This Made Me Think: Debt - The First 5000 Years

[ashnistrike]

Disclaimer: I'm not necessarily in a position to write the post I want to write about Debt.  I read it as a 20-hour audiobook while driving from Louisiana to DC, and there were several points where I wanted to hit pause and stare off into space thinking about it for a while, but was driving and didn't try to negotiate my visually-based MP3 player interface, and then he said something else really interesting that I would have liked 10 minutes to process... Not to mention that I'm not in a position to double-check any of what he wrote.  I'm planning to reread in hard copy as soon as possible.  Which is not something I normally say about 20-hour audiobooks.  Onward.

This is one of those centrally interesting books that not only deliberately intends to entirely reshape your worldview, but is worthy of doing so.  1491, and to a lesser extent 1493, both fall into this category.  Unlike those, Debt is written from a foundation of a recognizable modern political perspective, one related to Occupy and the related anti-globalization protests (though as it points out the "anti-globalization" movement is entirely mislabeled).  Having some sympathy with those movements myself, I spent the whole book on the edge of hair-trigger skepticism whenever David Graeber came near them.  For the most part, though, the book is nuanced, thoughtful, and deeply embedded in real economic history.  papersky's lovely review, much more thorough than this one, gives several examples--places where he tears apart economic myths through reference to anthropology. 



For example, contra every Intro Econ text ever, money doesn't arise from barter economies that look exactly like modern trade but without an intermediary symbol, and credit isn't a recent invention.  Money usually comes out of favor economies where tokens are used to track changes in human relationships (marriages, symbolic recompense for crimes, etc.).  And economies take a much wider range of forms that modern economists like to think about.  (The culture that negotiates inter-tribal trade through complicated orgies--why yes, we do share most of our genes with bonobos, why do you ask.)  This is already infecting my worldbuilding, and I strongly recommend the book to any writer of speculative fiction.

But Graeber does have a thesis, and it always comes back to the sustainability, or lack thereof, of modern capitalism.  About 3/4 of these claims he substantiates with solid evidence, and about a quarter seem to come out of nowhere, leaving me thinking hard, but extremely doubtful.  I think he's harder on capitalism than on other economic systems.  I also think that he sometimes defines capitalism in ways that are narrower than necessary, in order to support his thesis. So there were the wild claims with solid evidence:

• Yes, it does seem like monetary economies get screwed up right at the beginning, when some sort of token that's only been used to mark human relationships starts to get used for everyday market trade, and people start being frightened by the implication that they're for sale.
• Yes, this is often because it leads to people actually being for sale.  And yes, a good definition of slavery does seem to involve people becoming isolated from their social context so completely that they can be seen as fungible.  And yes, it does sound like our modern property law is so screwy because it still contains many pieces drawn verbatim from Roman laws around slavery.  We should do something about that.
• Yes, student loans do seem to be turning into a form of debt peonage.  Yes, our morality about having to "pay our debts" is full of contradictions, both historically and in modern society.  
• Ah, that explains it.  The Jubilee, which is in fact a brilliant idea, inevitably gets legislated out of existence, which is why we don't have it any more.  And he makes some sensible suggestions for making a modern one work.

There's a masterful rant, near the end of the book, about how the austerity urged on those in debt is wildly antisocial.  What counts as discretionary spending, as things that you really shouldn't do as long as you have credit cards to pay off?  Going out to dinner with your friends.  Buying food for a feast.  Going to movies and the theater, visiting museums, and in general enjoying the fruits of your culture if they cost money.  Loaning money to your family.  Buying gifts for your kids.  Holding expensive ceremonies to mark life events.  "Yet in spite of all moralistic urging, poor people insist on continuing to hold weddings and funerals."  And yes, there are people who will turn all those things into pure excuses to consume and and show off.  But it's not the way to bet.  And I have felt that contradiction--and that guilt over every "food out" and "gift" label in the "optional expenses" column on my budget sheet--even though my own personal debt is well under the American median.

Towards the end of the book, Graeber also makes a set of claims that he doesn't support with evidence, and that I don't (so to speak) buy. 

• That capitalism is somehow more apocalyptic than other economic systems--yes, it contains the seeds of its own destruction, but it's not like we can point to any economic systems that don't.  We've even seen anthropogenic environmental degredation under other systems.  I will buy that capitalism is partly responsible for our current ability to do that at scale, but only partly. 
• That it's impossible, under capitalism, for everyone to have fair wages and fair treatment.  True, we haven't managed it, but we haven't managed it under any other system either.  I don't see any intrinsic reason why such wages and treatment would cause the system to break down, and he doesn't provide them.  I think he's defining the term so tightly that, if everyone did have fair wages and treatment, he would use a different term.
• That capitalism necessarily undermines human relationships by monetizing them.  I will acknowledge that it tries, at least in its current form.  But I see too many human relationships succeeding in spite of that, too many gift economies and webs of favor exchange flourishing in the margins, to believe that it's even possible for it to succeed.

That last is the one I woke up thinking about this morning.  Because the threat is a real thing.  How many marriages are strained by money?  How many friendships by unpaid financial debts?  And at the same time, we have the pixel-stained technopeasants who give away the products of their creativity and expertise, simply for the pleasure of production and in the confidence that others will give back. 

I have spent the last month being reminded of what a remarkable web of family--chosen, blood, and extended through marriage--I have managed to build around myself.  The drive from Louisiana was part of an effort to get two dear friends, along with their newborn daughter, out of a town where they had been stuck for eight years by economic necessity, and back into the heart of their own chosen family where they could raise a kid in safety.  The move eventually drew on the willingly shared resources of six households other than their own, ranging from time and logistical expertise to throwing a little extra money into the rescue pot.  This is what Graeber, in a vain attempt to redefine inflamatory terms, calls a communist economy, and I would call a communal one.  I'm not blind to the pressures trying to prevent it from flourishing.  But it's hard to believe, settled comfortably in the heart of it, that it's as near-impossible to nurture in the shadow of capitalism as Graeber says.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to bring up gender politics, because I feel like that's all I do these days...but I am having the germ of an idea here. How many unqueer men were involved in those six families? The gift economies I know about (knitting and ficcing) are pretty strongly gendered female from where I sit. You don't hear about robber baronesses and their trophy husbands. The women CEOs out there tend to be called failures much sooner than male ones, and they don't get golden-parachuted into their next job, either.

I don't know, am I just making stuff up? I think I should read that book sooner rather than later.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

There are definitely gender politics in how these things play out in society as a whole--and the book covers some of them--but in this case, I count 3 straight men, plus 2 who date women but occasionally ogle elsewhere. What they mostly are is fannish, and used to having more social than financial resources to solve problems.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Aha. That makes sense.

[aspenwolf.livejournal.com]

... and now I shall have to seek out this book! Thank you for your thoughtful review!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

On your last one, I have a lot of personal friend level experience of seeing how differently things work in the US as opposed to the UK and Canada. I always think about two friends of mine, both people with severe ADHD, to the point where it interferes with their ability to work and earn money, both of an age where they couldn't get treated until well into adulthood, both men, both fans. The British one could in the late eighties and throughout the nineties survive on welfare and his parents occasional help. The US one couldn't, and was reduced to borrowing from friends and in the end abusing their kindness. The ability to get medicated came along at the turn of the century, and the UK one got ritalin, did a Masters and PhD and is now a productive member of society. Also, he still has all his friends. (He got loans for the degrees -- he was starting from zero, not from debt.) The US one bounces from medicated to unmedicated with available money and is so far in the debt hole he can't imagine seeing out of it. He has also lost a lot of friends, because he's like they type example of how to wear out your welcome.

I think there's this thing where we are trying to live our lives and our lives naturally fall into those village patterns of trust, rather than monetary patterns, and yet we're doing it within the wider structure of society and expectations, and the wider structure affects what's possible to us.