination.
No. There's a good reason no one will lend me any money. It is because I recognize no fucking moral obligation to pay my debts. True, if I were smart and had rational expectations, I would pay my debts so as to be able to borrow and invest more and more money with the result that I wouldn't be as poor as fuck. Sadly, I am not smart at all.
The moral inversion of obligation
Graeber's greatest moral insight was that those who owe the most are the least blamed, and those who owe the least are shamed most.
This is because I used to follow him around shouting 'Graeber, mate, you got a tiny dick! Take the shame you shithead!'.
When banks collapse, we bail them out.
Very true. Graeber & Murphy personally leant half a trillion dollars to Citibank. That is why they were constantly subjected to body-shaming.
When citizens default, we punish them.
Graeber used to kick in the heads of people who couldn't afford their sub-prime mortgages.
When corporations exploit tax havens, we call them efficient.
Because it helps pass the time.
When the poor ask for help, we call them lazy.
No. We laugh heartily and then tell them to fuck off.
He called this moral inversion the defining hypocrisy of capitalism, which is a system that preaches responsibility but rewards irresponsibility at scale.
Fuck are these two nitwits doing other than preaching? Still, if they get to sell a few of their shitty books, good luck to them. That's how the market works.
Work, bureaucracy, and meaning
In The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber explored how bureaucracy and finance have fused into a single system of control, but I would argue that Debt: The First 5,000 Years is his most important work.
Sadly, it is less important than a cow-pat.
Capitalism, he argued, now survives not through production but through paperwork, including endless forms, metrics, and managerial hierarchies, that reinforce the entrapment of people that debt creates, with people trapped in jobs that serve no purpose except to sustain debt, discipline, and obedience.
By contrast, Communist countries had no bureaucracies.
Work has become theatre; labour, a ritual of compliance.
Rather than a ritual featuring sado-masochism and virgin sacrifices to Baphomet.
This, Graeber wrote, is the real crisis of modernity:
as opposed to those fake crises which have big Instagram followings.
the loss of meaning disguised as efficiency, but which is actually control.
Especially if you get the sack just because you like to take a nap at work.
The anthropology of hope
Unlike Marx's determinism or Keynes's pragmatism, Graeber's vision was profoundly humanist.
Then he died. Now his vision is less humanist and more 'food-for-the-worms-ist'
He believed that because our institutions are human creations, they can be remade.
We can fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit. That's true enough.
History, he showed, is full of moments when people simply stopped obeying, meaning hierarchies collapsed because they lost legitimacy.
The Soviet Union collapsed. That's true enough.
His activism, from the Occupy movement to debt strikes,
both were useless
was a living experiment in alternative economics and in the reconstruction of reciprocity beneath the ruins of neoliberalism.
Graeber's hope was anthropological: he knew that cooperation is as ancient as competition, and that freedom lies in the capacity to imagine something different.
You lose that freedom when you die. Graeber died.
What answering Graeber requires
To answer the Graeber Question, we must rehumanise money
so that it too can suffer disease and death
and reclaim the politics of debt.
Write off all loans, not just student loans. Did you know a lot of pensioners are living off interest payments? That's usury! Get rid of it and laugh heartily as pensioners starve to death.
That means:
Reasserting money as a public good: governments must issue credit for collective purposes, such as housing, care, and the green transition, rather than claiming that they are leaving money creation to private banks is the solution.
Trump should be allowed to print money and send checks to those who vote for him.
Liberating the indebted, meaning governments must assist in the cancellation of unpayable and unjust debts and end the moral stigmatisation of the poor.
Unpayable debts are written off. Every debt is unjust in the eye of the debtor. It is not enough to destigmatize poverty. We must destigmatize the causes of poverty- e.g. being a drunken, workshy, cretin like yours truly.
Redefining value because honour, care, creativity, and community are the true measures of wealth.
Tax the creative by all means. Give me the money thus raised. Nobody can deny that I lack honour, care, creativity and community more than anybody else.
Reclaiming time, freeing people from meaningless labour
like teaching nonsense at the LSE.
so they can contribute meaningfully to society.
By getting drunk and running naked down Houghton Street with a radish up their bum. I'm not saying that's what I did but I do feel I was wrongly advised by Prof. Amartya Sen that I would get a PhD in Social Choice theory if I did so. Anyway, it turned out, it wasn't Amartya Sen at all. It was Partha Dasgupta. Fuck your Sir Partha! Fuck you very much!
The moral economy of freedom
Graeber taught that economics is always moral because debt is always a relationship between people.
I have relationships with people. They won't lend me any money. Sad.
To reform money is to reform power.
But you need power to reform shit. These guys will never have any. Nor will you even if you occupy the shit out of Wall Street.
Our age of financial abstraction has severed money from morality and replaced promises with punishment.
We don't have prisons for debtors.
But if debt once enslaved, it can also be redeemed, and not just be forgiven but redefined as a bond of mutual care.
The Bank should come and wipe my bum because it was once foolish enough to lend me money.
The task is not to abolish obligation, but to turn it back into solidarity.
After which, our species can hand from tree branches by our tails while eating bananas.
Inference
The Graeber Question is the spiritual twin of the Judt Question. Both ask how a civilisation founded on care and promise lost its moral compass.
but found a safe space on Campus.
Graeber's answer is that our debt is not financial but ethical: we owe one another the duty to imagine better.
We really don't. I told a girl in my Topology class that I could better imagine her without her clothes on. She slapped me silly. Then it turned out it wasn't a Topology class. It was remedial Arithmetic.
Money began as trust. It can be trust again.
Politicians can fuck the economy. Smart peeps can form high-trust networks and continue to thrive. Maybe this is also the case with crypto.
The future will belong to those who
don't drop dead. Graeber dropped dead.
understand that economics is not about exchange, but about relationship, and not about repayment, but about repair.
and not about productivity but about braiding each others' hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.
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