Debt - The First 500 Years

Chapters 1-6

• Barter economies globally and historically only occur between strangers and not bedfellows, ’ true, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consider each other strangers,vbut they’re usually people who might as well be strangers - that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility or trust, or the desire to develop ongoing relations.’ - consider flatmates and roommates who exist in the same space vs those who engage in commoning on a local scale… How to encourage commoning practices within eg flat buildings, streets etc. ‘if one cares enough about someone - a neighbour, a friend - to wish to deal with her fairly and honestly, one will inevitably also care about her enough to take her individual needs, desires and ‘the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.’
• on debt as guilt - how what often makes me feel better about not thriving under capitalism, not ‘succeeding’ or not being ‘productive’, is to imagine myself as without guilt, I’m existing, and there’s nothing more ‘required’ of me as a precedent to life, I don’t even have to be happy, I just have to be.
• this sort of economic anthropology is vital learning that isn’t offered
• to pay == to pacify, to appease
• Barbarian Law Codes, monetary penalty for theft, compensations
• If it’s money only in the case of sin and wrongdoing, a restorative/abolitionist perspective goes nicely hand in hand with abolition of money
• “we owe everything we are to others … If we were to imagine what we owe them as a a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, debt is by definition something we could at least imagine paying back. It is strange enough to wish to be square with one’s parents- it rather implies that one would not wish to think of them as parents anymore. Would we really want to be square with all humanity?”
• You both do owe everyone everything and don’t owe anyone anything…
• Whether or not ‘primordial debt’ is how money was established and developed, it explains why we are so willing to continue to go along with these myths.
• ‘if there’s anything more propesterous than claiming to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiations with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side’ EG on why prisons, police, and any moral authority shouldn’t exist
• ‘we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it) but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it.’
• It doesn’t have to be so negative - not necessary to frame as ‘debt’ what can be purpose, responsibility etc
• Emile Dürkheim, how religions are reflections of interdependence in societies, god == society
• But the problem being that we’ve commonly attributed society to state or nation rather than ‘humanity’
• ‘we owe it to the nation that formed us’
• logic of the market, not owing anything to anyone, and logic of the state, owing everything to the state, a false dichotomy, as markets and states are inextricably bound
• In peasant revolts since ancient times destroying the bookkeeping records of debt, is the hardiness of our tech currently actually making it harder to revolt as they backup financial data? Do financial institutions keep hard copies?
• situation into account. Even if you do swap one thing for another, you are likely to frame the matter as a gift.’
• baseline communist, communist amongst fily and friends, only hierarchical in the abstract
• pg 114: markets as mathematical models abstracting away much of the reality
• market ‘balance’ conflated too often with ‘justice’
• where abilities and needs grossly disproportionate safeguards are established to avoid forming new hierarchies
• ‘to thank someone suggests that {they} might not have acted that way’
• ‘creating a ground of socialibility amongst strangers can often require an elaborate process of testing the others’ limits by helping oneself to their possessions’
• no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt as then it wouldn’t be a debt but simply a demand ??
• many words for debt are synonyms for guilt or sin
• a debt as an ‘exchange that had not been brought to completion’
• communism as a state of ‘permanent mutual indebtedness’ meaning there is no debt to each other at all actually.
• ‘what we owe to each other’ and how ‘the good place’ as a good set of informal lessons on this
• human interactions are not all exchanges
• please and thankyou, not Universal
• gestures of acknolegment, a recognition of common humanity
• ‘when you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word please you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.’ social obligation to comply despite claiming they only have to do it ‘if it pleases you’ … Please and thank you aren’t actually that important, thank you - think - I will remember what you did for me (usually not true) Much obliged - I am in your debt
• You’re welcome - releases the debt (but does it?)
• ‘i owe you one’ ‘no you don’t/I owe you’ -middle class morality, deference to authority link to middle class being actually working class or ruling class, middle class morality bridges this gap and forms a homogeneous mass in the middle, giving the impression of less division in society - dangerous !! - dictating whomst has ‘morals’ isn’t always kindness and compassion type values but a middle-class sensibility, a sense of morality based on politeness, professionalism, etc, ew
• ‘middle class etiquette insists that we are all equals, but it does so in a very particular way’
• ‘a set of assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another’
• pg125 satirical conception of planetary bodies and elements relations in Form of debts and obligations
• pg146 ‘we have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, in a human economy-’ (EG one where currency is only for blood debts/marriage debts)‘-one needs to first rip it from it’s context.’
• ‘spheres of exchange’, ordinary exchanges of women vs social currency exchange vs rights of women … Hard and rare to “turn chickens into cows”
• tsav, societies terrified of secret cannibals improving their tsav and gaining superhuman abilities, gaining a flesh-debt from societies of witches, mbatsav
• men with ‘strong hearts’/charisma manipulate debt to turn extras into treasures/wives. Assumption that male elders are witches and young men dying paid flesh debts - flesh debt being their greatest fear, as pawning becoming slavery commonly nearby

Chapter Seven: Honor and Degradation

• “there is every reason to believe that slavery, with it’s unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere”
• other acts of violence that do this context-rip, eg indigenous children taken to residential schools ripped from context
• “What happens, then, when the same process happens more slowly?”
• “men who live by violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed with honor”
• “the notion of honor seemed to echo a defiant insistence that financial debts are not really the most important ones”
• “reconstructing this history reveals how much our basic concepts of freedom and morality took place within institutions” (that we’d rather not think of at all ((slavery)))
• regaining what is stripped of you in a violent system through working within the bounds of that system - “the need to argue in the master’s language” - the flip side of the masters tools
• “What do all these circumstances [ways people become slaves] have in common? Al-Wahid’s answer is striking in its simplicity: one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died.”
• “a slave could not own debts, because in almost every important sense, a slave was dead” - and this was enshrined explicitly in Roman law that they were dead, the same in some West African customs
• various cultural zombie horror stories originating from slavery as “living death”
• Slavery and Social Death, it is not a moral relation, based purely on violence or threat of violence, a slave has no moral relations except the binding to their master, a state of utter degradation. But being able to enslave becomes the foundation of the master’s honour, so they’re always on the precipice of “debt of honour”
• “Honor is surplus dignity”, a “heightened consciousness of power, and it’s dangers” as directly stripped their honour/power from others
• “the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money”
• Barbarian Law Codes and fines directly mapped to injury sustained, but key to which injury mattered was “face” - honour and integrity in others’ eyes and ability to protect themselves from degradation - honour precisely quantified, varied by station of respect/power, pay blood price + Honor price
• “a violation of the honor not of the victim, but of the man who should have been able to protect them”
• “if he [a nobleman]” allowed himself to be satirized and did not take the offending poet to court, his price could be lowered to that of a commoner”
• “one’s oath and standing in law were also determined by one’s honor price”
• “A free woman was honoured at precisely 50 percent of the price of her nearest male relative” patriarchy
• “Unless, that is, she was an independent landholder” land ownership
• “Unless she was a woman of easy virtue, in which case it was zero, since she had no honor to outrage” sex work dignity sex-shaming
• “the lord’s honor price was notched upwards as a result if gathering another dependent: in other words, he literally absorbs his new vassal’s honor into his own” dependency
• “The value of a slave is that of the honor that has been extracted from them” as slaves not always used for the labour they might be capable of, it isn’t measured in labour power as it often is with serfs and workers
• pg175 pay monetary price AND give woman to slavery -> as a disgrace -> “a memorial to the payment of the honor price” — “Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot’s honor”, the monetary is equivalent to the display of honor transference from the family to the abbot
• “A man’s ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor.” so the biggest blow is to pass those women into degrading slavery of another
• in “a human economy, where money was used for social purposes” you can trade in “specific quantities of human dignity”, incomparable to basic goods, so when you start using the same money for these it’s “moral crisis”
• ancient Greek ‘tīme’ used much like Irish ‘honor price’, refers to both “glory of the warrior” and compensation paid for injury/insult, but through time it began to refer to price as well as a contempt for markets. Modern Greek ‘timi’ refers to honor as characterised by open generosity and disregard of money, as well as to literal price.
• “Masculine Honor is caught up not even so much in a man’s ability to protect his womenfolk as in his ability to protect their sexual reputations”
• “What happens, for instance, when the same money once used to arrange marriages and settle affairs of honor can also be used to pay for the services of prostitutes?”
• Sumerian texts 3000BC to 1200BC show the gradual sequestering of women away from public life - this is a backwards step that is still possible in sophisticated society. Can be observed in Indian and Chinese history too
• Sumerian example due to desert pastoralists bringing patriarchial cultures, but this is a very local explanation that doesn’t show broader patterns. Feminist scholarship generally emphasises social importance of war and the centralisation of state that accompanies it. Also, “conquest leads to taxes”, taxes lead to markets, and in cases with honor debt, markets then lead to women as a commodity, with increased reaction on the part of men ensuring ‘their’ women could not be traded
• “[B]ridewealth tends to be typical of situations where population is relatively thin, land not a particularly scare resource, and therefore, politics are all about controlling labor. Where population is dense and land at a premium, one tends to instead find dowry” so the bride’s family contributes to her land/wealth/money
• bridewealth as ” “the price of a virgin” - not a mere metaphor, since the illegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her father” Pg 179
• merchant’s daughters often took dowry to go into business in their own right or as partners with husbands
• nuzi - brideprice equal to slave girl price
• anthropologists stress that paying bride wealth is not the same as buying a wife, as they can’t then sell on their wife, BUT a mesopotamian husband could take out a loan with his wife as surety so they could then be taken away as a debt pawn along with children and cattle - (‘at least for a poor man’) his creditworthiness tied directly to his domestic authority, relations becoming property rights
• family members as commodities in general. ‘dispose of daughters’ as brides to work in husband’s households, hire out people as advance payment. Work off your debt == hire out labour as property
• pg181-182 on early Sumerian attitudes to prostitution, “the origins of commercial prostitution appear to have been caught up in a peculiar mixture of sacred(or once-sacred) practice, commerce, slavery, and debt.” #sex-work
• “Resistance, in the ancient Middle East, was always less a politics or rebellion than a politics of exodus, of melting away with one’s flocks and families - often before both were taken away. There were always tribal people living on the fringes.” - in good times the cities swelled and in worse the fringes filled with refugees, who would eventually form alliances and sweep back in to the cities as conquerors. They were often incredibly patriarchial in ‘protection’ of daughters and wives, as “made possible by, but at the same time was a protest against, this very commoditisation of people in the cities that they fled.”
• “Babylon […] as not only the cradle of civilization itself, but also the Place of Whores”, Rome as Babylon, Saint Peter
• “voices of the father and the ancient poor”
• punishment aimed at ‘nonrespectable’ women who DID veil
• ‘respectabrespectable’ women then are those whose bodies can’t be bought or sold
• “Women who could be exchanged for money, on the other hand, must be instantlyrecognisable as such”
• China’s history sees continuous unsuccessful campaign to end brideprice and debt slavery, periodic scandal over ‘markets in daughters’
• India’s caste system makes rich/poor differences explicit, with high dowries for rich daughters and brideprice for poor
• “twice-born” protected from debt bondage but for the rural poor debt was institutionalised dispatching daughters to brothels and laundries abd kitchens
• classical Greek literature the most rich and detailed source on this stuff
  • heroes and epics, pursuit of honour and gifted treasures
  • tīme meaning both honour and price, without contradiction
  • Greek coinage first used to pay soldiers and fees to the government
  • became a mark of civic independence for city-states to produce coinage
  • by fifth century they’re in common use and the agora not only for public debate and assemblr assemble but also fir trade
  • revolutionary factions and populist demand for radical debt relief
  • cities tended to limit or abolish debt peonage but ship off children of the poor to military colonies overseas which became conduits for the slave trade
  • aristocrats disdaindd the market as it was honorable to raise everything on your own estate and never handle cash
  • they still placed gifts, generosity and honor above commercial exchange
  • pederasty or man-boy love was seen as quintessentially aristocratic and often an initiation into high ranks, so democratic polis saw it as politically subversive - ,Ade homosexuality illegal, but widely practised
  • a woman’s honor had come to be defined almost exclusively in sexual terms
  • veiling also adopted in Greece
  • money as a symbol of degradation, ransomed prisoners branded with the mark of their currency
  • ‘the possibility of the utter degradation of a human being was in no sense a threat to heroic honor - in a way, it was its very essence’
  • ending up enslaved - ‘Such were the perils of war. All this was essential to the nature of martial honor. A warrior’s honor is his willingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur is directly proportional to how far he can fall.’
  • was it the commercial money that threw off the ancient Greek social hierarchy or was it the greed for money
  • ‘it was desirable because it was non-discriminating’
  • ‘money introduced a democratisation of desire’
  • when it switched from a want to a need it was a profound change, previously even slaves were well fed as needed to be labouring for whoever owned them
  • ‘the fact that their basic needs could no longer be taken for granted were precisely what made them submit to others’ desires’
  • ‘This extreme fear of dependency on others’ whims lies at the basis of the Greek obsession with the self-sufficient household.’
  • it was more common now for men to accuse each other of prostitution to try to make their political rivals lose civic freedoms
  • erosion of older forms of both hierarchy and mutual aid. Communistic relations increasingly confined to interior of household
  • the erosion of hierarchy at stake in a series of debt crises around 600BC, when commercial markets were taking shape.
  • many poor farmers fell into debt and became dependents on their own property, or sold abroad as slaves.
  • Demands for redistribution, freedoms, clean slates - sometimes outright revolution
  • in Megara interest bearing loans were made illegal and creditors had to return previously paid interest
  • with dependents and patronage there was at least responsibility on both sides - a warrior and his client both were expected to account for each other’s needs
  • transferring this to a debt relation with loans implies no ongoing responsibility on the part of the creditor but does assume a fundamental equality of legal status
  • ‘This is certainly the most ruthless and violent form of equality imaginable’
  • tensions between neighbours who would give, lend and share equipment and resources - fundamental to human sociability especially in farm communities - but overdemanding was an irritant only made worse by precise quantification of cost and loss
  • ‘with the appearance f money, it could also become unclear what was a gift and what was a loan’
  • ’ so what’s the difference between a generous return gift and an interest payment?’
  • in many medeteranian languages incl. Greek the word for interest also means offspring - tiny baby pot :)
  • in a heroic system it is only debts of honor that operate completely tit-for-tat
  • ‘What had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest stratagem’
  • “mass production of coinage permitted a degree of anonymity that , in a pure credit regime, simply could not exist. Pirates and kidnappers Di business in cash - yet the loan sharjs sharks at Aegina’s marketplace could nit gave operated without them. It is this same combination of illegal cash business, usually involving violence, and extremely extremely harsh credit terms, Aldo enforced through violence, that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed ever since.”
  • moral confusion, honor life and sin now spoken about as debt and repayment - but money now caused moral bankruptcy too
  • basis of modern ethics and moral philosophy such as Plato’s Republic.- justice consists of two thinks, tiling the truth and always paying ones debts - one part ’ insofar as justice exists, it is simply that: The interests of the powerful’ - tend fir your sheep but ultimately kill and eat - mistaking tending fir your sheep with profiting from them. Just do with the art of governance ‘if such an art exists, it must have its own intrinsic aim apart from any profit one might also get from it, and what can this be other than the establishment of social justice? ’
  • ‘its only the existence of money, Socrates suggests, that allows us to imagine that words like “power” and “interest” refer to universal realities that can be pursued in their own right, let alone that all pursuits are really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage or self interest. The question, hr said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office will do so not for gain, but rather for honor’
  • ‘there might be far worse things than moral incoherence’

• Ancient Rome (Property and Freedom)

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Chapter 8: