"I've stayed out of this discussion because I'm only about halfway through Graeber's book (although I read an earlier version some time ago)."
You're a wise man, Mike.
I will follow Michael's lead and venture my comments:
There's no necessary reason for the weight of a particular economic relation in a modern capitalist society to map its historical origin. But there's no reason either for them not to map! In fact, there are multiple cases in history in which -- so to speak -- the ontogenesis and the phylogenesis of an economic relation go parallel. This is one of those cases in which we have to go, if you forgive my Hegelian phrase, from the un-determined Being to the determined Being (i.e. Quality, which requires that people say more than just something *is* and define *what* is it it that is, etc.). Detailed casuistic research (both historical *and logical*, because if you don't organize the historical information logically then how is it history?) is required to determine the role and location of a given economic relation in a given social formation, and the peculiar ways in which such economic relation may have emerged and developed historically.
I can take at face value the claim anthropologists (e.g. Graeber) make that there are no solid empirical leads indicating that civilized societies (from Mesopotamia on) relied *primarily* on barter. I can also accept the claim that barter was rare and (as Marx also believed) relegated at first to the contact between communities rather than a within-community affair. I'll of course accept that barter was in various degrees shrouded by all sorts of relations of direct personal dependence and the morality associated with societies in which direct personal dependence was predominant. However, our ignorance is even greater about what went on *before*. The earlier societies, without stable agriculture and what we may call decipherable writing, left no Code of Hammurabi. So we don't know the nature of those interactions.
Honest, I find Graeber's incredibly confusing. He speaks very loosely and uses terms without carefully defining them or somehow hinting the content he's assigning to them, and the relations between his categories appear to shift in mid course without warning. If, as Michael says, he's using today's common usage when referring to debt (not good if you wish to dispute what Smith or Marx wrote), then it's your *obligation* :-) to proceed carefully in assessing what people in the 18th or 19th century wrote. If you are driving and fast approaching another car from behind, your responsibility is greater to ensure that you don't surprise the driver ahead of you, who will be focusing mainly on the road ahead. Marx cannot re-write his works now to adapt to today's usage. It's us writing today who need to make sure our dialog with Marx, Smith, etc. is duly and fairly translated back and forth.
I respect Graeber greatly, because of his advocacy and activism, and because his work provides a much needed service, namely reminding people that social life is fundamentally fluid, that the institutional configuration of our society is mutable, and that we can construct better social arrangements. That we just need to keep in mind the aspects of social life that are truly essential to our existence as a species, manage them adequately, provide them with better, more workable ways to flow. And that such aspects are neither money nor markets nor inequality (although he apparently believes that a global communist society is impossible, as opposed to what he calls "communism" -- i.e. direct, mutually-regarding cooperation in various settings). In times of crisis, reminding people of this is absolutely indispensable. So I applaud Graeber for his work insofar as it is a contribution in this direction.
However, if we take him seriously, then we need to be critical of his work. I could list dozens of cases in which he flatly contradicts himself. Hint: If your personal definition of "debt" is such that it encompasses all personal bonds (!) among people, then stay consistent with that, and we'll understand each other. But if here you seem to be saying that "debt" is inherent to any human interaction, and there you are saying that "debt" is only inherent to a particular set of social arrangements, then we will not be able to talk sense. We know that, from a logical contradiction any conclusion can be derived. I am not saying logic is the only way in which we can grasp the world mentally, but it is a necessary one -- and because of that we have to respect its rules. This is why criticizing Graeber's work is a bit like playing a fool's game: you can always find a passage in his Debt to show that your criticism is unwarranted. But let me try and address some of the claims that appear to be a bit more stable in his Debt:
*The foundation of social life is morality*. It seems to me that the primary requisite of social life is people *reproducing* themselves materially. How people rationalize their necessary productive practices (whatever they need to do to ensure their reproduction), how they establish rules of collective behavior to reinforce their reproduction, how they vest the social arrangements that mediate their reproduction with moral and even mystical qualities to make them stick, all that seems to be much less fundamental than their material reproduction proper. (I don't accept the claim that "you cannot separate this from that," because indeed we can -- it's called abstraction.) The rationalizations and rules and other (well) bullshit are not primary, but secondary. I understand that morality (or the embryonic forms of morality) must have emerged almost as soon as -- if not at the same time -- as language and reflective consciousness proper emerged. Insofar as humans reflected on their interactions (and how could they not if they were indeed human), then their interactions had to be immediately infused with moral content. But, again, any fully-formed moral code had to be premised on a certain level of development of the productive force of labor. A colony of bees is perfectly capable of reproducing itself, yet one would be hard pressed to believe that their reproduction would have been impossible were not for the mediation of some self-conscious morality. I'm not saying early humans or hominids were like bees, but there must be a line drawn somewhere.
*Violence leads to comparison, calculation, proportions.* As opposed to nonviolence? Graeber emphasis on violence (effective or virtual) as ingrained in our economic relations is warranted, but he overstates the case. As Marx wrote in Grundrisse: Societies, regarded altogether, cannot live by forceful appropriation alone. For that to be possible, there must be wealth to appropriate and, hence, production! "The mode of pillage is determined by the mode of production."
Say in Madagascar markets were created by the colonial state. The French enforced the creation of markets. But that only shifts the question -- how did the French state create the markets in France? How did all the European colonizers, their states, create the markets that propelled them to colonize the world? Was it only sheer violence, pull yourself by your own bootstraps type of story? To be sure, there was a fair amount of chicken and egg feedback, but the driving force was economic -- not legal or political. Otherwise, the markets would have been artificial and unstable. Why did they prove so resilient? This is all a mystery under Graeber's account.
Was it violence that led people to quantify the extent to which they helped one another? Or is it the fact that, one way or another, if a society is to ensure its reproduction, then the proportion in which people help one another also gets socialized, which is to say, it entails comparison, aggregation, apportioning, etc. And even more fundamentally than that -- leave aside the way people interact with one another -- wouldn't the sheer interaction with the forces of nature impose on people the need to quantify the proportions of their effort to reproduce themselves materially? Back then, earlier in human history, the day was also finite, even if people hadn't yet developed the anal-retentive inclination to split it into 8.64 × 10^13 nanoseconds.
*Money is simply an abstract expression of this quantification*. So then money is inherent to all social life? When a mom in prehistorical times fed her baby for a given period of time, she was implicitly and effectively conducting a monetary transaction with her baby? This was flowing from violence, which didn't have to be overt, it was inherent to the fact that the mom had the power to not the feed the baby while the baby only had the power to die? IMHO, defining money this way makes it impossible to have a meaningful conversation about it.
*Debt is moral obligation couched in monetary terms*. Well, yes, morality shrouds every commercial interaction and every human interaction, period, in our society. No doubt. We are moral animals.
I guess that follows from the claim that morality is the foundation of social life. But, again, this claim seems more robust: Looking at things from a broader perspective, the commercial, monetary, and fiduciary interaction is just mediating the allocation of the productive force of labor under a particular (alienated) social form. Logically speaking, morality comes next to rationalize the conflicting interests of creditor and debtor. I'm not saying that morality doesn't play a role in reproducing (or undermining) the social forms of the interaction. Everything flows together, but not everything plays the same role in that flow. The true content of the interaction is the labor intercourse, so to speak, because without it, social life is truly out of the question.
I could go on and on. In reply to Joanna: There's no way, absolutely no way IMO in which we can assimilate Graeber's accounts of markets, money, and debt to Marx's. I'm not saying that there's not important and useful ethnographic and anthropological information referred in Graeber's work. I'm just saying that it is going to take a careful critical effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. This will sound like extreme dogmatism, but as far as I can tell, I find no reason to modify anything essential in Marx as a result of the information Graeber provides in his book.
Again, it seems that, in Graeber's mind, money is inherent to the allocational decisions that people has to make in apportioning labor in accordance with the need to economize time. He seems to believe that attributing some conscious or de-facto quantification in the day-to-day decisions people in earlier (or contemporary, but different) societies is an extrapolation or retrojection of our current obsession with monetary forms. There's something to that, of course. But what is effectively going on here is that the development of markets, specially (but not only) under capitalism has indeed makes us more aware of what we actually need to do to ensure our reproduction in general. That Graeber believes to have located crucial elements of a modern capitalist society embedded in earlier societies is the result of this, precisely. It is his seeing things from the standpoint of the present that helps him identify those elements. Because it makes much sense that the understanding of a more complex organism (not necessarily better in every conceivable sense) makes it easier for us to understand the simpler one. As to the quantification thing, consider the hypothetical counter-factual: If we were to base our social life on direct human interactions unmediated by money, would we then need not to care about how our collective resources get allocated among its different productive uses in order to meet our needs, etc.? I think not. Banning a cosmic shift, the day will still have 8.64 × 10^13 nanoseconds, and we will be in the business of producing as much -- whatever you want to call it -- power, freedom, wealth, wellbeing, happiness, etc. as possible out of that day.
Conclusion: I find no reason to change my belief that these proportions in which labor power (or, in flow terms, labor time) gets allocated are necessarily or per se value, market monetary prices, etc. These social-labor proportions are instead what Marx called the *determining factors* or the *content* of value, as opposed to value proper, value as a social, objective, alienated form, let alone money.
It is the same thingies that Lange called "terms on which alternatives are offered;" Kantorovich's "resolving multipliers," Novozhilov's "feedback costs," Arrow-Debreu prices, and what have you.
These determining factors take the form of value (and hence money) only when labor exists divided into private independent units. The mediation that re-assembles the divided labor is not commodity exchange in the way we are used to seeing it under capitalism. Instead, prior to capitalism proper, the exchange mediation was only embryonic, associated with a myriad personal direct bonds, and rather marginal in pre-capitalist societies.
I don't know if some form that we could recognize as barter (quid-pro-quos unmediated by money) actually predates money. The historical record gets murkier for pre-civilized societies. But, by analogy with the development of mathematical thought (and most scientific thought), it wouldn't surprise me. It stands to reason that the emergence of a commodity as a general equivalent entails a lot of prior quid-pro-quos in settings in which no particular commodity could claim for itself alone the role of general equivalent.
The "abstraction" of money (which flows, in Graeber's account, from personal dependence and moral obligations he deems debt) had to come later.
The origin of mathematics did not begin with some abstraction, with -- say -- the notion of number or length. It was very concrete: basic counting, where the notion of number was, in people's perceptions, completely glued to its physical representations (fingers in a hand, sticks and stones, pieces of food). The abstraction and the possibility of improving one's understanding by extrapolating the logic from one field of thought to another came later. Just look at how children develop. Conceptual thinking and long-forward thinking evolve gradually (even if in a modern kid, due to socialization, such evolution is incredibly fast), from concretion to lower abstraction to higher abstraction, from immediacy to long (space/time) mediacy.
Debt, viewed as a commercial exchange (one side hands a promise of future repayment, the other side hands a good in exchange, e.g. money), presupposes long-forward thinking. This season, I'm handing you some wheat. Next season, I expect it back with some more on top. I am no anthropologist, but something tells me that this sort of arrangement took a long time to emerge. Earlier humans, I suspect, were more in the here and now, especially in the immediacy of the groups in which they relied on for survival. But how could those social groups stick without debt accounting, forward-thinking, etc.? Well, they did. The reason why I handed you something now without necessarily expecting anything in return in the future had to be close to instinctive: we do it this way because it's worked in the past, and the evidence for that is that we are here. Breeds that tried other approaches are not around to tell the story. I don't know exactly why, but it works, and I don't even want to entertain that consciously -- I just do it.
I admit this is sheer speculation in my part, but anthropologists and historians do that a lot -- admittedly in ways that are more informed and disciplined than mine, but it's speculation nonetheless.
Also, the chartalist story about the origin of money reverses the sequence. Instead of legal and political institutions emerging to sanction and channel economic necessity (yeah, social cost/benefit economizing made imperative by the need to reproduce), they predate and tilt the scale in favor of commodification, markets, etc. Why did they stick? How is this legal and political system capable of pulling itself by the bootstraps? All that is a mystery in the chartalist story.
I will leave it at that. Nathan, if you got to read up to this point, feel free to forward this to Graeber. I'd be curious to know his response, if he has a chance to compose one to such a disorganized set of points. Again, more power to him for having written this thought-provoking book.
Re. chapter 8, Graeber's account of the historical switches from virtual to credit money and then back to virtual is consistent with Marx's account in Capital 2-3 and the Contribution (although Marx seemed to have thought of it more narrowly, as if confined to the 17th-century England-on history). And herein lies evidence that belies Graeber's understanding of money. When markets make the life of a society (or aspects of it) flow, the functions of money as a means of exchange and as a means of payment (debt liquidation) eclipse the function of money as world money (in Marx's times) and store of value. Life is pumped up, states are stable, etc. However, when social life gets disrupted, perhaps by crises induced by the very "mechanism" of markets, then the function of money as vehicle to preserve value over time takes precedence. That suggests strongly that the state (the organized violence of the state) cannot be the primitive notion in the category of money. Before civilizations emerged and stabilized with the development of larger-scale agriculture, societies were more easily disrupted and had to rely on rigid custom and habits if they were to stick minimally. In their interactions (between communities at first, but then within the community as well, although those interactions couldn't be chemically pure commodity exchanges), when conditions got iffy, people had to lean back on commodity money. That is why the concrete tangibility of money was of the essence. The virtual aspect of money only emerges when exchange gets regular and fluid, and people go about their business and money appears as merely instrumental rather than an end in itself.
Graeber says there are all sorts of human propensities, some of them contradictory. But we need to be mindful of which propensities may underpin our social life today. All good, but what is giving us the degrees of freedom to look at things this way? He doesn't seem to understand the logic that makes a social structure successful and virulent and robust. How can we build better social arrangements without this understanding?
The symbols are *instrumental* to truck and barter (and yeah, they serve other intrinsic purposes as such symbols). They are in fact very little without the trucking and bartering -- or social cooperation. And this is an inversion as well. "Our debt to society" (the fact that we rely on cooperative labor) comes first. When cooperative labor is bridged via a class society, by the exploitation of the many by the few, then that bridging is smuggled ideologically as arising not from social cooperation but from the sovereign powers of the state, backed up by the gods, natural order of things, etc.
Why did the gods regard oxen as worthy of them? Because oxen were valuable to people, because oxen were the universal equivalent in those contexts. One thing is mythology and another thing is organized religion, and state religion. It presupposes classes, etc.
When private ownership began to emerge, how did people refer to it? How did people began to verbalize it and the transactions that arose from it? Obviously, they used the references of the type of interactions that predated exchange. But there's a change in quality and the content of the terms had to shift. (All good if we keep track of all this. Bad otherwise.)