Debt – David Graeber - Book Review 3

Debt, the first 5000 years is a thoroughly researched book by an anthropologist David Graeber, with so many shocking findings about deliberate lies we learn in school books that the reader has to sit down and think about everything all over again. He presents the history of debt throughout different cultures on Earth for the past 5000 years and concludes that human existence by itself is a form of debt. At least this is how many, but not every, cultures function. He further explains the connection between money creation, debt and war and the complex army-coins-slavery. His book also reveals how human moral and ethics eroded due to money creation, debt and wars. It is not a relaxing book to read. Why did I put this book in the Book Review Series? I find the findings of this book, that war and debt are connected – making war means debt creation -, and go hand in hand with the oppression of women and children in various ways, making them tradable goods that are treated as private possession of the winners/owners, important enough to present. The book also reveals that the ecological catastrophes are not new, they are the consequences of wars, debt creation, and trading societies that seem to be the basis of modern civilization. It simply tells us how horribly humankind behaved throughout the history and de-romanticizes the past, and how humankind has lost the ethics and morals, and the true connectedness with Earth and the fellow beings (plants and animals) that surround them. It is also a description of how humans lost the connectedness to their own spirit and themselves, because they have to listen and obey their masters to whom they are in debt. The book also shows how much the patriarchal oligarchic systems on the planet have failed.

“For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed.”

The line of conviction presented in this book, which the majority of the humankind seem to follow - willingly or unwillingly – that everything is merely a thing and a tradable good has enslaved most of the beings on Earth or at least it tends to. One truly can ponder on who gave the humans the idea of ownership that they follow now with such obsession and destructiveness.

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”

Even though some criticize the author, the book is still worth reading, and he doesn’t present it as the ultimate truth. Rarely, we get such collection of data shoveled at us to get some insight into something called human economy and its transition into market economy from an anthropologist’s perspective.

I'll summarize some of the most important stunning findings for the readers.

1. The theory of Adam Smith that the nature of barter among humans was »I give you apples, you give me a chicken in exchange as an equal value« upon which he based his money theory never existed in pre-Columbus America among Native American people. And, it was never found. So, his theory is based upon a self-deception or maybe just stubborn conviction. Whichever, we were obviously taught a lie.

2. Very few people from Africa were actually kidnapped by whites, when the slave trade in Africa started. Most of those people were in-debt to or among their own tribe members, and were sold to pay the debt by their own African people (among them some even studied in England, and we can still find a website where the descendants of African slave traders are presented). Slaves were people who were given in pawn and torn out of their community and were not responsible to anyone but their owner.

3. Similar impression to what the author found about Africa is what happens when the humane economies make the transition to market economies across the planet, especially if the later are connected with advanced military technology and ceaseless demand for human resources.

4. Chinese were the first known nation to make paper money, and they were making it out of tree bark, and it was state-wide accepted by the ruler’s decree. The rulers knew that the empire was so big that they can declare anything as currency as long they start collecting taxes in that currency. When silver coins become popular in China instead of paper money which they used before, the traders brought the silver from mines in Mezzo America, where they enslaved and slaughtered Native people to obtain that silver.

5. In the early Sumerian texts women were represented in various professions quite numerously. Until 1200 B.C. their representation eroded and was nearly extinct; they became protégées of their husbands. The author concludes that the laws of the society are stricter against women the more militant the society becomes. The book gives a very strange impression that Sumerians visit us from time to time in one way or another, even if they are long gone. The Sumerian kings and later the Babylonian declared general amnesty from time to time to prevent total social collapse: the consumer debts were erased, the land was returned to the original owners, the thralls could return to their families.

6. Part of the book is dedicated to present how people who live violently, whether they are gangsters or soldiers, have a special notion of honor and are obsessed with it. For them the justification for violence is that they have felt dishonored, because others didn’t comply with the idea they represent and present as the only valid. Debt is on the other side of this equation, where we see honorable debt and honoring the debt, and we can observe how what we our sense of duty is turns into debt.

7. Money is not made by state. Money is a loan which is brought into existence by a private contract, and it is a religious matter. It has been so for the past 5000 years. In the past, money (and other valuables) has been stored in shrines. Indebtedness makes humans sort of Gods, who can make something out of absolute nothing. In axial age(roughly in the 1st millennium BCE) vast amount of gold, silver and copper were de-treasured from shrines and hands of the wealthy, and put into the hands of common people.

8. Before market economy, there was human economy, which used to have power over women (but not necessarily only women). Women were tradable goods valued for their fertility; honorable women were those who were not tradable. The book also presents the oppression of women (transported from humane economies) in this military-war-debt civilization that with ownership obsessed societies produced for quite some time; the narrations in the book are so graphic and abominal that I’m not going to reproduce it here.

9. Back then in 17th century, the Treasury of Britain wanted to make coins of smaller denomination, because the value of silver had risen so high that the coins were worth less than the value of the metal they were made of. A war of pamphlets ensued, wherein Charles Davenant proposed credit money based on public trust. John Locke (then an advisor of Sir Isaac Newton, Warden of the Mint) won the argument and advised that to solve their problem was necessary to take all currency out of circulation, and to restrike it at exactly the same value that it had before. They did exactly as he proposed and the results were disastrous: enormous famine and unrest, hence there was practically no coinage in the society during next few years; the prices and salaries collapsed. Only the wealthy were secured because they could use the new credit money and traded with the kings’ debt in the form of bank notes. The value of those banknotes stabilized after it was decreed they could be swapped for precious metals. The position of everyone else got better only after they introduced enough banknotes and coins of lower denominations. Shortly after that the golden standard was accepted (1717) and the idea that gold and silver are real money.

There is much more to be found in David Graeber’s book than just the summaries above, but I’d like to end this review with a quote from his book.

“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.”

And, maybe humans should take Mo Di’s conclusion to their hearts: “if one could add up the total costs of aggression in human lives, animal lives, and material damage, one would be forced to the conclusion that they never outweighed the benefits-even for the victor.”

3rd Book Review - This is the third book review in the book reviews series I'm intending to present that may show you a very different picture of the human affairs on this planet. I'm not presenting it to hurt anyone or for the potential users to hurt anyone.

This review has a first tag #bookreviewseries, the first two weren’t tagged in such a way, so below is the link to them.

1st Book Review https://steemit.com/propaganda/@irastra/propaganda-edward-bernays-book-review
2nd Book Review https://steemit.com/bookreview/@irastra/massoni-gioele-magaldi-laura-maragnani-book-review