TURMEL: David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5,000 Years Chap07
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Chapter Seven
P165: HONOR AND DEGRADATION
OR, ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION
[HAR]: n., liver; spleen; heart, soul; bulk, main body;
foundation; loan; obligation; interest; surplus, profit;
interest-bearing debt; repayment; slavewoman. - early Sumerian
dictionary1 It is just to give each what is owed. - Simonides
IN THE LAST CHAPTER, I offered a glimpse of how human
economies, with their social currencies- which are used to
measure, assess, and maintain relationships between people,
and only perhaps incidentally to acquire material goods- might
be transformed into something else. What we discovered was
that we cannot begin to think about such questions without
taking into account the role of sheer physical violence.
JCT: Creditors trying to collect from debtors is still a root
cause of violence.
DG: In the case of the African slave trade, this was primarily
violence imposed from outside. Nonetheless, its very
suddenness, its very brutality, provides us with a sort of
freeze-frame of a process that must have occurred in a much
slower, more haphazard fashion in other times and places. This
is because there is every reason to believe that slavery, with
its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to
turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of
markets everywhere.
What happens, then, when the same process happens more slowly?
It would seem that much of this history is permanently lost-
since in both the ancient Middle East and the ancient
Mediterranean, most of the really critical moments seem to
have occurred just before the advent of written records.
Still, the broad outlines can be reconstructed.
P166: On the one hand, violence: men who live by violence,
whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed
with honor, and assaults on honor are considered the most
obvious justification for acts of violence. On the other,
debt. We speak both of debts of honor, and honoring one's
debts; the notion of honor makes no sense without the
possibility of degradation,
Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural
community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of
Benin. Kidnaped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano
was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight
of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then
to a plantation in colonial Virginia.
Equiano's further adventures- and there were many- are
narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African,
published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years' War
hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his
freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners- who
regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke
their word- until he passed into the hands of a Quaker
merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to
purchase his freedom. Over the course of his later years he
was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-
selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the
leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the
power of his life story played significant parts in
the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave
trade in 1807.
Readers of Equiano's book are often troubled by one aspect of
the story: that for most of his early life, he was not opposed
to the institution of slavery. At one point, while saving
money to buy his freedom, he even briefly took a job that
involved purchasing slaves in Africa.
Equiano only came around to an abolitionist position after
converting to Methodism and falling in with religious
activists against the trade.
P167: To be made a slave is to be stripped of any possible
honor. Equiano wished above all else to regain what had been
taken from him. The problem is that honor is, by definition,
something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to
recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and
standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means
that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the
institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first
place.
First-year Roman law students, for instance, were made to
memorize the following definition: slavery is an institution
according to the law of nations whereby one person falls under
the property rights of another, contrary to nature.2
2. Florentius in Justinian's Institutes (1.5.4.1). It is
interesting to note that when attempts are made to justify
slavery, starting with Aristotle, they generally focus not on
the institution, which is not in itself justifiable, but on
the inferior qualities of some ethnic group being enslaved.
JCT: They deserved it.
P168: DG: For most of human history, most people saw slavery
much as we see war: a tawdry business, to be sure, but one
would have to be naive indeed to imagine it could simply be
eliminated.
an Egyptian sociologist named Ali 'Abd al-Wahid Wafi, in Paris
in 1931.3 Everywhere, he observes, from the ancient world to
then-present-day South America, one finds the same list of
possible ways whereby a free person might be reduced to
slavery:
1) By the law of force
a. By surrender or capture in war
b. By being the victim of raiding or kidnaping
2) As legal punishment for crimes (including debt)
3) Through paternal authority (a father's sale of his children)
4) Through the voluntary sale of one's self4
Everywhere, too, capture in war is considered the only way that
is considered absolutely legitimate. All the others were surrounded
by moral problems. Kidnapping was obviously criminal, and parents
would not sell children except under desperate circumstances.5
5. The sale of children was always felt to be a sign of
economic and moral breakdown; even later Roman emperors like
Diocletian, notes al- Wahid, supported charities aimed to
provide relief for poor families explicitly so they would not
have to resort to things like this (Elwahed 1931: 89-91).
P169: On one level, al- Wahid's argument is just an extended
apologia for the role of slavery in Islam- widely criticized,
since Islamic law never eliminated slavery, even when the
institution largely vanished in the rest of the Medieval
world. True, he argues, Mohammed did not forbid the practice,
but still, the early Caliphate was the first government we
know of that actually succeeded in eliminating all these
practices (judicial abuse, kidnappings, the sale of offspring)
that had been recognized as social problems for thousands of
years, and to limit slavery strictly to prisoners of war.
The book's most enduring contribution, though, lay simply in
asking: What do all these circumstances have in common? Al-
Wahid's answer is striking in its simplicity: one becomes a
slave in situations where one would otherwise have died. This
is obvious in the case of war: in the ancient world, the
victor was assumed to have total power over the vanquished,
including their women and children; all of them could be
simply massacred. Similarly, he argued, criminals were
condemned to slavery only for capital crimes, and those who
sold themselves, or their children, normally faced
starvation.7
7. Debt slavery, he notes, was practiced in early Roman
history, but this is because according to the laws of the
twelve tablets, insolvent debtors could actually be killed. In
most places, where this was not possible, debtors were not
fully enslaved by reduced to pawns or peons (see Testart2000,
2002, for a full explanation of the different possibilities).
This is not just to say, though, that a slave was seen as
owing his master his life since he would otherwise be dead.8
8. Al-Wahid cites examples from Athenaeus of Greek patients
who offered themselves as slaves to doctors who had saved
their lives (op cit:234)
Perhaps this was true at the moment of his or her enslavement.
But after that, a slave could not owe debts, because in almost
every important sense, a slave was dead.
In West Africa, according to one French anthropologist, the same
principles applied:
Once he had been finally removed from his own milieu through
capture the slave was considered as socially dead, just as if he
had been vanquished and killed in combat. Among the Mande,
at one time, prisoners of war brought home by the conquerors
were offered dege (millet and milk porridge)- because it was
held that a man should not die on an empty stomach- and
then presented with their arms so that they could kill themselves.
Anyone who refused was slapped on the face by his
abductor and kept as a captive: he had accepted the contempt
which deprived him of personality.10
In a book called Slavery and Social Death- surely the most profound
comparative study of the institution yet written- Orlando Patterson
works out exactly what it has meant to be so completely and
absolutely ripped from one's context.11
First of all, he emphasizes, slavery is unlike any other form
of human relation because it is not a moral relation. Slave-
owners might dress it up in all sorts of legalistic or
paternalistic language, but really this is just window-
dressing and no one really believes it; really, it is a
relation based purely on violence; a slave must obey because
if he doesn't, he can be beaten, tortured, or killed, and
everyone is perfectly well aware of this. Second of all, being
socially dead means that a slave has no binding moral
relations with anyone else: he is alienated from his
ancestors, community, family, clan, city; he cannot make
contracts or meaningful promises, except at the whim of his
master;
JCT: Remember the parable of the Debtor who was forgiven a
loan, then did not forgive the loan of another debtor, and the
master changed his mind and made him owe again.
even if he acquires a family, it can be broken up at any time.
The relation of pure force that attached him to his master was
hence the only human relationship that ultimately mattered. As
a result- and this is the third essential element- the slave's
situation was one of utter degradation. Hence the Mande
warrior's slap: the captive, having refused his one final
chance to save his honor by killing himself, must recognize
that he will now be considered an entirely contemptible
being.12
12. He quotes Frederick Douglass here to great effect: "A man
without force is without the essential dignity of
humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor
a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even that it
cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise."
(in Patterson 1982:13)
Yet at the same time, this ability to strip others of their dignity
becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. As
Patterson notes, there have been places- the Islamic world
affords numerous examples- where slaves are not even put to
work for profit; instead, rich men make a point of surrounding
themselves with battalions of slave retainers simply for
reasons of status, as tokens of their magnificence and nothing
else.
JCT: Enslaved to party with the owner.
P171: The reader might be asking: But what does all this have
to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly:
everything. Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money
we know about appear to have been used precisely as measures
of honor and degradation: that is, the value of money was,
ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.
The curious puzzle of the cumal- the slave- girl money of
medieval Ireland- would appear to be a dramatic illustration.
Honor Price (Early Medieval Ireland)
For much of its early history, Ireland's... very lively slave
trade. As one historian put it, "Ireland has no mineral
wealth, and foreign luxury goods could be bought by Irish
kings mainly for two export goods, cattle and people."14..
Hardly surprising, perhaps, that cattle and people were the
two major denominations of the currency. Still, by the time
our earliest records kick in, around 600AD, the slave trade
appears to have died off, and slavery itself was a waning
institution, coming under severe disapproval from the Church.15
15. St. Patrick, one of the founders of the Irish church, was
one of the few of the early Church Fathers who was overtly and
unconditionally opposed to slavery.
Why, then, were cumal still being used as units of account, to
tally up debts that were actually paid out in cows, and in
cups and brooches and other objects made of silver, or, in the
case of minor transactions, sacks of wheat or oats? And
there's an even more obvious question: Why women? There were
plenty of male slaves in early Ireland, yet no one seems ever
to have used them as money.
P172: Money could be loaned... Mainly, though, it was used for
paying fines. These fines are endlessly and meticulously
elaborated in the codes, but what really strikes the
contemporary observer is that they were carefully graded by
rank. This is true of almost all the "Barbarian Law Codes"-
the size of the penalties usually has at least as much do with
the status of the victim as it does with the nature of the
injury- but only in Ireland were things mapped out quite so
systematically.
P173: Every free person had his or her "honor price": the
price that one had to pay for an insult to the person's dignity. These
varied. The honor price of a king, for instance, was seven cumals, or
seven slave girls- this was the standard honor price for any sacred being,
the same as a bishop or master poet. Since (as all sources hasten to
point out) slave girls were not normally paid as such, this would mean,
in the case of an insult to such a person's dignity, one would have to
pay twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of silver.20
The honor price of a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows,
of a minor lord, that, plus half a cow additionally for each
of his free dependents- and since a lord, to remain a lord,
had to have at least five of these, that brought him up to at
least five cows total.21
if one stole, say, a man's brooch or pig, one had to pay back
three brooches or three pigs, plus his honor price, for having
violated the sanctity of his homestead. Attacking a peasant
under the protection of a lord was the same as raping a man's
wife or daughter, a violation of the honor not of the victim,
but of the man who should have been able to protect them.
Finally, one had to pay the honor price if one simply insulted
someone of any importance:..
P174: What about women? A free woman was honored at precisely
50 percent of the price of her nearest male relative (her
father, if alive; if not, her husband). If she was dishonored,
her price was payable to that relative. Unless, that is, she
was an independent landholder. In that case, her honor price
was the same as that of a man. Unless she was a woman of easy
virtue, in which case it was zero, since she had no honor to
outrage.
P176: What happens to such an economy when people do begin to
use the same money used to measure dignity to buy eggs and
haircuts? As the history of ancient Mesopotamia and the
Mediterranean world reveals, the result was a profound- and
enduring- moral crisis.
P177: One historian who went through fifty years of police
reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia
discovered that virtually every one of them began when one
party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister was a
whore.30
"patriarchy" in its more specific Biblical sense: the rule of
fathers,
Readers of the Bible had always assumed that there was
something primordial in all this; that this was simply the way
desert people, and thus the earliest inhabitants of the Near
East, had always behaved.
This was why the translation of
Sumerian, in the first half of the twentieth century, came as
something of a shock.
In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from
roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are everywhere. Early histories
not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make
clear that women were well represented among the ranks of
doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and
generally free to take part in all aspects of public life. One
cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered
women in all these areas. Still, one gets the sense of a
society not so different than that which prevails in much of
the developed world today. Over the course of the next
thousand years or so, all this changes.
The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more
familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on
chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually
wholesale disappearance of women's role in government and the
liberal professions, and the loss of women's independent legal
status, which renders them wards of their husbands. By the end
of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, we begin to see large
numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some
places, at least) subjected to obligatory veiling. In fact,
this appears to reflect a much broader worldwide pattern.
It has always been something of a scandal for those who like
to see the advance of science and technology, the accumulation
of learning, economic growth- "human progress," as we like to
call it- as necessarily leading to greater human freedom, that
for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case. Or
at least, has been the case until very recent times. A similar
gradual restriction on women's freedoms can be observed in
India and China. The question is, obviously, Why?
Feminist scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the
growing scale and social importance of war, and the increasing
centralization of the state that accompanied it.34
P183: The pastoral fringes, the deserts and steppes away from
the river valleys, were the places to which displaced,
indebted farmers fled. Resistance, in the ancient Middle
East, was always less a politics of rebellion than a politics
of exodus, of melting away with one's flocks and families-
often before both were taken away.49 There were always tribal
peoples living on the fringes.
49. Diakonoff (1982). Loose bands of pastoral nomads or
refugees, who also sometimes doubled as soldiers, were often
referred to generically as hapiru or habiru, both in
Mesopotamia and to the West. This might be the origin of the
term "Hebrew," another group that according to their own
histories had fled from bondage, wandered with their flocks in
the desert, and eventually descended as conquerors on urban
society.
P186: for much of the rural poor, debt dependency was
institutionalized, with the daughters of poor debtors,
predictably, often dispatched to brothels or to the kitchens
or laundries of the rich.55
P186: Classical Greek literature gives us a unique opportunity
to observe the transformation as it was actually taking place.
The world of the Homeric epics is one dominated by heroic
warriors who are disdainful of trade...
All this was to change dramatically when commercial markets
began to develop two hundred years later. Greek coinage seems
to have been first used mainly to pay soldiers, as well as to
pay fines and fees and payments made to and by the government,
but by about 600 BC, just about every Greek city-state was
producing its own coins as a mark of civic independence. It
did not take long, though, before coins were in common use in
everyday transactions. By the fifth century, in Greek cities,
the agora, the place of public debate and communal assembly,
also doubled as a marketplace.
One of the first effects of the arrival of a commercial
economy was a series of debt crises, of the sort long familiar
from Mesopotamia and Israel. "The poor," as Aristotle
succinctly put it in his Constitution of the Athenians,
"together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the
rich."58
58. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 2.2. He is
referring to the great crisis leading to Solon's reforms, the
famous "shaking off of burdens" of c. 594 BC.
Revolutionary factions emerged, demanding amnesties, and most
Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist
strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical
debt relief. The solution most cities ultimately found,
however, was quite different than it had been in the Near
East. Rather than institutionalize periodic amnesties, Greek
cities tended to adopt legislation limiting or abolishing debt
peonage altogether, and then, to forestall future crises, they
would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children
of the poor to found military colonies overseas. Before long,
the entire coast from Crimea to Marseille was dotted with
Greek cities, which served, in turn, as conduits for a lively
trade in slaves.59 59. Greek chattel slavery was in fact much
more extreme than anything that appears to have existed in the
ancient Near East at the time not only because most Near
Eastern "slaves" were not technically slaves at all but
redeemable debt pawns, who therefore at least in theory could
not be arbitrarily abused, but because even those who were
absolute private property had greater rights.
The sudden abundance of chattel slaves, in turn, completely
transformed the nature of Greek society.
When the curtain truly goes up on Greece, in the fifth
century, we find everybody arguing about money. For the
aristocrats, who wrote most of the surviving texts, money was
the embodiment of corruption. Aristocrats disdained the
market. Ideally, a man of honor should be able to raise
everything he needed on his own estates and never have to
handle cash at all.60
60. "Self-sufficiency is an end and what is best" (Aristotle
Politics 1256-58;
P188: The effects on women, though, were even more severe than
they had been in the Middle East. Already by the age of
Socrates, while a man's honor was increasingly tied to disdain
for commerce and assertiveness in public life, a woman's honor
had come to be defined in almost exclusively sexual terms: as
a matter of virginity, modesty, and chastity, to the extent
that respectable women were expected to be shut up inside the
household and any woman who played a part in public life was
considered for that reason a prostitute, or tantamount to one.
The Assyrian habit of veiling was not widely adopted in the
Middle East, but it was adopted in Greece.
P189: Even in the third century AD, the Roman emperor Valerian
(253- 260 AD), defeated at the Battle of Edessa, was captured
and spent the last years of his life as the footstool that the
Sassanian emperor Shapur I used to mount his horse. 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, then, that the advent of commercial money threw
traditional social hierarchies into disarray?
P190: We might say, then, that money introduced a
democratization of desire. Insofar as everyone wanted money,
everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous
substance. But even more: increasingly, they did not just want
money. They needed it. This was a profound change.
JCT: Pay off that loan with interest or be enslaved. You can
bet they "needed it."
DG: In the Homeric world, as in most human economies, we hear
almost no discussion of those things considered necessary to
human life (food, shelter, clothing) because it is simply
assumed that everybody has them. A man with no possessions
could, at the very least, become a retainer in some rich man's
household. Even slaves had enough to eat.70
70. In the Odyssey (11.488-91), famously, Achilles, when
trying to invoke the lowest and most miserable person he can
possibly imagine, invokes not a slave but a thete, a mere
laborer unattached to any household.
Here too, the prostitute was a potent symbol for what had
changed, since while some of the denizens of brothels were
slaves, others were simply poor;
As a result, respectable women became invisible, largely
removed from the high dramas of economic and political life.72
72. The reader will observe that even in the anecdotes that
follow, women simply don't appear.
If anyone was enslaved for debt, it was normally the debtor.
Even more dramatically, it was ordinarily male citizens who
accused one another of prostitution- with Athenian politicians
regularly asserting that their rivals, when they were young
boys being plied with gifts from their male suitors, were
really trading sex for money, and hence deserved to lose their
civic freedoms.73
P191 the erosion of hierarchy- that really seems to have been
at stake in the "debt crises" that struck so many Greek cities
around 600 BC, right around the time that commercial markets
were first taking shape.74
When Aristotle spoke of the Athenian poor as falling slave to
the rich, what he appears to have meant was that, in harsh
years, many poor farmers fell into debt; as a result they
ended up as sharecroppers on their own property, dependents.
Some were even sold abroad as slaves. This led to unrest and
agitation, and also to demands for clean slates, for the
freeing of those held in bondage, and for the redistribution
of agricultural land. In a few cases, it led to outright
revolution. In Megara, we are told, a radical faction that
seized power not only made interest-bearing loans illegal, but
did so retroactively, forcing creditors to make restitution of
all interest they had collected in the past.75
JCT: I can reprogram the banks' computers to put back the
interest people paid.
In other cities, populist tyrants seized power on promises
to abrogate agricultural debts.
On the face of it, all of this doesn't seem all that
surprising: the moment when commercial markets developed,
Greek cities quickly developed all the social problems that
had been plaguing Middle Eastern cities for millennia: debt
crises, debt resistance, political unrest. In reality,things
are not so clear. For one thing, for the poor to be "enslaved
to the rich," in the loose sense that Aristotle seems to be
using, was hardly a new development. Even in Homeric society,
it was assumed as a matter of course that rich men would live
surrounded by dependents and retainers, drawn from the ranks
of the dependent poor. The critical thing, though, about such
relations of patronage is that they involved responsibilities
on both sides. A noble warrior and his humble client were
assumed to be fundamentally different sorts of people, but
both were also expected to take account of each other's
(fundamentally different) needs. Transforming patronage into
debt relations- treating, say, an advance of seed corn as a
loan, let alone an interest-bearing loan- changed all this.76
On the other hand, friends do not charge one another interest,
JCT: Sociable Credit.
and any suggestion that they might was sure to rankle. So
what's the difference between a generous return gift and an
interest payment? This is the basis of one of the most famous
Nasruddin stories, one that appears to have provided centuries
of amusement for peasants across the Mediterranean basin and
adjoining regions.
One day Nasruddin's neighbor, a notorious miser, came by
to announce he was throwing a party for some friends. Could
he borrow some of Nasruddin's pots? Nasruddin didn't have
many but said he was happy to lend whatever he had. The next
day the miser returned, carrying Nasruddin's three pots, and
one tiny additional one.
"What's that?" asked Nasruddin.
"Oh, that's the offspring of the pots. They reproduced during
the time they were with me."
Nasruddin shrugged and accepted them, and the miser left
happy that he had established a principle of interest. A month
later Nasruddin was throwing a party, and he went over to
borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor's much more luxurious
crockery. The miser complied. Then he waited a day. And then
another . . .
On the third day, the miser came by and asked what had
happened to his pots.
"Oh, them?" Nasruddin said sadly. "It was a terrible tragedy.
They died."79
P195: the mass production of coinage permitted a degree of
anonymity for transactions that, in a pure credit regime,
simply could not exist.83 Pirates and kidnappers do business
in cash- yet the loan sharks at Aegina's marketplace could not
have operated without them. It is on this same combination of
illegal cash business, usually involving violence, and
extremely harsh credit terms, also enforced through violence,
that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed
ever since.
what was one to make of the fact that money, that very thing
that seemed capable of turning morality into an exact and
quantifiable science, also seemed to encourage the very worst
sorts of behavior? It is from such dilemmas that modern ethics
and moral philosophy begin.
P196: Socrates eventually gets around to offering some
political proposals of his own, involving philosopher kings;
the abolition of marriage, the family, and private property;
selective human breeding boards. (Clearly, the book was meant
to annoy its readers, and for more than two thousand years, it
has succeeded brilliantly.)
What I want to emphasize, though, is the degree
to which what we consider our core tradition of moral and political
theory today springs from this question: What does it mean to pay
our debts? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal businessman's
view. When this proves inadequate, he allows it to be reframed in heroic
terms. Perhaps all debts are really debts of honor after all.88
88. What Polemarchus is invoking of
course is the logic of the heroic gift, and
of the feud. If someone helps or harms
you, you pay them back the same or better.
Polemarchus actually says that there
are two circumstances when it's easiest to
do this: in war, and in banking.
P197: It's not surprising that these issues weighed on Plato's
mind. Not seven years before, he had taken an ill-fated sea
cruise and wound up being captured and, supposedly like
Nicostratus, offered for sale on the auction block at Aegina.
However, Plato had better luck. A Libyan philosopher of the
Epicurean school, one Annikeris, happened to be in the market
at the time. He recognized Plato and ransomed him. Plato felt
honor-bound to try to repay him, and his Athenian friends
assembled twenty minas in silver with which to do so, but
Annikeris refused to accept the money, insisting that it was
his honor to be able to benefit a fellow lover of wisdom.89
As indeed it was: Annikeris has been remembered,
and celebrated, for his generosity ever since. Plato went on to
use the twenty minas to buy land for a school, the famous Academy.
Ancient Rome (Property and Freedom)
p199: Nonetheless, Roman law does insist that the basic form
of property is private property, and that private property is
the owner's absolute power to do anything he wants with his
possessions.
(This is how slaves were defined in Roman law: they were
people who were also a res, a thing.)95
The word dominium, meaning absolute private property, was not
particularly ancient. It only appears in Latin in the late
Republic, right around the time when hundreds of thousands of
captive laborers were pouring into Italy, and when Rome, as a
consequence, was becoming a genuine slave society.98
P201: the earliest Roman debt law was equally unusual in its
harshness, since it allowed creditors to execute insolvent
debtors.103
103. Or to enslave them. In fact the Law of the Twelve Tablets
(III.1) itself seems to be an attempt to reform or moderate
even harsher practices,
JCT: In the days when not paying your mort-gage really got you
morted.
The early history of Rome, like the histories of early Greek
city-states, was one of continual political struggle between
creditors and debtors, until the Roman elite eventually
figured out the principle that most successful Mediterranean
elites learned: that a free peasantry means a more effective
army, and that conquering armies can provide war captives who
can do anything debt bondsmen used to do, and therefore, a
social compromise- allowing limited popular representation,
banning debt slavery, channeling some of the fruits of empire
into social-welfare payments- was actually in their interest.
JCT: But the money-lenders never quit.
P202: What made Roman slavery so unusual, in historical terms,
was a conjuncture of two factors. One was its very
arbitrariness. In dramatic contrast with, say, plantation
slavery in the Americas, there was no sense that certain
people were naturally inferior and therefore destined to be
slaves. Instead, slavery was seen as a misfortune that could
happen to anyone.106 As a result, there was no reason that a
slave might not be in every way superior to his or her master:
smarter, with a finer sense of morality, better taste, and a
greater understanding of philosophy. The master might even be
willing to acknowledge this. There was no reason not to, since
it had no effect on the nature of the relationship, which was
simply one of power.
The second was the absolute nature of this power. There are
many places where slaves are conceived as war captives, and
masters as conquerors with absolute powers of life and death-
but usually, this is something of an abstract principle.
Almost everywhere, governments quickly move to limit such
rights. At the very least, emperors and kings will insist that
they are the only ones with the power to order others put to
death.107
107. The Chinese emperor Wang Mang was so fastidious on this
point, for instance, that he once ordered one of his own sons
put to death for the arbitrary murder of a slave.
But under the Roman Republic there was no emperor; insofar as
there was a sovereign body, it was the collective body of the
slave- owners themselves. Only under the early Empire do we
see any legislation limiting what owners could do to their
(human) property: the first being a law of the time of the
emperor Tiberius (dated 16 AD) stipulating that a master had
to obtain a magistrate's permission before ordering a slave
publicly torn apart by wild beasts.108
108. The lex Petronia. Technically it bans owners from
ordering slaves to "fight the wild beasts," a popular public
entertainment: "fight," though, is usually a euphemism, since
those fighting hungry lions were not provided with weapons, or
obviously inadequate ones. It was only a century later, under
Hadrian (117- 138 AD), that owners were forbidden to kill
their slaves, maintain private dungeons for them or practice
other cruel and excessive punishments. Interestingly, the
gradual limitation of the power of slave- owners was
accompanied by increasing state power, expansion of
citizenship, but also the return of various forms of debt-
bondage and the creation of dependent peasantry
P203: Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social
ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity
to make and maintain moral commitments to others. The English
word "free," for instance, is derived from a German root
meaning "friend," since to be free meant to be able to make
friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of
equals. This is why freed slaves in Rome became citizens: to
be free, by definition, meant to be anchored in a civic
community, with all the rights and responsibilities that this
entailed.111
By the second century AD, however, this had begun to change.
The jurists gradually redefined libertas until it became
almost indistinguishable from the power of the master. It was
the right to do absolutely anything, with the exception,
again, of all those things one could not do.
Actually, in the Digest, the definitions of freedom and
slavery appear back to back:
Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that
is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution
according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes
private property (dominium) of another, contrary to nature.112
p204: Originally, human beings lived in a state of nature
where all things were held in common; it was war that first
divided up the world, and the resultant "law of nations," the
common usages of mankind that regulate such matters as
conquest, slavery, treaties, and borders, that was first
responsible for inequalities of property as well.114
JCT: What came first, the usury or the war? I say once the
usurer owned everything, it took war and oppression to keep
it. War just doesn't just happen. Throughout most of history,
it's been creditors collecting or debtors resisting. Usury.
P205: one man's right is simply another's obligation.
P206: Jean Gerson, Rector of the University of Paris...
"For a Gersonian, liberty was property and could be exchanged
in the same way and in the same terms as any other property"-
sold, swapped, loaned, or otherwise voluntarily
surrendered.119 It followed that there could be nothing
intrinsically wrong with, say, debt peonage, or even slavery.
And this is exactly what natural-rights theorists came to
assert. In fact, over the next centuries, these ideas came to
be developed above all in Antwerp and Lisbon, cities at the
very center of the emerging slave trade. After all, they
argued, we don't really know what's going on in the lands
behind places like Calabar, but there is no intrinsic reason
to assume that the vast majority of the human cargo conveyed
to European ships had not sold themselves, or been disposed of
by their legal guardians, or lost their liberty in some other
perfectly legitimate fashion. No doubt some had not, but
abuses will exist in any system. The important thing was that
there was nothing inherently unnatural or illegitimate about
the idea that freedom could be sold.120
120. Note here that in this period,
the justification was not based on any assumption of racial
inferiority- racial ideologies came later- but rather on the
assumption that African laws were legitimate and should be
considered binding, at least on Africans.
JCT: Give Jean Gerson credit for easing the consciences of the
slavers.
Before long, similar arguments came to be employed to justify
the absolute power of the state. Thomas Hobbes was the first
to really develop this argument in the seventeenth century,
but it soon became commonplace. Government was essentially a
contract, a kind of business arrangement, whereby citizens had
voluntarily given up some of their natural liberties to the
sovereign. Finally, similar ideas have become the basis of
that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic
life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our
freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its
sale.121 121. I've made the argument that wage labor is rooted
in slavery extensively in the past- see e.g., Graeber 2006.
P208: it is only by the threat of ticks, ropes, spears, and
guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly
complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters,
friends, rivals . . .) that render them unique, and thus
reduce them to something that can be traded.
P209: That such relations of intimacy can often develop
between men of honor and those they have stripped of their
dignity, history can well attest. After all, the annihilation
of any possibility of equality also eliminates any question of
debt, of any relation other than power. It allows a certain
clarity. This is presumably why emperors and kings have such a
notorious tendency to surround themselves with slaves or
eunuchs. There is something more here, though. If one looks
across the expanse of history, one cannot help but notice a
curious sense of identification between the most exalted and
the most degraded; particularly, between emperors and kings,
and slaves. Many kings surround themselves with slaves,
appoint slave ministers- there have even been, as with the
Mamluks in Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. Kings surround
themselves with slaves for the same reason that they surround
themselves with eunuchs: because the slaves and criminals have
no families or friends, no possibility of other loyalties- or
at least, in principle, they shouldn't. But, in a way, kings
should really be like that too. As many an African proverb
emphasizes: a proper king has no relatives either, or at
least, he acts as if he does not.128
In other words, the king and slave are mirror images, in that
unlike normal human beings who are defined by their
commitments to others, they are defined only by relations of
power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated
beings as one can possibly become.
P210: Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to
begin the Declaration of Independence by directly
contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "We hold
these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created
equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable Rights.."- thus undercutting simultaneously any
argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that
they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and
legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he
did not propose some radically new conception of rights and
liberties.
JCT: Might not have been the right time in the middle of a
revolution to broadcast his thoughts. It must have been
obvious to him that his black kids were as great as his white
ones were.
Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works
from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate
your liberty, at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it
determines what most of us have to do for most of our waking
hours, except, usually, on weekends. The violence has been
largely pushed out of sight.130
JCT: Yes, playing the mort-gage death-gamble is slavery. Spend
your time chasing the buck or get morted.
we're no longer able to imagine what a world based on social
arrangements that did not require the continual threat of
tasers and surveillance cameras would even look like.
JCT: I just imagine a world where everyone has an interest-
free UNILETS timebank account.
Who's going to rob you if they have their own interest-free
credit line and there are lots of jobs offered at full pay?
Who's going to cheat you when your score doesn't confer any
particular status?
When everyone has equal access to sociable credits, it becomes
a game of excellence where there's no incentive to cheat to
win and it's no fun not winning fair and square.
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