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Title: Debt: The Possibilities Ignored
Author: William Gillis
Date: October 7th, 2014
Language: en
Topics: book review, debt
Source: https://c4ss.org/content/24459

William Gillis

Debt: The Possibilities Ignored

It’s no secret that economists and libertarians have developed a bad

habit of assuming things about history and other societies on first

principle without actually checking archaeological or anthropological

findings. On occasion the divide can be quite stark. David Graeber’s

Debt: The First 5000 Years gets a lot of momentum by attacking a widely

circulated economic fable purporting to explain the origin of currency

wherein coinage precedes credit. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the “I

need a blanket and all I have to barter with are five chickens but

everyone in my village likes cowry shells” dilemma at the start of

elementary economics textbooks has no clear historical basis; there’s

little evidence small tribes or villages needed to invent physical

currency to facilitate market exchange internally because reputation and

credit are far more natural and flexible.

To say this is sympathetic territory for me would be an understatement.

In my longest essay in Markets Not Capitalism I emphasized the role

reputation and goodwill play in relationships as more fundamental and

foundational than property titles and critiqued the recurring assumption

that property titles are inherent to all societies. Even though my

conclusion was a full-throated defense of property titles, albeit

repositioned as a looser, less absolute, second order derivation from

goodwill and reputation, you might be forgiven for expecting a strictly

positive review of Graeber’s breakout book. Certainly many of my

colleagues did. And there is a lot to be found of value in Debt for

libertarians and anarchists of all stripes. It is a refreshingly

audacious work hearkening towards the kind of grand theory building

radicals used to do and I’ve found myself handing it out to young

activists hungry for something of more audacity and scope than

Gelderloos or Bonanno. It’s been far too long since a work of anarchist

theory topped bestseller lists. And anything that so flusters and

discombobulates liberals, marxists, and vulgar libertarians alike is

surely of value.

However Debt is not without its flaws, some of them quite vexing.

Perhaps the greatest thing about anthropology is its capacity to

demonstrate that often unexamined norms we consider universal are but a

tiny sliver in the phase space of cultural and societal configurations

that have existed throughout human history. Anthropology helps serve as

a reminder of the paucity of our imagination. Yet it is important not to

blindly take history as a constraint. Two hundred thousand years of homo

sapiens is simply too few iterations, too tightly correlated to truly

explore the expanse of what is possible.

Sadly, if there is one underlying failure coursing through Graeber’s

bestseller it’s his reactionary instincts in the face of such

possibility.

Debt sets out a long and winding exploration of how notions of the

interpersonal or economic obligations characterized as “debt” have

morphed over the last five thousand years and how these changes

correlated to the presence of state violence and the development of

currency.

Graeber suggests that the first currencies were direct markers of honor,

status, or social goodwill only incidentally exchanged for goods and

commodities. Coinage and specie currency were sharp deviations from this

norm, invented so religious institutions could keep internal accounts of

goods but quickly adopted by states to quantify penal codes, collect

taxes, and pay marauding soldiers. Coinage, Graeber argues, was an

invention imposed by the state to dissolve the complexity of informal

bonds between individuals into relations as universal and

interchangeable as its own scope. In this context debt tended towards

outright slavery and the specific game theoretic dynamics that

characterize statism grew increasingly hegemonic. When your honor or the

value you held to others was simplified to the widely interchangeable

gold in your pouch, throat-slitting became suddenly quite appealing.

Surrounding this historical transition the wild array of dynamics and

social mores at play in various societies became increasingly framed in

terms of person-to-person exchanges (theoretically repayable) rather

than standing before the community or as matters of hierarchically

ritualized benefaction. And in turn, through its persistent creep as a

metaphor to frame human relations as exchanges (implicitly between

equals or should-be-equals), debt came to signify an unnatural

perturbation of baseline equality. While on the one hand the word

“freedom” has its roots in Sumerian debt-cancellation, that same

moralistic language of obligation to one’s debts was frequently adopted

by the oppressed and those with grievances. Amid all of this communities

on the periphery played games with notions of perpetual debt to denote

and enforce ties of fraternity, but on the whole debt increasingly came

to connote a sinful state of inequality and injustice. …Except with

things so tangled that exactly who is in the wrong is never entirely

clear and consistent rules never really hashed out. Thus, Graeber

concludes, we arrived at the ridiculousness of our present situation

where for instance plutocratic plunder and the vast subsidy of

historical violence are seen as prompt for charity, but the notion of

cancelling the supposed debt incurred to one’s explicit oppressors is

unthinkable.

Though certain chapters are resplendent with crowing at the repeated

close confluence of money, markets and the atrocities of state power, to

his credit as an intellectually honest academic Graeber doesn’t flinch

away from recognizing situations where state power has withered and

markets blossomed.

There have, certainly, been times and places when a kind of free market

populism has emerged, where markets began operating independently of

governments, at least to some degree – Medieval Islam is one famous

example, and later, Ming China—but in such cases, they tended to operate

in very different ways than the kind of markets we’re now familiar with,

less about competition, much more about creating and maintaining

relations of interpersonal trust, or for instance, profit-sharing

operations instead of interest, etc etc.

…History shows that you basically need a state to create a situation

where people are willing to sign on basically as rent-a-slaves to other

people.

That many observers, some with horror, have read these asides as

validation of left market anarchist theory is unsurprising. We are of

course totally right. About everything. Obviously. But Graeber is less

than enthused to see these confessions extend beyond proving the

unsustainability of capitalism in the absence of state violence. Free

market populism, in his framework, is still an ultimately confused state

of affairs, championed by the well-meaning but insufficiently

far-seeing. Useful perhaps as a half measure for the US and a few other

contexts where anarcho-communist alternatives are beyond culturally

alien, but not an ideal goal. For Graeber markets and currency cannot

shed the incredibly suspicious stain of their inception through state

violence. Currency in particular.

Lest we get too lost in the default rhetorical devices of radicals, let

us remind ourselves that if Hitler popularized consensus process or the

refrigerator it wouldn’t invalidate either. But in fact history and

prehistory are almost certainly more complicated than the selection

Graeber presents in his tale. Mass societies have been around for a hell

of a long time and so has trade in obsidian, grain, cattle and copper.

Things weren’t nearly as simple as one day villages and the next day

Mesopotamian scribes keeping accounts in silver; we know there’s a ton

of history lost before the proliferation of writing. Gift economies are

empirically known to scale poorly, and it’s obvious that when there’s

too many people to personally keep track of the approaches that work for

villages and tribes start to break down. If cities nine thousand years

ago like the famous Çatalhöyük weren’t characterized by intense

statism–and there’s less than no reason to suspect they were–folks very

likely faced double incidence of wants on a regular basis. In particular

the five thousand years of mass society before Graeber starts his

account saw many profound social changes, my favorite tale of which is

this:

On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of

the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast

that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple

was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone

pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them

were broken up. The place itself – previously maintained and kept

meticulously clean for more than 1000 years – was converted into a

municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had

been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a

few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had

burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size

to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an

inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social

differences were erased.

…Not only did the revolutionaries of those remote times succeed in

overthrowing a regime thousands of years old, bloody and exploitative –

moreover, they also succeeded in developing their own alternative

society, devising and realizing it. An egalitarian, classless society

arises in which women and men are equal, a society which rapidly spreads

over the whole of Anatolia and almost simultaneously over the Balcans

and which endures for 3000 years.

When Mesopotamian scribes finally pick up the pen to give us more direct

accounts we are not glimpsing the first steps, but a very particular

product of a richly storied past we have only fleeting access to.

Sure, when credit is feasible there’s no need for the convoluted dance

of boots into obsidian or grain and then back into chickens, but when

there’s thousands of teeming people–when people have options outside a

tightly controlled tribe, neighborhood, or caste–credit frequently

becomes less secure and/or efficient than spot transactions. We know

from the North American Great Plains that even when the land won’t

support it longer than a few weeks, people will still often struggle to

form mass societies when and where they can to take advantage of the

benefits such provides in novelty, culture and general opportunity.

Here’s an alternative postulate to Graeber’s: Early mass societies arose

and iterated through very different forms and there were many avenues by

which they tackled the limits of gift economies. Some mass societies

simply preserved the village model internally by subdividing (or

remaining divided) into neighborhoods, clans and castes where gift

economies could be retained internally while they continued to trade

with one another externally, but the danger of losing excommunication as

the ultimate sanction required these divisions to still be policed

relatively tightly lest individuals start abandoning their ties and

debts for greener pastures. Some mass societies with more idealic roots,

either as cultural loci or the result of slave uprisings that shrugged

off ruling castes leaving behind a single relatively unsubdivided mass

of individuals, were obliged to turn more strongly to barter. Lastly

still other mass societies, possibly where the maintenance of clans,

castes or even polycentric associations had become problematic, resorted

to the sort of centralized arbitration and accounting that eventually

fueled the fires of empire seen thousands of years later in Mesopotamia

where Graeber blithely starts his tale.

But even after his launching point there are systemic biases against

anarchistic mass societies in the historical record that he should be

damn well aware of. No, in the absence of pharaohs and emperors we don’t

tend to erect giant edifices to our glory or stamp millions of coins,

but that doesn’t mean freer societies left no trace. By focusing on the

classical states of antiquity and then, upon arriving at more recent

ages, pointing out that the more free market societies that arose

afterward arose afterward, Graeber occludes numerous points any other

anarchist historian would place front and center. The gist of which is

that freer societies have certainly existed in a great multitude between

the gaps in the statist’s saga of war and empire. Some, like the

Harappans, major contemporaries of Mesopotamian tyranny, left no signs

of priests or leaders, no palaces, temples or monuments. A flourishing

trader and artisan society they likely had a spectrum of social respect

or at least a diversity of focuses (visible through differences in

adornment) while at the same time capital was egalitarianly distributed.

They led advancements in the purity of metallurgy, docks, wheeled

transport and adopted uniform weights–testaments to how central trade

and quantified exchange were to their society. Despite their intense

noteworthiness in size, accomplishment and impact, popular history has

largely dismissed them for not making reference in any major wars. (And,

most deliciously, certain scholars have dismissed them as obviously

having a state because they had plumbing.)

I think it’s intuitively obvious that credit and debt preceded

currencies focused on coordinating goods. And the introduction of

universal metal coinage has both the unmistakable scent of the state’s

drive to universalize and the gangster’s need for contextless cash. But

the notion that the concerns found in widespread barter only arose as an

occasional byproduct of the statist imposition of markets and central

currencies as means of accounting is simply unsubstantiatable. Neither

Graeber nor I have a time machine and the most relevant particulars to

that kind of claim take place before he even begins his story. In the

absence of young upstart mass societies just developing in the wilds of

Brazil, say, the evidence is scant. Thankfully we can at least get

somewhere modeling these kinds of things and that is precisely what

economists have done with extensive consideration and mathematical

modeling.

Which brings us to a particularly irksome current in Debt. If the book’s

systemic failure is not recognizing the breadth of the possible,

Graeber’s weakest and at times most embarrassing arguments by far stem

from his assertion that a critical distinction between good obligations

and bad ones is whether or not anyone’s gotten rigorous or considered

about it. In his worst moments he blames mathematics, and indeed

elevates it as a comparable evil as you know, loan sharks bludgeoning

people to death:

Debt is just a perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by

both math and violence.

Of course what’s actually happening is not an issue with mathematics or

even arithmetic and quantification, it’s an issue with violently imposed

universal simplifications of richly complicated or localized dynamics.

The problem is the state and the legalistic impulse that underpins it

here, not the innate tendency of human minds to geek out and analyze

shit in pursuit of precision and efficiency. Mathematical analysis unto

itself in no way implies oversimplification or misrepresentation. And

while there are often limits to what we can know and calculate in a

given context, especially when dealing with other minds, such

limitations are themselves mathematical dynamics. There is just as much

to be gained from augmenting our interactions with awareness of these

limitations as there is from using mathematical modeling directly when

and where it can clarify dynamics and expand our agency.

Distinctions between what can and can’t be quantified substantively in

different dynamics and contexts have long been core to modern

libertarian analysis, both in the pragmatically mathematical Hayekian

sense and the more analytic Praxeological sense. Certainly the legal

codification of remuneration for honor violations in units of Irish

slave girls, as per one example from Debt, fails virtually every

economic and libertarian precept imaginable. That said, there is

something quite interesting and fresh in Graeber’s implicit attack on

the valuation of gold as a near-universal mediator of social debts. The

loss of nuanced social information happening when you can exactly

‘repay’ a friend for their kindness in precious metals is surely stark.

Or at least it is when such repayment isn’t a trust-building exercise

and a product of their subjective desire via some fresh negotiation that

validates both parties as human beings with unknowable subjectivities,

but an exchange in which one or both parties can merely default on

static universal standards with little to no consideration of the other

as a complex individual. The very notion of going back to “square one”

strangerhood through repayment, of erasing the accounts containing the

context of prior interactions, is only possible when tracking and

conveying a particular person’s trustworthiness is impossible, where

there are no true currencies available, just dumb commodities like gold

that don’t even have a public ledger.

Yet it should be obvious that such situations are not a product of

quantification! The impulse seen in the use of coinage to dismiss rich

context or make declarations about the objective comparative value of

incredibly complex and situational things like favors is clearly sloppy

at best and dangerous as hell at worst. But that’s completely different

from using a measuring cup when loaning your neighbor rice (or gold) so

there’s no lingering misperceptions, disagreements or wasteful default

biases. Artificially simplifying universal norms are only sustainable

when there’s coercion backing them on some level. The issue is whether

debts are enforced through the violent suppression of contextual

awareness or the voluntary maximization of it through reputation, trust

networks, and risk conveyance. By the time there are kings, chiefs,

governments, oligarchs, or central committees remotely capable of

revoking debt, things have obviously gone too far and the whole system

can be assumed rotten. But the imposition of universal simplifications

certainly doesn’t satiate anyone’s drive for precision and informed

agency save the rulers, indeed it acts to suppress precision and complex

analytic depth at play in our relationships and calculations with regard

to one another. The sort of debts Graeber conveys are not, as he puts

it, the collaboration of violence and math but rather the suppression of

math by violence.

You may ask why I dwell so strongly on this theme within Debt. The

misuse of something as richly descriptive and human as mathematics to

refer to arithmetic and artificially simple quantification is irritating

to be sure, yet I feel this framing belies something deeper than

mischosen words. Graeber makes quite a lot to turn on the distinction

between quantified and unquantified interactions but in his writing he

rarely stays content with such, expanding this theme to decry the

“impersonalism” of mathematics and reason. Now one might say math and

reason are defined by their search for global symmetries in a world of

messy particulars, something that can momentarily disregard those

particulars, but in application math and reason have infinitely rich

descriptive capacity. I can’t help but smell an anti-intellectual

current in Graeber’s language that’s sadly all too common among the left

wherein intelligence or analytic rigor is implicitly conceded as

inherently sociopathic at high values. Where measuring, modeling or

keeping accounts of things inherently implies hostile or untoward

intent. In this inversion of any sane or coherent ethics vigilance

itself becomes suspect. We cannot afford to examine, measure or analyse

our social or interpersonal dynamics too closely because that way lies

sociopathy! I’m well aware that through centuries of misappropriation

math and reason now strike many as the devil’s sign. But I shudder to

think of what it must be like to live in such a world, that openly

swallows the premise of our enemies that humane relations are only

possible through ignorance and then reacts by embracing ignorance!

Of course I doubt that Graeber is so quite explicit with himself–and we

are all sometimes subject to cognitive dissonances–but Debt contains so

many arguments or implications from association (even just loose

etymology) it risks Glenn Beck territory at points. And, as such, it

poses dangers within the wider left and radical discourse. While the

scattershot explorations can be enjoyably bracing, it’s embarrassing to

see the most powerful and popular anarchist work of this century get

mired in weak arguments. Leaping from historical association to

causation is the same shit pulled by primitivists to critique

refrigerators. Indeed many of Graeber’s fans would be shocked to stop

and actually dwell on lines like this:

not only do existing technologies necessarily mean a society based on

alienation and oppression, which is hard to deny, since existing

technologies have been developed in that context

I mean that is just some pretty extreme faulty reasoning.

For example the more significant dynamic contemporaneous with the advent

of large scale states and widely accepted currency is not quantification

but writing. Let us remember that bureaucratic account keeping and laws

imposing universal prices are direct result of the technology to save

memories to papyrus or stone and convey them. We know that the

introduction of persistence, of nonnegotiable historical accounts, is

always a huge cultural event in any society. Further at the time writing

sharply pushed back against prior diseconomies of scale, enabling the

growth of cancerous social hierarchies in China, India and the

Mediterranean. Until full-fledged alphabets were invented by Semetic

slaves in Egypt writing retained a steep learning curve that was

critical alongside the sword in preventing the technology’s diffusion to

the periphery. The major event contemporaneous to the downfall of

Çayönü? The nearby invention of writing in the form of the Vinča signs.

Yet aside from John Zerzan and the occasional wingnut no anarchists

reject writing as inherently implying “a society based in alienation and

oppression”. We correctly realize that despite its sharp and profound

dangers in certain contexts, writing’s even sharper positive potential

outweighs them. …Just as the danger from Einstein’s insights making

possible nuclear bombs is profound, but the value to better

understanding the world around us is even greater still.

In exactly the same sense markets and dastardly evil of measuring cups

can be extraordinarily useful.

While priorities vary wildly between each person and over time, human

beings have always sought precision in their crafts and interpersonal

communications. Even determining what one’s priorities or preferences

are in a situation is a calculation, often requiring extensive

consideration and measurement. Freed from the oppressive tensions of

capitalism we would surely prefer to turn such focus on say crafting

baskets or writing poems rather than neurotically calculating and

re-calculating the week’s remaining expenses or the quickest trip across

town, but even in a world where our everyday stopped being a hustle to

merely survive there would still be necessary calculations. The

abolition of the artificial scarcities that plague our world does not

imply the triumph over scarcity in general. You could no more triumph

over entropy. And many of the passions we develop free of survival

concerns involve a great deal of complexity and coordination of scarce

goods. So long as human beings have dreams and desires in a finite

environment there will be coordination and calculation problems to be

solved. While the extent of the possible is vast there are limits; you

can’t shuffle around loaves and fishes under some cups and magically end

up with more loaves and fishes. Sure, much of modern economics is

infected with neoliberalism, but there are nevertheless strong

mathematical constraints to our interactions with the material universe

and each other. Markets provide an array of extraordinarily useful tools

for solving these coordination problems; indeed they denote the only

phase space where solutions can be found for problems past a certain

complexity. Whereas the inherency of subjective knowledge, experience,

and desire in our individual brains and the tiny bandwidth of human

language place strong limits on communist alternatives, decentralized or

not.

While there’s much to critique on many levels to current norms of

currency (and the surrounding economic, political, and cultural

context), double-incidence of wants is a real phenomenon with important

implications. The value of currency of some form in facilitating the

cosmopolitan mass society we so desire clearly outweighs the dangers.

Indeed setting our sights slightly further, there’s a very potent point

only somewhat obscured by Graeber’s instincts in his own pages, which is

that the evidence doesn’t show prohibiting usury makes for positive

markets, but rather merely the violent enforcement of usury. “Under

genuine free market conditions loans at interest will become effectively

impossible to collect,” Graeber writes, but while they would surely be

much harder to collect, I highly doubt all instances will disappear

because there are occasionally quite valid reasons to ask for and accept

it. Instead, defanged of the threat of violence one would expect

quantified debts to collapse more directly and organically to the full

human relations and contexts that underpin them… including risks and

opportunity costs. My British syndicalist friends obsessed with policing

the borders of mutualism and individualist anarchism might gasp to hear

me suggest it but, in the absence of physical violence or a broadly

coercive context like capitalism, voluntary agreements should be free to

involve interest in recognition of subjective costs. Because when

reputation is the only enforcement mechanism the state’s mercenary

coinage is not positioned as the ultimate good, instead goodwill is. To

remove violent enforcement from the equation puts an immediate release

valve on any potentially metastasizing power relations and grounds

people directly in their social context. The main benefit and promise of

mass society is having more degrees of freedom with which to respond to

cancerous social forms. If usury or wage labor were to completely

overrun a society and catalyze a shift from centrifugal tendencies on

wealth to accumulative ones we’d surely consider that society a failure.

But interest, like credit, often reflects and models important realities

of uncertainty and subjectivity that we’d be likewise insane to always

ignore.

The problem in all these situations isn’t modeling, but cognitive

simplicity and/or the wrong models. Our tools should not simplify or

ignore dynamics but give us more awareness of, options in, and leverage

over them.

It is precisely through not simplifying our desires into a form parsable

by CEOs, politicians, and general assemblies, but instead embracing

their infinite diversity and potency that we can begin to make traction

against the forces that need visibility and human interchangeability to

control us. Yet our desires will always map onto material realities in

one way or another–with ordinal preferences–and scarcities of elements,

energy, etc. will always exist. Coordinating their allocation with any

remote efficiency is not always hyper important, but for desires and

considerations of any complexity they will be. I hear tell it’s hard to

build a good radio telescope without at least rounding up both string

and coconuts. Hayekian calculation problems are no trivial concern and

as hardbaked into the universe as entropy or cryptography. Social forms

that don’t prioritize individual agency in the allocation of goods that

affect them will lose tons of information. Conversely no matter how

complex individuals’ subjective desires, autonomous direct action can

maximally convey the relevant underlying information through revealed

preference. Unless we all retreat to the most tame of land projects and

meditation regimes anyone seeking to build a freer society will need to

adopt market forms to some degree.

At the same time anarchists should also be the first to point out the

dangers in simplifying these motivations. Problems arise when we lose

sight of the roots of our reasons for utilizing markets. One of the most

fascinating considerations in Debt is the way popular frameworks of

ethics have changed over time as religious, ideological or radical

movements got knotted up appealing to the dominant language in their

society.

When people start fetishizing the act of exchange as a foundation for

ethical analysis–internalizing strategic oughts as full blown

motivations unto themselves–danger arises.

Graeber has a complicated and tumultuous affair with the notion of

reciprocity throughout Debt‘s pages. On the one hand he wants to point

to debt as the source of positive currents in societies, lending weight

to his abhorrence for quantification by showing how some use a mesh of

debts that are never precisely resolved to build ties of community and

brotherhood. On the other hand he wants to reject that in favor of the

“Everyday Communism” of community members giving to one another (whether

salt or accurate directions) without a second thought. Where accounting

is never undertaken and human relations are artificially assumed to be

permanent:

the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if

the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable

enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to

each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

I sympathize strongly with the impulse here, but not the terms of the

solution Graeber presents. In trying to seize the pragmatic high ground

by abandoning foundational conceptual considerations and speaking

instead in terms of groupable existing cultural practices, Graeber

inherently blocks himself from anything more robust or potent than the

most mundane casual kindness.

“From each according to their abilities to each according to their

needs” is nice as a very abstract guiding light but when applied to any

non-trivial particulars it rapidly falls apart. Human needs are simply

unfathomably complex. Aside from some base considerations like food,

water and shelter that could be easily universally assured by merely

toppling the state and capitalism, the vast majority of our needs or

desires are in no sense objective or satisfyingly conveyable. Measuring

exactly whose desire is greater or more of a “necessity” is not just an

impossibility but an impulse that trends totalitarian. The closest we

can get in ascertaining this in rough terms is through the decentralized

expression of our priorities via one-on-one discussions and

negotiations. The market in other words. Communism through praxis rather

than the attempted omniscience of committees and general assemblies. But

a communism in which individuals must proactively stand up for

themselves and give voice to the desires and complexities that only they

have access to. A communism in which whenever our knowledge of another

person’s needs and preferences grows hazy we solve the calculation

through a conversation of comparisons with our own. A communism in which

we are constantly looking for opportunities to build trust (through

tests like exchange and loans) outside our immediate circles so that our

conversations can spread wealth faster and dynamics of distrust can be

countered.

(Don’t be distracted by the fact that sociopathic wars of all against

all can likewise take place in a decentralized one-on-one fashion of

hostile discussions and negotiations. In a different environment with

different cultural instincts and different, more advanced social

organisms, intentions that slide towards the sociopathic can be

recognized and organized against before such contagion gains the

strength to seriously self-compound.)

In contrast to the communist potential of the market Graeber’s notion of

Everyday Communism in which “no accounts are taken” is capable of

sliding by in only a tiny region of possible circumstances. I don’t know

about you but a communism that’s only maintainable through our ignorance

of details sounds awfully unsatisfying, and certainly unstable. Granted,

we all instinctively relax a bit at the prospect of any relief from the

constant stressful calculations we’re forced to preform under

capitalism, where precarity disrupts our thoughts with a blaring

hyper-awareness of every last penny, every last contact, every last

risk. But that trauma shouldn’t lead to overreaction in blind pursuit of

carthesis. The problem is not that accounts are taken, that

relationships are mapped, or trust flows established more rigorously,

but that we are forced to pay constant attention to a small and crude

subsection of these. That our other desires and preoccupations–some

involving extraordinary attention to detail–are suppressed. The problem

is not the availability of tools and knowledge, but the infrastructure

that denies us a choice in them. Keeping accounts of all the details of

our interactions with extraordinary degrees of precision, or merely

being able to, do not equate always paying attention to those details.

As active minds with desires we will always geek out and stress out

about things, and the coordination of goods will always remain one.

Similarly Graeber’s exhalation to delude ourselves into assuming

infinite persistence (in relationships, in societies, etc) is obviously

incredibly dangerous and conducive to oppressive situations. Moralizing

in favor of ignorance is a dumb strategy for communism and certainly not

pragmatic. The dynamics at play in trivial situations like passing the

salt to one another and not giving people false directions, while

positive, are not scalable blueprints for a better world.

I want to be absolutely clear here. By rejecting Graeber’s “everyday

communism” I am not advocating the secondary moral framework he

implicitly sets up as competitor or fallback. There are deep issues with

ethics built on notions of exchange. Indeed my greatest critique of

“everyday communism” is that it doesn’t go far enough in rejecting the

ethic of reciprocity. The internalization of the useful strategy of

exchange or tit-for-tat into a core motivating obligation is a cognitive

error with nasty consequences. In short reciprocity would be recognized

and denounced by millennialist rebels throughout history as a respecter

of persons; it differentiates the world according to who has done what

for us personally rather than who could best benefit. This is fine for

many strategic considerations but awful as a motivational framework.

Empathy and compassion are not strategic, they are prior to strategy.

They’re what set the goals. The oughts of ethical motivations arise when

our identity, our selfhood becomes blurred across time and space. To

future versions of one’s “self” who’d be irritated if today one didn’t

take out the trash, but also to other fountainheads of creativity and

inquiry embedded in different contexts, different bodies. It’s not that

we in some sense owe them, it’s that we in some sense are them. Albeit

subjectively closed from their full context. Such oughts are not

external obstacles or dynamics but direct expressions of our selfhood.

Our communist motivations precede the realm of strategies and market

exchanges, and will on occasion overwrite the heuristics we adopt in

those contexts. As in the case of “intellectual property” where there’s

no reason to persist in strategies adopted to deal with actual

scarcities.

Graeber is not unaware of the dangers to reciprocity as an idea and he

tries to stretch it as far as the concept can go without breaking, but

what he conjures as an idealic reciprocity in a broad sense is still not

enough:

What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would

do the same for you, not that they necessarily will.

This falls dramatically short of empathy as a foundation for an ethical

outlook in two respects, 1) it requires knowledge of the other person’s

motivations and 2) it restricts my obligation to merely those who share

the same ethos as me. Now I’m not saying that those aren’t strategically

important considerations. But most of us would fight to save people from

genocide regardless of whether our ethnic or social circles overlapped

enough for us to know a damn thing about their motivations. And we’d

fight to save them if even we knew they wouldn’t do the same for us.

Indeed, as anarchists putting our lives on the line to fight oppressions

that the vast majority of the world silently tolerates or endorses, this

is no rarefied academic issue. It’s one that anarchists have grappled

with for as long as there have been anarchists. Tensions between egoist

theory and altruistic consequentialist practice rivet every single nook

and cranny of our movement’s history. Yet as bad as this supposed

dissonance has been, many of the grand solutions we’ve flirted with have

been even worse. If Kropotkin’s attempt to play realist by embracing

mutual aid as “human nature” condemned the anarchist movement to a

century of luddism and the natural fallacy run rampant, Graeber is on

the verge of canonizing the present generation’s mistakes in which the

anarchist decides to play realist by valorizing anti-intellectualism,

social capital, and reciprocity.

There are major problems lurking here. We are not “national anarchists”

content with a retreat to tribes, with smaller states more attentive in

their oppression. Rwanda proved that just as decentralization is always

more efficient than centralization, decentralized fascism can be more

efficient than centralized fascism. Informal power dynamics matter and

must be countered. As do material constraints. A society incapable of

complex economic calculation is a society that will leave Einsteins

stifling in the fields and the blind without restorative implants.

It’s not enough to merely identify that there are currents of a better

world coursing through our veins. We’ve long known this. What should

preoccupy us is less what has worked in the past, but what else is

possible going forward. Graeber, like all academics, trapped in the land

of liberals and sneering marxist dinosaurs, is loathe to commit or

substantively consider beyond the most shallow of prescriptions: Abolish

the debt. Well of fucking course. Even Chomsky starts to look radical

from that position.

Engaging with what is possible–and how to work backward from there to

attacks on the existing–requires an analysis deeper than clustered

associations from anecdotes. I would love to see left market anarchists

and radicals more broadly seriously take up the challenges raised in

Debt.

What would currency look like in a freed society? We don’t know, but

it’s safe to say it would no more look like the current economy with US

treasury notes replaced by silver coins than businesses in the absence

of the state would look like Walmart.

There’s been a paucity to our imaginations here too. And mapping out the

possibilities, much less learning through praxis which array best meet

our situational needs, is sure to be a huge task. I’ve been studying,

writing and having conversations about this since 2003 and so too have

many mathematicians, economists and computer scientists (“currency”

obviously sitting within a much wider phase space of trust and protocol

dynamics). There’s interesting work being published on the arXiv, in

books and monographs by activist economists like Thomas Greco, and amid

the deluge of cryptocurrencies. Indeed the popular explosion of

cryocurrencies immediately following the publication of Debt is perhaps

one of the most interesting examples of convergent historical pressures,

and has seen both truly out there proposals as well as studiously

primordial experiments like Ripple and Etherium.

Amusingly a good many libertarians are still kicking themselves today

for disregarding Bitcoin thanks to Austrian orthodoxy pretty much rooted

in a cobwebbed few paragraph aside by Mises in Human Action. If only

they’d paid attention to the man considered by far to be the most likely

creator of Bitcoin, Nick Szabo, who wrote extensively on the history and

nature of money as a social relation a decade before Debt. Szabo

launched off Dawkin’s summary that “money is a formal token of delayed

reciprocal altruism” and expanded it into a more rigorous examination,

explicitly laying out many of the motivations for Bitcoin:

Collectibles augmented our large brains and language as solutions to the

Prisoner’s Dilemma that keeps almost all animals from cooperating via

delayed reciprocation with nonkin. Reputational beliefs can suffer from

two major kinds of errors — errors of about which person did what, and

errors in appraising the value or damages caused by that act. Within

clans (the small and immediately local kin group, or extended family,

which formed a subset of a tribe), our large brains could minimize these

errors, so that public reputation and coercive sanctions superceded the

limited motivation provided by the counterparty’s ability to cooperate

or defect in the future as the main enforcer of delayed reciprocation.

In both homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens sapiens, with the

same large brain size, it is quite likely that every local clan member

kept track of everybody other local clan member’s favors. The use of

collectibles for trade within the small local kin group may have been

minimal. Between clans within a tribe both favor tracking and

collectibles were used. Between tribes, collectibles entirely replaced

reputation as the enforcer of reciprocation, although violence still

played a major role in enforcing rights as well as being a high

transaction cost that prevented most kinds of trade.

To be useful as a general-purpose store of wealth and means of wealth

transfer, a collectible had to be embedded in at least one institution

with a closed-loop cycle, so that the cost of discovering and/or

manufacturing the object was amortized over multiple transactions.

Furthermore, a collectible was not just any kind of beautiful decorative

object. It had to have certain functional properties, such as the

security of being wearable on the person, compactness for hiding or

burial, and unforgeable costliness. That costliness must have been

verifiable by the recipient of the transfer — using many of the same

skills that collectors use to appraise collectibles today.

Of course as a vision of an ideal world Bitcoin is problematic in many

respects. The environmental cost of the energy consumption is nowhere

near as high as has been insinuated but is still arguably unnecessary.

The trust model has insufficiently examined weaknesses when it comes to

the proliferation of future protocol updates–even just the ratio of core

developers to users inherently introduces weaknesses the government has

been eager to pressure. And the implicit goal of One Big Currency is

just as unreasonable as One Big Union. Any flat global currency will

radically fail to match the topologies of trust, reputation, and other

diverse human realities it floats on top of – lurking instabilities are

inherent. Introducing parallel competing currencies all modeled on the

dream of a universal standard hardly solves the problem. My own

inclination is that exchange facilitating human reputation systems will

trend towards a rhizomatic federative model with every community,

collective or congealing association floating their own “currency” in a

sense, built to be dynamically recognfigured, and with routing protocols

fluidly negotiating the network topology on the fly for individual

transactions while retaining far more directed information regarding

lines of trust and repute. And indeed Bitcoin has already set off a vast

cornucopia of such developments from things like color coins, side

chains, and meta coins, to communities like the Lakota nation and

Catalonia launching their own alt coins (Catalonia even working on a

scheme to bake in basic universal income). Of course it’ll be a while

before this development process or praxis achieves everything we want.

But in the meantime, in the non-prefigurative actually-existing world of

violence distorted markets, we’re having a hard time holding onto even

the precondition of a decentralized internet. It’s not just an analogy

to note that while the anarchist ideal may be a rich ecology of mesh

networks, we’re anemic enough that net neutrality is better than

DisneyComcast. And in that context Bitcoin and its variations, must be

acknowledged as holding immense practical utility when compared to the

current regime. The CNT was a clusterfuck but it did get some good shit

done.

And there are a number of things Bitcoin gets right. Whatever sloppily

imposed tale of grand historical cycles Graeber cares to conjure, many

of the attributes of specie currency are of great utility to resistance

movements. If we are to make a serious push back through direct action

against global power structures we need the same fungible currencies

that gave (and give) lifeblood to pirate utopias and enable millions to

hustle out survival under the table. At the same time Bitcoin is caught

in a tension with prefiguration by quirk of mathematics which forces

every transaction into a public ledger to its satisfy proof of work

scheme. This trait was seen as a bug rather than a feature by many

Libertarians (and there are a few elaborate schemes in progress to

overcome it), but history arguably shows that public ledgers are the

more natural framework for currency, from necklaces to clay tablets to

marked sticks. The most famous and direct example being the islanders of

Yap who carved giant stone coins hundreds of miles away, rafted them

home and then simply publicly declared changes of ownership without ever

moving them. When a coin was accidentally dropped into the sea on its

way to Yap the islanders shrugged and continued to exchange title to it

since its physical location was ultimately unimportant. Bitcoin has

merely used mathematics to extend the number of parties to such

consensuses while freeing our brains to remember and think about other

things. (Interestingly this ease has also facilitated an explosion of

social gifting which currently constitute the majority of Bitcoin

transactions.)

Of course even when it’s possible there can be problems with simply

scaling up tools and approaches that work well on the tribal level, just

because we can get around Dunbar’s limit on some dynamics doesn’t mean

we can for all interrelated dynamics, and to grab onto solutions that

have worked before ignoring changes in context is dangerous in the

extreme. If a technology–like a currency–can facilitate a liberatory

mass society it should be built around enhancing agency and giving folks

broader and more fluid choices.

That said, while a great number of problems can be solved by automating

the grunt work involved in protocol negotiation, routing, map-learning,

stock predictions, etc., even the most furturist general AI will still

be starkly limited by Hayekian subjectivity. Unless we buy into the

capitalist and state communist vision of limited, controllable desires

we will still have to at some point, at some level engage. Even the most

advanced tool can’t intuit our needs, or, for example assume a threat or

trust model for us. We have to declare our ever changing preferences and

contextual considerations, we have to make decisions, we have to

actively judge. And it’s here that the issue of what exactly do we want

to pay attention to arises. Markets can exist only wherever attention is

placed. And some people feel deeply annoyed when huge amounts of

attention is placed in areas by others that they don’t want to likewise

pay attention to. What should we have markets in? What should we

calculate with precision? How can we, in wildly varying situations,

mediate between those who for various reasons want to obsess over a

dynamic and those who would rather not give a fuck? These are questions

often cloaked in combative, reactive rhetoric, but are worth bringing to

the fore.

Obviously we shouldn’t just retire human inquiry away at some level of

awareness, start some land project and seek no further, but we do

occasionally reach plateaus in human computational capacity with

diminishing returns. In the absence of a higher-bandwidth language or

telepathy, micromanaging our relationships can become counterproductive.

When I was a teen I felt horrified and betrayed to overhear a cluster of

anarchafeminists bitterly complaining about their sensitive partners

checking in about consent on every little action in bed, but the point

is actually valid. Over-resolution in a specific realm when it becomes

normative can be constraining to those with other priorities in

exploration. That said there is of course, ultimately no such thing as

over-resolution in our collective striving for understanding in every

arena. There’s no area or level to which we all should flinch from

examination–regardless of whether we decide we want to live at that

granularity in our everyday lives with boring old non-transhuman homo

sapiens brains.

We have many problems to solve, from the feedback loops in social

capital that drive informal power relations to means for survivors of

secret rapists to find one another and coordinate in an untrustworthy

environment. A wishful longing for ignorance of historical accounts is

not a productive or workable ideal. If there’s one thing I hope readers

take away from Debt it’s a calling to geek out on particulars and tackle

these dynamics. This isn’t unchartered territory, there’s a lot of

really great work going on and tools being forged by heroes. The next

chapter on debt, in which many of its forms aren’t abolished from on

high but dissolved from below, has still yet to be finished.

So what then to say in conclusion?

I think this summary of Graeber’s is supremely illustrative of the

mistakes creeping into his account:

All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are.

Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations. This

is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation.

It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled,

that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have

nothing further to do with each other.

Yet there are no such thing as unseparated human beings! Every human

relationship is deeply predicated upon separation. Until brain-to-brain

technology matures and radically scales up the bandwidth of our

potential communication even the closest of lovers face strong limits

from the subjectivity inherent to individual existence. For some

relationships and situations Gift of the Magi style catastrophes are a

tolerable bullet to bite, but only ever to a certain degree. And as we

shake off the shackles of capitalism and let our desires stretch such

confusions and logjams will become even less cute.

Further, the notion that “equality is restored” wildly ignores what

social currency was about imperfectly declaring: standing and

trustworthiness, realities that don’t have to be hierarchical and

assessments thereof that don’t have to be collectively managed. When the

neighbor returns precisely one cup of rice and maybe a little more as

agreed on, that doesn’t have to cancel the relationship, it can enhance

it by proving trustworthiness. I am freeing you to have agency in your

association with me, so that our friendship might be richer for the

knowledge that we are not bound by material considerations. Only with

such knowledge can we be capable of developing real affinities. A

consensual society should be built off knowing we can reconfigure our

social relations at any moment. That their substance lies not in

ossified roles or identities but in empathy.

In an understandable but dangerous rush to paint a clean picture David

Graeber ignores a host of other possibilities and paints an all-too-cute

historical progression and taxonomy in which all human societies mix

different degrees of hierarchical, communistic, and market oriented

dynamics. But markets, in his tale, are primarily a confused state of

affairs in which any permanence or substance to human relations is

dissolved and everything is quantified. And the unquantified,

unexamined, unmapped ignorance of communism is bliss.

I disagree.

Whatever moralistic language may sometimes cling to them, markets

themselves are not rooted in cultural confusion but in inescapable

material and game theoretic realities. Currency resolves an important

issue in mass societies and while it can have problems they can be

solved with more mathematical nuance not less.

We should be incredibly suspicious of valorizing alternatives like

Maussian gift economies that embrace interpersonal power dynamics rather

than working to negate them. And Graeber’s

communism-as-a-deliberate-state-of-ignorance hardly serves any better.

If we really care about one another, if we really want to build a freer

world from an orientation of empathy and compassion, if we’re really

concerned about the crystalization of hierarchies, we owe it to

ourselves to be maximally vigilant, to seize every tool at our disposal

and remain unpetrified of exploring root dynamics.

It is the interplay of desire and math that ultimately shapes what is

possible, not sweeping historical impressions or awkward taxonomies of

cultural dynamics. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an exhilarating storm

of anecdotes and with many insightful themes, but it flounders in many

respects when it seeks to draw lessons from history.

The past is no cage for the future.