TURMEL: David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5,000 Years Chap06
ISBN: 978-1-61219-129-4
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8
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P127: Chapter Six
GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH
WHEN WE RETURN to an examination of conventional economic
history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to
disappear.
JCT: Not an "oops, we forgot," but an "oops, we made it
disappear!"
P128: In this light, the economists' insistence that economic
life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for
teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate,
or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is
touchingly utopian.
JCT: But the party line.
DG: Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from
numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law
codes: Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in
cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal),
with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the
Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal...2
How is it possible to read this passage without immediately
stopping at the end of the first line? "Bondmaids"? Doesn't
that mean "slaves"? (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female
slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to
function as currency. How did that happen?
JCT: If other cultures used oxen for big deals, why not if
you've got slavery?
DG: And if we are trying to understand the origins of money
here, isn't the fact that people are using one another as
currency at all interesting or significant?3
3. To be fair to Grierson, he does later suggest that slavery
played an important part in the origins of money- though he
never speculates about the gender, which seems significant:
slave girls also served as the highest denomination of
currency in Medieval Iceland (Williams 1937), and in the Rig
Veda, great gifts and payments are regularly designated in
"gold, cattle, and slave girls" (Chakravarti 1985:56- 57). By
the way, I say "young" because elsewhere, when slaves are used
as monetary units, the unit is assumed to be a slave about 18-
20 years old. A cumal was considered the equivalent in value
of three milch cows or six heifers.
Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would
seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not
actually traded, but just used as units of account.
JCT: Same as the old Roman currency units used in France
though they had none. Just agree on a numeraire and tell me
how many eggs it's worth and everything else will get figured
out. One Vling is worth 10 eggs and knowing how many eggs a
cow is worth helps us know how many Vlings worth it is too.
Sounds like a "dollar." I once wrote an essay on using the
letter "A" as a unit of account.
DG: Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were
they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold
by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were
they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions
would seem to be yes, but it's hard to say more because the
history remains largely unwritten.4
Or let's return to the parable of the ungrateful servant.
"Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and
his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay
the debt." How did that happen? Note that we're not even
speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor's
servant), but outright slavery. How did a man's wife and
children come to be considered no different than his sheep and
crockery- as property to be liquidated on the occasion of
default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to
be able to sell his wife? (It wasn't.)5 If he didn't own her,
why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn't pay
his debts?
JCT: And keep in mind, the master reneged on the forgiveness,
that too is a special kind of power.
P129: The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It's
hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching
his daughter taken off by strangers. On the other hand, one
might also ask: Why weren't they taking him? The daughter
hadn't borrowed any money. It's not as if it is ordinary for
fathers in traditional societies to be able to sell their
children.
JCT: But they could in those days and before. Rib Hadda's
people of Byblos sold their children into slavery to get
victuals from the land of Jarimuta. I mention that because
Jarimuta is mentioned a dozen times in the Armana Tablets but
no one has looked into who this provisioner to Pharaoh's
cities was.
DG: This is a practice with a very specific history: it
appears in the great agrarian civilizations, from Sumer to
Rome to China, right around the time when we also start to see
evidence of money, markets, and interest-bearing loans; later,
more gradually, it also appears in those surrounding
hinterlands that supplied those civilizations with slaves.6
JCT: Slavery arose out of people not being able to pay their
debts? Seems almost the logical outcome..
7. "Although the rhetorical phrase 'selling one's daughter
into prostitution' has wide currency... the actual arrangement
is more often presented as either a loan to the family or an
advance payment for the girl's (usually unspecified or
misrepresented) services. The interest on these 'loans' is
often 100 percent, and the principal may be increased by other
debts- for living expenses, medical care, bribes to officials-
accrued once the girl has begun work" (Bishop & Robinson
1998:105). 96. Akiga Sai 1939:161.
Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not
to "covet thy neighbor's wife" clearly referred not to lust in
one's heart (adultery had already been covered in commandment
number seven), but to the prospect of taking her as a debt-
peon- in other words, as a servant to sweep one's yard and
hang out the laundry.8
In most such matters, sexual exploitation was at best
incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway,
symbolically important). Again, once we remove some of our
usual blinders, we can see that matters have changed far less,
over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we
really like to think.
These blinders are all the more ironic when one looks at the
anthropological literature on what used to be called
"primitive money"- that is, the sort one encounters in places
where there are no states or markets- whether Iroquois wampum,
African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, and
discovers that such money is used almost exclusively for the
kinds of transactions that economists don't like to have to
talk about.
P130 In fact, the term "primitive money" is deceptive for this
very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a
crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this
is precisely what we don't find. Often, such currencies are
never used to buy and sell anything at all.9
9. Wampum is a good example: Indians never seem to have used
it to buy things from other members of the same community,
although it was regularly used in conducting trade with
settlers (see Graeber 2001:117-150). Others, like Yurok shell
money or some Papuan currencies, are widely used as currencies
in addition to their social functions, but the first seems to
have emerged from the second.
Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise
reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages,
establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console
mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes,
negotiate treaties, acquire followers- almost anything but
trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.
JCT: So the world ran on tabs with ceremonial "money" filling
the gaps.
I've decided therefore to refer to them as "social
currencies," and the economies that employ them as "human
economies... primarily concerned not with the accumulation of
wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of
human beings.
JCT: And what's the best "social currency" base?
DG: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do
people accumulate in human economies? And what happens when
human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by
commercial ones?
JCT: How does the cancer take hold and grow.
P131: Money as Inadequate Substitute
French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabe.
that "primitive money" was not originally a way to pay debts
of any sort. It's a way of recognizing the existence of debts
cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in
detail.
JCT: Nice way to put it.
DG: The simplest and probably most common way of doing this
was by being presented as what used to be called "brideprice":
a suitor's family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth,
or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social
currency, to a woman's family, and they would present their
daughter as his bride. It's easy to see why this might be
interpreted as buying a woman... if you were really buying a
wife, you'd be able to sell her.
P1321: The Tiv at that time used bundles of brass rods as
their most prestigious form of currency. Brass rods were only
held by men, and never used to buy things in markets (markets
were dominated by women);
JCT: And run on tabs.
P133: Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately
give in exchange for a woman is another woman.
P143: True, when villages fought, it was also always over
women (everyone Douglas talked to expressed incredulity at the
very idea that grown men, anywhere, could ever come to blows
over anything else).
P145: it's only when governments, and then markets, enter the
picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese,
tobacco, or salt.40
P150 During the 1760s alone, perhaps a hundred thousand
Africans were shipped down the Cross River to Calabar and
nearby ports, where they were put in chains, placed on
British, French, or other European ships, and shipped across
the Atlantic- part of perhaps a million and a half exported
from the Bight of Biafra during the whole period of the
Atlantic slave trade.55
Some of them had been captured in wars or raids, or simply
kidnapped. The majority, though, were carried off because of
debts.
P151: Debtors would pledge family members as surety for loans;
the pawns would then become dependents in the creditors'
households, working their fields and tending to their
household chores- their persons acting as security while their
labor, effectively, substituted for interest.61
Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off
from their families; but neither were they precisely free.62
P152: one very common expedient for rulers was to manipulate
the justice system, so that almost any crime came to be
punishable by enslavement, or by death with the enslavement of
one's wife and children, or by outrageously high fines which,
if one could not pay them, would cause the defaulter and his
family to be sold as slaves.
P154: Most of those payments, titles, and ceremonies were tied
to the secret societies that the merchants had also brought to
the area.
JCT: That's another story not covered by mainstream academe
but David Astle does. Who were these secretive banksters
running the fractional reserve scam millennia ago?
DG: In the old days, if anybody got into trouble or debt in
the upper parts of the Cross River, and wanted ready money, he
used generally to "pledge" one or more of his children, or
some other members of his family or household, to one of the
Akunakuna traders who paid periodical visits to his village.
Or he would make a raid on some neighboring village, seize a
child, and sell him or her to the same willing purchaser.74
JCT: And that's how the moneylender caught the unwary. With
his caravan passing through, make loans to every village king
with payment in gold or slaves. Since the gold didn't have
babies, they were going to all need human ones. And rather
than give up yours, they'd all try steal someone else's to
survive their death-gamble.
DG: Often debtors would be forced to pawn more and more of
their own children or dependents, until finally there was no
recourse but to pawn themselves.78
JCT: Like they pawn more and more of their possessions until
they find the house and the car repossessed.
DG: If the Tiv, then, were haunted by the vision of an
insidious secret organization that lured unsuspecting victims
into debt traps,
JCT: The Babylonian Woe...
DG: whereby they themselves became the enforcers of debts to
be paid with the bodies of their children, and ultimately,
themselves- one reason was because this was literally
happening to people who lived a few hundred miles away.
JCT: Just like our Justice system works today to enforce the
loansharking on ourselves.
DG:What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies
extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy,
premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate
value, to which nothing could possibly compare. Instead, all
the same institutions- fees for initiations, means of
calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies, debt
pawnship- were turned into their opposite; the machinery was,
as it were, thrown into reverse; and, as the Tiv also
perceived, the gears and mechanisms designed for the creation
of human beings collapsed on themselves and became the means
for their destruction.
JCT: A useful tool, currency, turned into a yoke of oppression
by the demand for more than is physically payable by all.
DG: One could find the exact same things happening wherever
human economies came into contact with commercial ones (and
particularly, commercial economies with advanced military
technology and an insatiable demand for human labor).
JCT: Can't believe it arises in those cultures where the
rulers ran their own interest-free chips. Maat was a lot
easier for a Monarch of the game than for a debtor.
P156: one practice, noted from Thailand to Sulawesi, is for a
group of poor brothers to turn to a rich sponsor to pay for
the expenses of one brother's marriage. He's then referred to
as their "master." This is more like a patron-client relation
than anything else: the brothers might be obliged to do the
occasional odd job or appear as his entourage on occasions
when he has to make a good impression- not much more. Still,
technically, he owns their children and "can also repossess
the wife he provided if his bondsmen fail to carry out his
obligations."81
Elsewhere, we hear similar stories to those in Africa- of
peasants pawning themselves or members of their families, or
even gambling themselves into bondage; of principalities where
penalties invariably took the form of heavy fines.
"Frequently, of course, these fines could not be paid, and the
condemned man, often accompanied by his dependants, became the
bondsman of the ruler, of the injured party, or of whoever was
able to pay his fine for him."82
Reid insists that most of this was relatively innocuous- in
fact, poor men might take out loans for the express purpose of
becoming debtors to some wealthy patron who could provide them
with food during hard times, a roof, a wife.
Clearly, this was not "slavery" in the ordinary sense. That
is, unless the patron decided to ship some of his dependents
off to creditors of his own in some distant city like
Majapahit or Ternate, whereupon they might find themselves
toiling in some grandee's kitchen or pepper plantation like
any other slave.
P163: imagine what would be likely to happen in our own
society if a group of space aliens suddenly appeared, armed
with undefeatable military technology, infinite wealth, and no
recognizable morality- and announced that they were willing to
pay a million dollars each for human workers, no questions
asked. There will always be at least a handful of people
unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation- and
a handful is all it takes.
The African slave trade was, as I mentioned, an unprecedented
catastrophe, but commercial economies had already been
extracting slaves from human economies for thousands of years.
It is a practice as old as civilization. The question I want
to ask is: To what degree is it actually constitutive of
civilization itself?
JCT: Slavery is not constitutive of civilization itself but of
the malfunction of civilization itself. Interest creates
unpayable debts. Slavery will always seem to be an answer to
satisfy the demand for "something for nothing" while the payee
gets nothing for something.
If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of
war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.
JCT: Of the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never
completely gone away because we have an exponential debt
society. Keeping in mind non-exponential debts measure true
time owed by an honorable person.
DG: It's still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions
of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no
longer see that it's there.
JCT: Yes they think slavery is ended because the metal chains
have been lifed failing to notice the invisible debt chains.
That's why I named my political party the Abolitionist Party
of Canada, anti-slavers here to finish the job that the old
metal chain Abolitionists missed. With LETS interest-free bank
software.
DG: In the next chapter, I will begin to describe how this
happened.
JCT: This should be the fun stuff. How they got away with
imposing debt slavery on our world...
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