Debt: The First 5000 Years - Extended Interview

welcome to uprising David Graeber Thanks so in your book you tackle a very fundamental question at the outset before you go into the history of debt and that is how we think about that and and how it becomes and has become a question of morals of morality and no matter what one's politics we have so deeply ingrained into our minds the fact that if we are in debt we are obliged to pay off that debt how did that concept come to be so prevalent one away I wrote the book to answer that very question because it's something to smack your head against all the time if you're doing political organizing for example the fact that anybody who's in debt feels that they have done something wrong and you see that over and over again actually throughout world history even the words for debt sin and guilt are the same in so many languages of sanskrit aramaic to german umm so in a way i guess what i was really trying to ask in the book is first of all how is it that we come to see all moral imperatives as if they were debts and why is it that that notion of debt has this moral hold over us and i started the book of a conversation where I'm describing structural adjustment policies to this very well-meaning sort of liberal activist lawyer um and you know describing things like death of thousands of babies you know through these people had to cut their mom medical services and you know the reaction is yeah but surely can't expect people just cancel the debts I mean people have to pay their debts a but are the money that commonsensical power I mean you can come up with 27 different reasons why this is absurd but each one will take ten minutes to explain where is that it's just yes this is five words so to seem self-evident and so in many ways that um language and that logic is is used to justify the forced repayment of debt well the word force is critical here because one thing I've found let's try to fit what is that I mean the basic definition of the concept is unclear it's not any kind of moral obligation although people try to extend the notion in that way well a debt is just one type of promise it's a promise that I like to say it's corrupted by math and violence it it's something where you can be exact and exactly quantify what is owed therefore it becomes impersonal therefore it becomes transferable so um as I always like to say if I promise to love you forever you can't give that to someone else right I promise to meet you at five you can't give it to someone else but a mathematical impersonal debt you can and the way that's what money is it's circulating down but that's only made possible by a relation of force but the other side of that is that that language is the cleverest method anyone has come up with to take a relation of force and make it seem moral not only to make it seem moral make it seem like the victims are complain well let's let's go into the history first of all the standard accepted history written by economists of how money came to be and and and you described in your book how there's an accepted myth that first came bartering then came the invention of currency then came credit if you will and you and other anthropologists have said there's really no evidence for this zero um this has been kind of a pet peeve of anthropologists for at least a hundred years uh Adam Smith made up the story you know in 1776 actually when he Wealth of Nations um it was a speculative what must have happened to lead to money and he said well I imagine that people would just swap things with each other and um I would say you know I need a cow tell you what I'll give you 20 chickens for that cow okay I've got 30 I needed negotiate you know come to a deal and problem is that you know if they don't happen to need chickens you don't have anything else they want no deal so you kind of have to invent something to use as a medium of exchange this is the standard line and everybody learns this in way or another um just the other day I was you know chatting with the airport security guy as he was scanning me about my book and I said I was but the first thousand euros in his like five thousand years I assumed they would all be using Barger backed up everybody everybody has this in their head the problem is no anthropologist have been going through the world pretty much everywhere for the last hundred years trying to find someplace where they do that and they just don't exist that's it using that barter doesn't existent as an adopted in a society Willian societies I mean people do barter of strangers you know if there's somebody you're never going to meet again well you kind of got it swamp things but if it's people that are your neighbors which is the original scenario is people your any kind of regular contact with um we even it really if it's a regular trade people don't do that and and if you think about it for a moment it's kind of obvious why they wouldn't because what the standard story assumes is that people will deal with their neighbors in what economists called the spot trade you know I give you something you give me something we walk away and if we can't settle the deal right now that's it well that's silly because now it even imagining the sort of twenty chickens for the cow scenario and the guy doesn't need chickens well you know I'm his neighbor I'm gonna have something he wants at some point and it's nice to have neighbors in your debt in fact what you actually observe in most communities where people are you know people relatively equal status who are neighbors of are coming to some sort of arrangement with each other about stuff for example it's often the case that if you just praise an object that belongs to someone else they kind of have to give it to you so what would really happen is you go up and you say wow that's a beautiful cow you know and there's really no appropriate response there's nothing you can say other than oh well and it's not much but take it please you know you're my neighbor I love you I don't even think about giving me something back but of course we all know now I owe him one so what you get is a sort of credit and debt situation but it's sort of it's not a specific one where you can quantify exactly how many of one thing equals another usually you have a sort of rank of sorts of things like how is roughly the same as a canoe is the same as a jade necklace is the same um second rank third rank for three types of objects or you could you know it's not necessarily an object to this could be a favor need help with something it's good to have people on your dad so what they're making up you know these economists is a story which imagines that essentially social relations don't exist that people are only thinking about the stuff which is fine if you're inventing economics which is the study of people who are only thinking about the stuff but that's not how actual people normally behave so is there evidence that society's whole societies behaved on on credit and lending and borrowing us you know items and keeping tabs if you will before currency existed absolutely that is what all evidence comes to indicate I should make a distinction here I mean the the scenario I was just alluding to is more a case of it's not nobody's tabulating anything sore vague sense of you know IOU sort of like that right you sort of like this question is how it becomes quantified and oddly enough all evidence we have indicates that it's legal systems where that starts to happen when you have to pay fines because that's the cut the situation where people are in no mood to compromise um and you know would you somebody's eye gets poked out it'll be like 27 heifers for an eye or you know This Means War and if you don't have efforts you actually do have to figure out how to substitute so in situations like that where there's a potential for violence where people are in a very uncompromising situation that's precisely when they start counting things and demanding exact equivalents there's other ways that money crops up it seems that first forms of money in Mesopotamia had to do with people who had to they had these very complex temple complexes of thousands of people working for them often widows and orphans at first and because after a war they start bringing in captives but they have to allocate materials within these bureaucratic complexes which are actually States there is autonomous um running themselves but you know there's people doing fishing there's people doing pastoralism there's people growing things there's people making things they have these little factories and they have to distribute stuff and calculate rations and equivalent so they make up a system where everything is equivalent to a certain amount of silver and that markets kind of develop on the side of that where people start using those systems but the interesting thing but ancient Mesopotamia for example is that they don't seem to have been actually using the silver to buy stuff them in fact sort of will give away is they didn't make scales accurate enough to weigh the very very tiny bits of silver that would have been required to buy you know a hammer a chair a shirt something like that even though it seems that people were after awhile buying them so everything was put on the tab hmm so gold and silver have at various points in human history being considered currency or equivalent to currency being able to measure something in the form of a metal that doesn't corrode how how does that figure into the history of currency and money in the u.s. in the u.s. I'm sorry I'm worldwide world what okay um well I mean at first they mainly just kept the gold and silver stock called and used it as the basis of credit transactions Egypt counted more toward the gold bezel potamia toward the silver um I mean a merchant's are very rich people would occasionally actually show up with a staff or sometimes you'd bring it in at the end of the year so you'd run up a tab and um of your local merchants and then every six months to a year you to sort of show up with something either denominated and silver if you had some sulfur actual silver but again they weren't stamping the silver and your foreign bits um that's not to weigh it out um so so that's what you have at first the question is what why did people actually start using it in everyday transactions and that happens quite late now we're already seeing these credit transactions interest rates um discussed in document sort of 3200 PC um coinage on the other hand actual systemic circulating bits of gold silver and bronze crop up well it seems maybe around 700 BC in the eastern Mediterranean but definitely by 600 BC in China and India as well and it's not like the idea spreads it seems to be independently invented in all three areas or using different technologies for exam to make them but the social situation is remarkably similar in each case what you find it in the Ganges Valley in the North Plains of China and the eastern Mediterranean you start with a bunch of little kingdoms all at war with one another often hiring mercenaries and gradually they you get some of them wind gets empires based on standing armies of course standing armies have to be paid and it makes sense that quaint edge would be invented to pay soldiers which seems to be what happened because usually there's like one or two generations where the state isn't quite involved yet but it seems you where the soldiers are that you get these things and then quickly the government jumps in and it makes sense if you think about it this way well okay here are these people operating on credit most transactions on credit who is the last person in the world you're going to want to stand credit to a heavily armed soldier is just passing through on the other hand who is the person most likely to actually have little bits of gold and silver the same guy is just been looting and pillaging so cash markets of some kind are most likely to crop up where armies are and governments get involved because it becomes this very efficient way of provisioning armies oh if you think about it it's actually one of the great mysteries of antiquity is wydad king's demand taxes in gold and silver coins I mean it might seem obvious they wanted the money but in fact they produce the money um if gold and silver would just naturally became money because of trade well the logical thing to do would be grab the gold and silver mines you have all the money and in fact Kings would do that the question then is why do you take the golden silver that you've just grabbed stamp your picture on it give it to people and then say okay everybody in the kingdom has to give me one of these back again hmm in a way it doesn't make a lot of sense but makes perfect sense if you're trying to feed an army because you know here I have fifty thousand guys heavily armed sitting on my border how do I feed them they're going to eat everything edible you know within walking distance in in a few weeks after that unless you're going to employ another fifty thousand people bringing them food all the time you're in trouble I mean other you got to send them out conquering people all the time doesn't always work or you've got a problem well the easiest solution to the problem is give them little pieces of gold and silver with your name on it which of course is the kind of thing they'd be carrying around anyway they're already these little markets on the side and then say everyone in the kingdom has to give me one of these back you automatically employ your entire population getting soldiers things they want let's talk about the sort of religious backdrop to the concepts of debt and actually how religion itself views and various religions who view debt because it's it's a pretty strong theme throughout most organized religions the Catholic Church comes most strongly to mind and in the concept of moneylenders is being sort of uniformly default view throughout so many different cultures it sort of from it runs counter to the power that moneylenders have in our society on the one hand they've been vilified for most of civilization on the other hand they have armies or can have armies and can use the force of violence to extract debts and in fact if they don't have armies they really can't you can't really do power comes from violence exactly um yeah one of the things that fascinated me as soon as I began looking into this stuff was that ambivalence um you know the fact that more people will always say morality is just paying your debts but then they'll say moneylenders are evil why do you square that um and that conversation which I started we're in talking to this person and about cancelling the debts and she's like well surely you have to pay your debts and then I sort of come up with all the reasons why that's not the case it's like it's like that conversation has been happening for five thousand years over and over and over again and in fact the great world religions it's quite the same I like to start with Plato's Republic since a lot of people have read that you know it begins in the same way they say well what is justice there's this rich guy is like this wealthy arms manufacturer manufacture keval OSes as well justice is a matter of paying your debts and not lying now Socrates blows that one away immediately he's as well say somebody lend me his sword and then he goes violently insane and wants it back to kill somebody Oh obviously I'm not going to give it to him I don't probably make up some lie as to why not um so he's alone whatever I don't know something else ed um thing kind of drops it in wanders off and the rest of the men dev saying well okay it's not dead what is it and that question you know well isn't morality just paying your debts no actually isn't um you get it in the brahmana's where they say you know life is a debt that you owe to the gods and you will look after your parents who you pay by becoming parents and you only get to the sages who created wisdom which you repay by becoming a sage and becoming wise um debt to humanity which you pay by mmm being kind of strangers and hospitable um you know the moment you examine it you know you realize they're not talking about that at all you wipe out the debt by becoming the thing you are you go to your parents but then you become a parent um in a way it's the same owing a debt to the cosmos which is what the gods really are um that doesn't make any sense how that would imply that me and the gods or me and the cosmos are two equivalent parties to a business transaction and that's absurd so you only can get rid of the depth I realize it isn't therapy as you are part of the cosmos um there's no ultimate difference in the Old Testament they start the same way that is some basis of morality in fact even the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic actually reads forgive us our debts just as we forgive our are those who owe us money of course the trick there is we don't normally forgive those who as money so it sort of implying along your Center arunya um why should God forgive you but he does because what is sacred is not to pay debts but to forgive debts and um the Old Testament New Testament so over and over again you start looking at his morality except no actually it isn't so there's a lot of moral confusion and it really run around debt exactly and the question is well why do they have to start with that if then they say it's not true and the best conclusion I could come to is exactly that situation we'll think about most people who ever lived have been told that their debtors how could that be the case you know who are they owing this to I mean to the 1% of the population who happen to be rich really do so we're so wonderful and give them so much stuff that like somehow all of those people were beholden to them clearly what we're talking about is a way of justifying relations of force and it makes sense P cause mafiosi understand this you want to shake somebody down you relate it make it a relation of debt and then you're nice to them about it and suddenly they seem like they're the ones who should be ashamed of themselves you know you say I conquered you therefore you owe me your life which I interpret literally I expects payment for your life but but no I'm a nice guy and let you off the hook for the first six months and after that terms are negotiable but I do expect that money suddenly you're the one who's running around you know feeling inadequate um however it tends to blow up in people's faces most revolt since erections in oral history are also about that and if you're going to reply to this the only really and it makes indignant because III think that is really the case that of all forms of inequality you know it does when it explodes it explodes biggest because if you say you're inferior you're a serf your slave your low caste whatever it might be um you know they'll be like set very much but if you say you should be my equal because you owe me something but you have failed you know your life is a failure you're inadequate human being it tends to make people even more angry um so when it blows up it blows a big and what do people start saying always the same thing it's like wait a minute who owes what to who I know that makes all the food around here what have you ever done that I should I do something oh but voila you're using the language of debt so suddenly political arguments are all about debt and they're kind of trapped in this language which is how people are arguing right and there's so much relevance to our current political conversation which I do want to get to but let me remind our listeners I'm speaking with David Graeber about his book debt the first 5,000 years um in in looking at history then how does how do these concepts of debt figure into and the logic of the Mafia figure into colonization you bring up the history of Madagascar and Haiti which are two very stark examples but presumably throughout the history of colonization the country that has been colonized somehow ends up in debt to the colonizer that interested just you know I mean I mean it's true and we may take it for granted but it says a lot I think about what debt really is used for absolutely and it also alludes to the example I said of feeding the army is um one of the myths that we have in our hats is that governments and markets are somehow inimical to one another they're opposite principles so that throughout the last hundred 200 years of political history we've been told we basically have to make a choice we can go for the government bureaucracy we can go for the market um in fact if you look at history discover that markets and governments are intimately tied to each other and can't really exist without each other to a large extent governments create markets markets sustain governments it's the same thing with the colonial world the first thing they do is they use tax policy just the way the ancient kings use tax policies to create markets to feed soldiers they create tax policies to create markets so general gallieni when he conquers Madagascar one of the first things he says is essentially well you know outfitting an army to conquer you is expensive colonies were supposed to sustain themselves I'm going to charge you now for the cost of your conquest I will issue paper money and everybody's got to give me a 20 Malagasy francs back again every year and it was I mean they were utterly self-conscious about what they were doing later oh they said um they called it the moralizing tax and France or the educational tax yeah I would teach them the value of work you know um so the colonized is indebted to the colonizer for being colonized exactly yes the expenses of being conquered and they did the same thing in India it was extremely intentional the idea of creating markets because they were this is ridiculous you have all these self-sustaining communities we need to have these people in debt so they will start doing wage labor so we can have exports so debt was used very very intentionally and one of the things I discovered while reading the book that really surprised me is the slave trade actually ran entirely on death it was like endless chains of indebtedness it all started with financiers in London who would then fund merchants in Bristol who had advance products to merchants in Africa um and it would go down the chain so that they would lend things to lend things and get people involved in debt traps either to force them into raiding people to get slaves or often into selling members of their own family or they people caught in these terrible debt traps which is of course the great social nightmare throughout it history is like population falls into indebtedness so severe they have to sell off members of their family or even themselves into slavery well related to that is a very fascinating part of your book about marriage and debt and I mean it's grim it's a very grim history and you know it makes one think very much about whether women were treated as currency in some places they were this is one of the things that really startled me when I was looking at the history of medieval Ireland they have a very complex system of honor price everyone has a price in honor um which is what you have to pay if you insult them all legal systems again but the highest denomination of currency are the cool malls which are slave girls you know so my first Gretl where does that come from and nobody would say I started looking around everybody is sort of oh yeah then the slave girls as if this is just completely unremarkable and the more I started looking into it the more I realized that that the slavery is essentially the most the primary form of commoditization that's where it all comes from there is a large debate in the 1920s about what they called well that they used to call bride price and they renamed bride wealth because the League of Nations is discovered in all these parts of Africa in other parts of the world that they said oh people are buying wives this is a form of slavery we should wipe this out is it the same as dowry oh it's different dowry is intergenerational so basically it's premature inheritance and it normally is goes in the other direction it goes from the bride's family to the groom's where's bride price goes from the groom's family to the prides and it goes across from the same generation and this is what anthropologist rushed in to say they said well this isn't buying a woman because you can't resell her can you you know it's just an arrangement um you know you can't sell your wife oddly enough there are one or two places in the world where you could sell your wife it's extremely unusual one of them was England Wow okay I said only 18 no 1923 was the last case it was uh technically legal for a man to auction off his wife if she'd been unfaithful but this is sort of clouded things a little but anyway the keister came in and they said no no you're not buying anybody uh it'sit's itself ceremonial thing it's and and this is true to our degree in a way what you're doing when you make these payments and what I call human economies where money is used to rearrange social relations is your saying nothing could possibly be the equivalent of your daughter and I'm giving you this money to recognize that just as you'd give the same money if somebody is killed and say well you know I never say that this is the same as your son hood you know my brother killed sorry about that um but you know this is our way of recognizing that nothing could possibly recompense you so in a way so we're recognizing a debt that can never be paid however with slavery suddenly it turns into a debt that can be paid and one of the fascinating things to want is how these human economies where you can't pay debts but at least you're you know passing currency to say that you recognize that turns into something where you can buy and sell people and you can buy and sell things and a lot of it has to do with GAD you know for example in Mesopotamia you know you you give present money large amounts of silver for when you get married to you're the bride's family and often the bride's family give it to the bride she'll actually wear it I mean all of these silver bands which are equivalent of how much should husband paid you know to show off how much he's worth and um no it's not buying someone at all except all of a sudden if the guy takes out a loan his wife is security so when Ted comes in suddenly she is transferred and you hear of this thing happening even today in Afghanistan with you poor farmers who can to earn debt to the opium warlords they offer their daughters as payment we see the sort of thing happening now let's go let's go back to we were talking earlier about bartering credit gold and silver as currency how did the introduction of money coinage when it became sort of used in a mass scale maybe around the time when currency becomes international how does it change society and also how does it change the concept of debt if it does at all once you have coinage um well it creates a crisis um whenever you first get markets coming in it actually the stuff we were just talking about is a large part of it it creates a one of the first things you always see is a crisis over slavery and prostitution um because you know in the past using currency was a way of saying that sexual relations are legitimate you know um this is a proper marriage money has changed hands suddenly you get phenomena like prostitution you get slaves were generally sexually available and there you have to distinguish the good girls and the bad girls um in fact there's a feminist historian Gerda Lerner who had a book called the invention of patriarchy she talks about this um which I used quite extensively because she points out the first reference to veils um that we have or in this middle Assyrian law where they're actually saying you know respectable married women have to wear veils prostitutes and slave girls cannot wear veils and all the penalties are not on you know the respectable women who don't but on the not respected woman who do you have to distinguish like what women are commoditize abow and what aren't so it becomes a gender crisis in a lot of cases and you see the same thing happened in ancient Greece incidentally where Athenian women actually had to wear veils most people don't know that because it sort of flies in the face of all of our prejudices about you know who's free and who's not but yeah they did um the so what's one of the first things that happens and and and one of the arguments I makes a duplicate page Sharky this is tendency to sort of revile both the great moneylenders and the great processes of prostitution comes from the sir fear that ordinary Mesopotamian farmers had that you know their daughters were going to be taken away to the temple to be turned out as as prostitutes and because of debts and people would simply run away and join these desert Nomad groups or semi-nomadic pastoralist who lives at friend of the city lock up their children so it almost starts as a form of resistance against you know great concentrations of wealth and what was going on and then it turns into a thing of itself of its own so so you have these moral crises when you know what had been money being used to rearrange relationships between people turn into a market economy same sort of crises happen over and over again now in looking at how these concepts work today I want to ask you to discuss how debtors are treated differently depending upon what class they come from so from I guess the history of civilization rich debtors have historically generally been treated very differently from poor debtors and you get some great examples such as in England and we see the same thing today absolutely Bank of America versus a person who took a bad mortgage exactly our AIG versus someone of a student loan yeah and one thing I discovered at that point about violins is critical when you have debts between equals they really are just a promise and promises of course could be renegotiated when circumstances change up people are reasonable with people they consider to be people like themselves so in the same way that if my brother is in trouble and I want to give him some money I'll say no no it's a loan you know ii don't want to embarrass him by getting the gift and um and then we forget or we remember it differently you could rearrange things and the same is true of rich people you know back to the earliest Mesopotamian documents you'll see these things saying well of course we're both gentlemen you're not going to charge the interest on this are you barrier let you see this going on and the way I put it as rich people can be incredibly kind generous and understanding when dealing with other rich people I even call it the communism of the rich one point now of course it's from each according their abilities to each according their needs we'll work something out and that's what we saw in 2008 where they made trillions of dollars worth of debt vanish through the waving of various complicated magic wands of one sort or another now when it's a debt that you owe them on the other hand suddenly its sacred and suddenly it's a question of morality its bagasse it's a question of very basic morality you should be ashamed of yourself even suggesting how could you say it's amazing and this has been true constantly I used the example of the debtors prison because it became a scandal in the in the 1600s in England that they actually had to wings to debtors prisons um and one wing was for the poor debtors and they were not even fed pizzetta's your deadbeat why should you live off the state um so unless they could figure out some way to get the relatives bringing food they would die of starvation I'd be like living in these like tiny in the sack written pestilence cells who usually last about six months before they died and the other branch was the rich debtors um who were you know allowed to have their own caterers and receive regular there's some prostitutes and manicurists deserve Orton's own often would like voluntarily submit themselves because it it was nice to get away for a little while and caulking you know how to go to the debtors prison to have some where people wouldn't bother you so much it was completely double standards in fact if the poor debtor survived at all is because they took jobs with the registers in the next cell so today we have the situation with rich debtors versus poor debtors but I want to go a little bit back say ten years ago or so when the anti-globalization movement was in full swing and the conversation around third-world debt was really big and I know you've been involved in the struggle against third-world debt and and and for forgiving of that debt for a long time and again and then this prompted the conversation that you signed in the earlier part of your book in the introduction where you talk to this lawyer and it was around third-world debt I think it's a conversation that is worth bringing up here during this interview which which is you know earlier we discussed colonization and how it has turned former colonies into debtors and in effect many of those debts are related to the debts the third-world countries find themselves and today because of the IMF so how do how does that work on a grand global scale where rich countries treat each other differently from the way poor countries who are in debt are treated that's well there's a I start the book of a proverb American proverb that you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars the bank owns you if you have the bank one hundred million dollars you own the bank and it's it's like that if you owe the United States 10 million got your Senegal and you know the United States one hundred million dollars you're in trouble um if you're Japan and the US I was you a hundred billion dollars you're also in trouble it really depends on again who's got the biggest guns and this is a way that relations of violence once again tend to become moralized and turned into a way of blaming the victim but since now the direction of the debt and who's got the guns entirely determines how it really works out um one of the interesting things about third-world debt though is it has largely been paid off uh and and it was people don't realize this is the globalization movement I like to call the globalization at anti-globalization peace we consider ourselves a form of globalization globalization movement or justice movement alter-globalization movement there many names was quite successful in a lot of ways in fact we thought it would take ten years to turn around the discourse at Washington Consensus um the way people were talking anybody who know didn't accept this full-blown total neoliberal free market will solve our problems rhetoric was was treated as literally insane and within two years you know this had changed dramatically owing to a worldwide mobilization I should emphasize that you know what happened in the US was a very minor all element of a global phenomena um really the people who created PGA which group I was with was Izapa Tisa's first of all the MST in Brazil are not a customer's Association India um who felt it was really important sort of Gandia and civil disobedience should reach places like America and Europe um there are a lot of elements out but it very quickly had extraordinary effects and and one way that that happened was through what happened in Argentina um where there was really an uprising based on those same sort of decentralized autonomous what I could call small a anarchist principles um we're by they said you know we're not even to try to like demand anything of the government the hell of the government all politicians are corrupt we're going to do things ourselves creator of assemblies um very much like what's happening now and the government sort of had to do something to read legitimate itself they were in a panic so they defaulted on the debt which set off this chain of cards which essentially destroyed the IMF the IMF has been effectively kicked out of East Asia Latin American debt is gone um Chavez played a role in helping pay it but they basically prioritize getting rid of it by any means possible Africa is still in a bit of a mess um but it it's interesting we're talking what austerity in Europe in America they're not actually talking about austerity in East Asia or a lot in America right now they have other problems but the focus has shifted and in a way that crisis has kind of come home to the metropolis where sort of top 1% in those countries are now trying to grab all the cookies as they see their debt Empire crumbling around I'm speaking with David Graeber about his a book debt the first 5,000 years and also want to talk to you about of course the Occupy movement that you have been deeply involved in in your book you bring up the question of how we approach who always want to home how we even look at these questions because we're living now at a time when people are more and more aware the legitimacy of the rich debtors versus poor debtors of the creditors versus the debtors and and you know there's whether we looking at people facing foreclosure because of bad mortgages while big banks are getting bailed out or even even other email I mean look at unemployment and low wages and people thinking of themselves as and having this greater awareness of an us-versus-them this class divided which we're seeing played out in the election as well how do you how do we grapple with these concepts because we have to address that moral seemingly unbreakable logic of you have to pay back your debts and that in the United States you point out in your book is a very deeply encoded logic much more so than another country so in a way we're battling against that logic itself indeed and then the first I mean I think in 2008 they let the cat out of the bag in ways that they don't want us to remember but it's going to be difficult for them to do um there's a whole bunch of stories that we totally sadly had to accept that markets are self-sustaining and the only way to organize anything all we realize that wasn't true they're not self-sustaining um they could only be sustained by constant government support and intervention on the line that you know that central capitalism isn't even really trying to justify itself by saying it's a good system in the sense of um something that will cause generalized prosperity and fairness they're just saying no other system could work at all and now we realize that you know that line these people might not be very nice but they're super competent well that's not true but the major thing we learned is that debts don't really have to be repaid we are moving into a I call you regime a virtual money and no everybody talks about this as if it's something new made possible by computers it's not um as I was pointing out it's the original form of money money has been virtual through much of world history and we know what that means in historical terms this is where I would one reason I wrote this book is I think this is a very appropriate time to point this out to people what we saw in 2008 is the first Cataclysm caused by the fact that we have a virtual money system but we're not treating it in the way we're treating antiquated terms or at least for poor people you know as as if money were a thing a commodity something there's a scarce resource you know that we just don't have any money we've run out of money and we make money money is a series of promises we can make any kind of promises to each other that we want to make throughout history in any period where you have credit money as the dominant form well people recognize that so they put safeguards in place to protect people from essentially falling into debt traps because once money is something that's a social contract you can what's to stop people from just infinitely generating this stuff and enslaving the poor um in the entry release they had that cancellation you know either Kings would cancel the dat's white-white the slate clean or they do believe biblical soluble EES Middle Ages they had usery laws or both in Islam and Christianity they eliminated but interest taking entirely in debt peonage whereas in China they were doing more debt cancellation again back then um and Buddhists also created pawnshops it's a bit long story great um but you know there's always something a period of virtual money you can do now the fascinating thing is that this time around we try to do the exact opposite way around here they create the IMF to protect creditors against debtors sure enough the entire world is falling into debt traps we have a design and people are blaming themselves so you have to realize that no this is an historical phenomenon us happened over and over again um and and when I just point out to people look most people in history have been debtors does that mean most human beings who've ever lived have been vastly inadequate and should be ashamed of themselves um it's a definition of utopian system that when something goes wrong it says there's something wrong with the people but it's all of them so that's where I would start you know what we we did it backwards and we're watching the predictable results you know when Aristotle or Hammurabi or Confucius or thing were the worst thing that could possibly happen is basically this entire population falls into that and if Aristotle were here today he would find the distinction between being so indebted that you sell yourself to work for others and being so indebted that you read to yourself to work for others to be something of a legal distinction at best yep there is a way out and we're going to have to look at historical examples I end with a call for Jubilee partially just to be provocative but partially to point out that you know this things like this have happened before and there are solutions right well what you bring up in the near the end of your book which is interesting is you you you quote now Ferguson who refers to the industrious poor because even defenders of capitalism have to ultimately justify capitalism as something that will theoretically benefit everybody but they make a distinction between the industrious poor versus the non industrious poor people who are just not useful to society apparently exactly because they spend their time you know taking care of each other meaning if they're poor they deserve to be poor which is what the logic is yeah and and I saw that phrase over and over again while finance systems are ways of moving money from the idle rich to the industrious poor because they're good poor people and they're bad poor people and the good poor people are the ones who want to be capitalists basically um and and I think that debt has allowed us to create this morality which is perverse if you think about it because what the last thing we need in this world right now is people to work even more people are working way too much it's destroying the ecosystem it's the growth levels that are demanded by our current economic system are clearly unsustainable it strikes me that if there are people out there who are taking care of each other and having a reasonable life and not you know sort of increasing this endless massive expansion that's destroying the world maybe they should be considered the pioneers of a new type of economy Hitler actually wouldn't destroy the planet so let's talk about the Occupy movement and how it has changed the conversation pretty radically just in the last six months amazing you've been involved in the the origins of this movement I was doing a lot of the early organizing meeting about 80 other people I would say whereas the sort of people who started putting the thing together in August in New York and how does the Occupy movements language and its framing of the current political system address the concept of debt and and and and the content capitalism if you will in in the in the that the fits within the history of written art out well do you I miss interesting I drew I was in New York in the summer I I was doing a lot of book promotions and I was also doing some of this organizing and I tried to keep them apart you know you don't want use a movement to saw your book and you don't want to like impose your vision on a movement but on the other hand it was kind of hard to keep them apart because every time I would go to speak to a audience where there's any number of young people about the history of Dada now two or three people would come up to me afterwards and say do you think there's any way we could get some kind of movement going around student loan issues mm-hmm it was just everyone was it just seems so unjust the situation that people are in and when the thing the occupation actually began a Zuccotti Park my friend Marissa the videographer Marissa Holmes was was one of the key organizers also went around to sort of interviewing everybody she didn't already know would come they're asking know why are you here to help tell me your story um another friend of mine Chris put up this we are the 99% tumblr page where we got similar stories and it was remarkably uniform now people were saying well look I I I'm one of the good kids I did what I was told I work really hard I studied hard I got into college I got good grades now here I am $40,000 in debt there's no jobs why are there no jobs because these guys who didn't play by the rules at all trash the economy and now I'm told I am a deadbeat and I'm a bad person because I owe them the money I mean again who owes what to here this is ridiculous um and it's that very no sense of humiliation blowing up in your face again just as it has throughout world history and of being told that you're in the wrong when clearly or not and but when you talk about capitalism it's very interesting one of the things that fast me was the alliance between labor unions and and working people in general and these people who are kids who just got out of college and are unemployed normally a bunch of unemployed college graduates worried about their student loan debts are not the sort of people say a transit worker in New York is going to most identify with however here we have the transit workers union like suing the police over the arrest buses and you're totally coming down on our side aggressively um and I think it has something to do have a shift in the nature of capitalism itself which is less and less about you know extracting value through the wage at all it's much more about financial manipulation which through alliance of the state I mean it's looking a lot more like classic definitions of feudalism you know which is a directed euro political extraction but I way I put it in the new book I say well look you know you have this famous line from Eisenhower what's good for General Motors is good for America you know what he meant was they were making so much profits they took sixty percent of the profits in taxes used it to build roads and highways which you know about the auto industry and you know that allowed that to redistribute lots of make lots of jobs redistribute lots of kickbacks and bribes and you know the economy flowed um now what do we have we have General Motors makes no money at all in cars it's all in the finance department all of these almost all profits are made in finance these guys are paying no taxes whatsoever instead they take some of the profits from the finance bribe the politicians so allow them to write the laws to take even more money through finance so I think the average American it's hard to get the numbers is paying like twenty percent perhaps of their income to the finance industry directly it's taken out of their pockets and who suffers the most and who can can't get out of these things well the students who stuck with student loans and the working poor we're the subprime mortgage victims who are the payday loan victims so suddenly they're in a very similar situation well finally I want to ask you about the concept you brought up earlier which is that markets need government to function government needs market you're a self-described anarchist how does how do we view than what is happening today because in so many ways when the left critiques the equivalents of capitalism and democracy in which which capitalist like to do the democracy is considered equivalent to government and it's consider we cannot have you know we cannot have our democracy be able to function unless we have a government so we try to separate government from the economy in as much as or at least have the government have more control of the economy but how you know how do you view it it's interesting the word democracy is much debated and a lot of anarchists actually would totally disagree with me on this one they said they say the same thing democracy is a form of government therefore you have to be against it but if you look at the word democracies it's fascinating like or like any word that everybody has to be for agrees they like everybody has a different definition of it and no one can agree on what it means but if you look at the history of the word democracy um I've been going through what the founding fathers have to say about democracy and actually when I like to annoy people I always point out nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence to say anything about America being a democracy was before strongly against democracy which they took to mean self-rule by popular assemblies which started to happen a little bit right before during the revolution or these big assemblies they call - you know call boycotts so the Patriots were involved and they were horrified but what happened I was reading this great account by governor Morris is a he's from New Jersey one of the early Patriots they called this assembly in New York - for a boycott and suddenly people started to made a debating what the future government would be like with the aristocratic or Democrat I can hear that this is horrible the mob begins to think and reason what will this mean everyone's terrified um you know they were horrified at the idea of popular democracy and they created a constitution which they called a republic after Rome which was nothing if not nothing like a democracy in order to suppress the danger somehow around the 1830s and this happened the same thing happened in France the same thing after England Canada they renamed these Republic's that were created to suppress democracy as democracies largely because the franchise widened enough that people called themselves Democrats kept winning elections so suddenly everybody was a Democrat before it had been a term of abuse the interesting question is why did people like this idea which had been you know everybody had the literate classes that the ruling classes had hated so um and I've been trying to understand that means still the case today most Americans love the idea of democracy but you know is democracy just a matter of choosing politicians to run a government most Americans hate politicians and are kind of sketchy at the idea of government so what is it they're thinking when they're for democracy clearly has something to do with the idea of individual freedom and the idea that we should be governing our own affairs even though it's not clear exactly how so I think it's quite conducive um crime thinker so my favorite n Turkish propagandas put it most succinctly they said well you know everybody loves democracy everybody hates the government anarchism is just democracy without the government and and do you think that ultimately this will be the Occupy movements biggest question to struggle with how do we envision a new system of economy and hence government I think so I mean we're what we've started with this is what we wanted to happen during the days of the globalization movement we thought we come up with these models and that they're thought of as anarchist process but they come as much or more out of feminism out of certain spiritual traditions or cobbled together their kind of systems such as decentralized consensus um that can work without coercion that could work without a police force well I always say an anarchist form of organization is any form of organization that would not require guys with weapons to show up at a certain point and say everybody shut up and do what you're told so any system that where you don't need those guys could be an anarchist system so we're trying to create our decision-making methods that could work without violent enforcement um and you know work has been done this when we wanted people to learn because when people find out they tend to get excited and it didn't really happen back in 2000 because it kind of got contained within the activist ghettos you know activists started all using this but other people didn't and what's happening occupies it you know ordinary people are suddenly learning how to do this is very exciting well on that note David Gruber I want to thank you so much for joining us today oh thanks for having me

Channel: Uprising with Sonali

Views: 48,042

Rating: 4.9139299 out of 5

Keywords: David Graeber, Debt, Occupy Wall Street, Sonali Kolhatkar, Uprising, KPFK, Pacifica

Id: zSnReXI4gKk

Length: 53min 9sec (3189 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/CeauxViette]

Here is the work in question.

And an excellent companion piece.

[u/[deleted]]

This is an amazing book btw. It will completely change the way you think about human societies and economics