Review of Graeber: Part I (Greiner 2015)

‘Debt’ as Social Value and Moral Force: An Analysis of Graeber

The social arrangements by which humans organize their lives require common codes—such as language and law—and mechanisms for the preservation of culture and the maintenance of order.  According to David Graeber, the concept of debt as a matter of social morality, by no means limited to the sphere of economics, has for the past 5,000 years served such an organizing function for most societies.  In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011; 2014), Graeber presents a sweeping ethno-historical account of the ways in which ‘debt’ has been culturally encoded and socially constructed, that is to say, normalized, as one of the primary means of ordering social relations and the very meaning of morality.  Debt becomes, to borrow a term from Althusser, a kind of ideological state apparatus.  Debt sets the terms and conditions for not only economics but ‘exchange’ at every level of human interaction and sociality.  Debt is, in Graeber’s account, a kind of zero-sum barometer by which all of human social life and cultural existence is measured, counted, and conducted in every sense of the terms.  The language and logic of debt set the standards for the ordering and enforcement of social, political, economic, and cultural organization.  Debt is seen as the logic of social life—period.

Far from a product of amicable cultural consensus, this logic of debt as the main ordering apparatus for the whole of socioeconomic and political life is in Graeber’s book a matter of systematic, achieved social violence.  That is to say, it is by violence and the ongoing and pervasive threat of violence that the apparatus of debt as an ordering force maintains a stranglehold on the rights and dignity of all of humankind.  This is not for Graeber hyperbole: The logic of debt maintains absolute rule by violence and force at every level of social organization—through various forms and formations of slavery, conquest, and war.

This essay examines some of Graeber’s key claims in detail and it especially explores the ways in which a cultural logic of debt maintained by structures of language and morality are in Graeber’s account rendered at once problematic and in fact the source of much social unrest and disorder.  Graeber’s intellectual project depends on a certain conception of violence and power in sustaining systems of subjugation in terms of debt.  Language, morality, and questions of sociality and social contract figure heavily in this account.

The Language of Debt

Language, literally and in almost every other sense, sets the terms and conditions for social interaction and cultural exchange.  Human society is unimaginable without a clear and mutually intelligible means for exchanging ideas and maintaining relationships whether economic or interpersonal.  From this fact it follows that much of the value that a society places on certain activities and the meaning it ascribes to various types and forms of exchange can be seen to be reflected in language use, even if not especially at the basic level of everyday, ‘ordinary’, communication.  Graeber’s book is very much informed by this phenomenological and materialist understanding of language.  Because language is the means of the transmission of cultural values, Graeber argues that it is essential to look at debt primarily as a matter of language, and moreover in terms of its historical use and encoding over time.  Most people, Graeber argues, have a rather ill-defined sense of what debt in fact actually is, what debt is, and what is means to exist in a state and condition of ‘debt’:

The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.  If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. (5)

And the victim, as Graeber’s account makes clear, is more often than not a person who is in some way economically disempowered (e.g., racial or ethnic minorities, women, slaves, etc.) and thus placed on unequal footing in terms of any business arrangement.  For this reason, a considerable portion of Graeber’s analysis deals directly with matters of language—the social construction of debt as a legitimating moral force, a force that lends credence to the notion that all of human economy is a matter of calculation and monetary exchange.  Graeber’s book is in many fundamental ways an elucidation of the concept of debt as a cultural imaginary, a sociohistorical analysis of the construction of the term in the ordering of human affairs.  A debt according to such logic is a matter for marketplace values and precisely quantified accounts.  Human economies become transformed into an economy of the market.  Under social conditions structured and informed by marketplace logic, the primary language becomes not so much the language of human relations but the “language of the business deal” Graeber 2014:13).  Such language leads to all manner of problems in the moral arena.

This, for Graeber, is the central question in the book: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?  What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?” (13)  Morality is for Graeber the central matter in understanding human constructions of debt as the force of economic and social organization.  It is not so much the matter of economics as such that Graeber finds problematic.  Economics is a necessary and vital part of any ordered (as opposed to chaotic) human society.  Even capitalism has its redeeming qualities in the critique advanced in the book.  What Graeber is taking issue with is the reduction of all of human social life to a matter of money, “money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene” (14).  It is not so much money as such that is in Graeber’s view the source of all evil, but rather the reduction of all basic human affairs and social relations to a question of currency values and quantifiable exchange, established by rules and enforced by violence.  Graeber sees a direct link between violence and quantification and he advances this link as the “source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt” (14).  Graeber’s analysis of debt is concerned at every level with the matter of morality and why our understanding, or misunderstanding, of the nature of debt and its place in human relations is responsible for so much if not all of the disarray and upheaval that characterizes the state of life now and over the course of the past 5,000 years.  

Marketplace Morality

Graeber’s project, then, is really at root an ethical project.  Graeber writes as an anthropologist and as an historian.  It is not difficult to understand that Graeber’s frame of analysis is concerned with the structures of human economies and the conditions for moral relations, what Graeber and other anthropologists figure in terms of mutuality and sociality.  Chapter five is a core chapter that sets forth Graeber’s moral argument and ties it back to the questions of language and the cultural encoding of debt as an absolute value and ordering mechanism in human relations.  “To tell the history of debt, then,” Graeber explains, “is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it” (Graeber 2014:89).  After delineating three systems or modalities of “moral accounting” (communism, exchange, and hierarchy), and the ways in which people order their economic relations differently according to the logic inherent to each modality, Graeber arrives at the core of his analysis which is a definition of debt.  Debt, Graeber writes:

is a very specific thing and it arises from very specific situations.  It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight. (120)

Key to this description of debt is its conditional nature and the possibility of settling an account, of balancing an otherwise unequal relationship between two or more people.  It is not so much in Graeber’s account that a debt is something that can or should be simply quantified and precisely calculated and that one a debtor should repay a creditor exactly a sum that is owed.  Such logic, again, is the language of the “business deal.”  What makes a debt a divisive and potentially destructive and morally corrosive arrangement is the way in which a debt can be not just maintained but enforced, especially through slavery, conquest, and war.  Debt and obligation are for Graeber two different matters, the first a matter of social violence and the other a potentially productive force in the advancement of sociality and good moral relations.  A society based on debt, as Graeber’s book argues, is a society predicated on the logic of calculation, an all but exclusively impersonal exchange of credits and debits in the interest of honoring that which one owes to another, not so much as a matter of morality and maintaining good relations as a matter of paying that which is due, or paying with one’s life (social violence and social death in one form or another).

So intrinsically interwoven is the language of debt with the logic of our lives that, in Graeber’s view, it has become almost impossible for people to imagine a society based on any other terms.  Graeber argues that the only way to regain a sense of social control and indeed sanity in terms of human relations is to begin to think of other ways of living and connecting to structures and networks of exchange that can foster more balanced and equal partnerships in the interest of individual satisfaction and the integrity of the greater good.  Is his vision for a more human economy perhaps a touch idealistic, even utopian?  Perhaps.  Leaving aside the question of whether idealism or utopian visions are by nature thoughts best forgotten or disregarded as ridiculous, or at best just not worth thinking too seriously about, I would like to observe that Graeber’s book does add value to the matter of advancing serious critical thought about the nature of economics and the cultural force that mediates this reality.  There is certainly nothing absolute about economic orders and it is always possible for humans to decide to arrange their lives and societies differently as interests change and environmental circumstances necessitate intelligent adaptations.

I do not think it is at all reasonable to suppose that any society now or possible world in the future can ever hope to do without debt—or without economics, for that matter.  Who can say what the future might hold for money?  Perhaps one day, on this world or another, humans will manage to do without it.  At this point, it is well to consider seriously what the matter of debt means for humans as a society and as a species that depends on mutual exchange in the interest of personal satisfaction and the maintenance of a greater good—in other words, a commons, however one wishes to conceive the term.  If a debt is truly the “perversion of a promise,” then perhaps the more healthy world of the future that any reasonable human could hope to achieve is one where every person does the best that he or she can, and systematic slavery on the basis of unequal exchange becomes a matter for the history books.  Who knows what kind of world might be written about by historians and anthropologists in the next 5,000 years?  With any luck, it will be a world a little less obsessed with accounts and a little more focused on doing one’s best for the greater good.