Woman Is an Object Without History: (and Other Reflections upon Reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years)

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years offers a longue durée, longer than most, through the lens of debt. Debt is an institution older than money, Graeber reminds us, and excavating the historical and anthropological record of the emergence and workings of debt rather than that of capital, the commodity form, or the wage-labor relation, allows for an inquiry into social relations and modes of domination that predate capitalism and are central to its configuration and reproduction. In making this inquiry, Graeber adds his voice to the chorus of public scholarship seeking to more comprehensively gauge the totality of all that must be transformed or destroyed in order for the full liberation of all people to occur. Graeber’s contribution to the creation of a “useable past”(Robinson [1983] 2000; Quan 2005) has three parts: (1) the central role of violence and domination in the creation of quantifiable equivalences and markets; (2) the nature of the modern state and the need to reexamine taken-for-granted notions of states and markets as discrete entities; and (3) the role of ideological infrastructures of control and attendant, legitimizing narratives of morality, justice, and deserving. Further still, through Graeber’s debt goggles emerges a depiction of the modern state that has at its existential core the capacity and compulsion to create both markets and money, the latter guaranteed ultimately by “the value of the power to turn others [human beings] into money” (171). This insight offers a pointed intervention into a number of dominant historiographies on the origins of capitalism. Put succinctly, Graeber tells us that “the story of the origins of capitalism, then, is … the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state” (332).

The Emergence of Something New—Debt in the Post-Keynesian Era

According to Graeber, periods of credit money have alternated with periods of bullion (coinage) over the past five thousand years of human history with coinage predominating in periods of “generalized violence” and credit money predominating in periods of relative calm, or within sociogeographical networks governed by trust and mutual accountability. Shifts between the two cycles are characterized by a high degree of social upheaval and crisis. Excavating these patterns renders legible the material tethers connecting the production of money (and its double, debt) with warfare and violence in the name of state making and market making.

Graeber’s proposed “shape to the past” (381) allows for a political imaginary of the present moment as one on the precipice of something—potentially—wholly new. He frames the 1971 decision by Richard Nixon to abandon the dollar-gold peg, the final remnant of the international gold standard, as the beginning of a new era of credit money, wherein the capacity to create money (through the issuance of debts that must be repaid, and nearly always with interest) proliferates into more and more hands.¹ The recession that followed the untying and subsequent devaluing of the dollar engulfed much of the 1970s, a period that saw massive restructuring at every scale attributable to, “the movement of dollars away from gold and capital away from production” (Gilmore 1999, 178).

The General Condition of Debt

In its increasingly boom-bust manner, the global economic growth that followed in the period since the unpegging of the dollar has been predicated on debt. And, it follows, debt has become an increasingly prominent theme in national and international political discourse—from debt crises and jubilee movements in countries with low GDP per capita, to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the looming student debt crisis, and the constant and vapid mainstream political debate over the national debt in the United States. In the past thirty-plus years in the United States, increasing numbers of people from an increasingly diverse spectrum of lived experience have found themselves...