Graeber 'Debt' analysis II (Greiner 2015)

A key part of Graeber’s analysis of debt is the extent to which violence has been linked to debt and effectively encoded at the most basic level of organizational logic that structures and defines the way in which humans live and have lived for most of human history (the past 5,000 years).  Debt is linked to violence due to structural forms of unequal relationships between otherwise at least potentially equal human beings.  Violence works by the exercise of power by one person over another, and it is through networks of exchange, based on structured inequality, that power is formed and violence in turn forced and enforced.  This “legacy of violence,” as Graeber terms it, “has twisted everything around us.”  Violence—epistemic and social violence—due to the logic of debt, as expressed socially in terms of the “language of the business deal” and the culture of calculation, has corroded sociality at every level of human experience.  This violence is pervasive and has in many ways been rendered largely invisible.  The cultural logic of debt and the forms of social violence that enforce it have become normalized and go for the most part unnoticed and unquestioned.  This legacy of violence has come to define social existence in a fundamental way.  Every institution has been affected by and largely organized and defined by the logic of debt and the legacy of violence that supports and is in turn supported by it.  This is central to Graeber’s argument and illustrated in all of his examples.  Graeber writes:

It’s not just that war, conquest, and slavery played such a central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected.  The story told at the end of Chapter Seven, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like. (Graeber 2014:385-86)

This passage may be profitably compared with the following remarks about how slavery works by abstracting people from their social networks and relationships with others—all the organizing factors that define social existence and personal identity for any person as a moral being worthy of rights and respect.   Slavery is in Graeber’s account a process of extracting individuals from meaningful networks of social identity—one term he uses in this connection is human economies (which is in turn contrasted with the marketplace economies that operate according to the logic of calculation and business deal language).  Slavery in whatever form it takes is for Graeber social disempowerment, and it can be understood as “that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt.”  “Slavery,” Graeber continues, “is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163).  Slavery converts free human beings into indentured servants.  It does this through a structured economy enforced through violence and maintained through war.  Graeber says this is “a practice as old as civilization,” and it is a hard claim to refute.  Yet it is a practice as old as a certain model of civilization, one that has unfortunately come to define human civilizations over such a long and pervasive span of time that one can be excused for thinking that this is the way that humans simply are and that there is no hope for any other possible economic system or sociocultural way of life.  Graeber as an anthropologist, however, knows as well as anyone that this is not the way that all human societies have ordered their existence or structured their affairs.

It is not human nature but rather the perpetuation of certain models of human behavior and certain codes of language and law and institutional enforcement over time that has placed debt and slavery as the seemingly normal and natural definition for what is sadly and not without irony called “the human condition.”  If debt is the perversion of a promise and if slavery is the abstraction of a human being from meaningful networks of exchange, then it certainly stands to reason that these are conditions that can change.  Civilization can in every sense of the word always advance and evolve.  The next 5,000 years need not come to affirm the legacy of violence that has characterized human life on the planet from bad mistakes in the past.  Debt need not be destiny.  And slavery should not in any society or meaningful human culture come to be seen by any thinking person as simply the way that things are.