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A review by lakmus
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
4.0
Graeber's books seem to have the unfortunate tendency to be fascinating but completely evasive to my memory – it seems world-changing while you are reading them, and then you put it down and you entirely forget everything, because there is just so much goddamn detail. I hope something sticks to the subconscious, or something.
Graeber presents an argument that our understanding of what is debt and what it means has shifted over the millenia. The key transformation that happened a number of times is between the state where debt is understood as something inevitable in human life but in an unquantifiable way, so that these debts can't all really be payed off – to a state where debts *are* very much quantified, so quantified in fact that we can buy and sell anything and everything, ourselves and others included, and the payment of debt is expected and enforced. Math and violence are a bad combination. The idea that the notion of personal rights and liberties descend from the same school of thought that justified chattel slavery is disturbing.
There are a few chapters focused on laying out this argument, supported by a mix of history and anthropology, and a few more reviewing the history of money in a few key stages since its invention.
Graeber presents an argument that our understanding of what is debt and what it means has shifted over the millenia. The key transformation that happened a number of times is between the state where debt is understood as something inevitable in human life but in an unquantifiable way, so that these debts can't all really be payed off – to a state where debts *are* very much quantified, so quantified in fact that we can buy and sell anything and everything, ourselves and others included, and the payment of debt is expected and enforced. Math and violence are a bad combination. The idea that the notion of personal rights and liberties descend from the same school of thought that justified chattel slavery is disturbing.
There are a few chapters focused on laying out this argument, supported by a mix of history and anthropology, and a few more reviewing the history of money in a few key stages since its invention.