I actually read Graeber’s book – “Debt: The first 5,000 years” – recently. I enjoyed it. Very well-researched and some interesting, counterintuitive insights. (Favorite chapter title: “Honor and Degradation: Or, on the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization”) Having said that, among other issues, two things that nagged at me after reading it were:
(1) Graeber makes no attempt to come up with an alternative to the financial system we have now. Basically, he points out the problems with debt and our financial system but offers no suggestions on how to improve things. I read an interview with him and this criticism came up and he said, in so many words, “That wasn’t the purpose of the book. I’m an anthropologist, not an economist.” Fair enough, but… when one criticizes something, isn’t it fair to ask what that person’s alternative would look like? In Graeber’s eyes, clearly it’s not.
(2) Debt jubilees – which Graeber is clearly fond of – already exist, in effect, at the individual, corporate and government levels. It’s called bankruptcy in the first two instances, and default in the last. We don’t have debtors prisons so when someone declares bankruptcy it results in, essentially, a “personal debt jubilee.” The debt disappears (for the most part) and the main penalty is that that person has difficulty obtaining more debt in the future (and might lose some of the goods accumulated through the use of the debt). But this shouldn’t be an issue in Graeber’s eyes because, well… debt, as we have come to define it, is bad. Likewise, if an African nation that has borrowed too much wants to default, it can. The only penalty will be that no one’s going to lend it more money for quite some time. But, again, that should be fine with Graeber – the debt was bad in the first place so we shouldn’t be loading them down with more of it. My point is that we already have a very fair and humane way of dealing with people who accumulate too much debt, so this notion of a wide-scale debt jubilee seems unnecessary. After all, the vast majority of people out there have no problems either financially or morally with paying back what they owe.
So, while I enjoyed Graeber’s book, it was kind of a head scratcher in a few ways. Other than showing how our notions of money, debt, and trade have changed over time – and disproving some long-held beliefs – it offered little in the way of enlightenment regarding how we should be dealing with things differently going forward. Of course, perhaps one shouldn’t expect much in this regard from a self-described anarchist. But it is a pretty good book.
