Can David Graeber Become the Marx

of the Debtor Class?

ELI COO K
Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber,
Melville House.

In December of 2012, forty-four lucky people in upstate New York

received a package in the mail. Wrapped in festive red paper as if it
were a Christmas gift, each package contained a letter:
Seasons Greetings from Strike Debt! We write with good news:
the above reference account has been purchased by the Rolling
Jubilee Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. The Rolling
Jubilee Fund is a project of Strike Debt. The mission of this
project is to buy and abolish personal debt. We believe that no
one should have to go into debt for the basic things in our lives,
like healthcare, housing, and education. You no longer owe the
balance of this debt. It is gone, a gift with no strings attached.
You are no longer under any obligation to settle this account with
the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else.

An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Strike Debts Rolling Jubilee initiative is both elegant in its simplicity and subversive in its
ramifications. After collecting donations via crowd sourcing and indie
telethons, Strike Debt enters into the shadowy underworld of the
secondary debt market and begins purchasing debt from banks for
pennies on the dollar. Banks sell these risky debts for far less than
they originally lent out because they are afraid that they will never
see any of these loans paid off and are looking to cut their losses. In
most instances, high-risk debt is purchased by debt collection specialists who are confident that if they hound and harass people long
enough, they can collect more of the debt than the banks had expected, thus turning a nice profit. Strike Debt, however, is not comprised
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of your usual debt buyers. After purchasing debt from banks, they
do something very differentthey forgive it. In a trial run in November 2012, Strike Debt spent $500 in the secondary debt market.
They managed to abolish $14,000 worth of debt. In December 2012,
they spent $5,000 to forgive $100,000 of distressed medical debt
owed by forty-four people in upstate New York. In March of this
year, Strike Debt wiped out $1 million of debt from emergency
rooms in Kentucky and Indiana. This time, over one thousand people
received a surprise gift in the mail. The Jubilee, meanwhile, shows no
sign of stopping: as of this writing, Strike Debt has raised $615,101,
which, if you crunch the numbers Occupy-style, should erase roughly $12 million of debt. Thats a lot of red wrapping paper.
Strike Debt leaders are hoping that liberated debtors who suddenly find themselves with more free cash than they expected will
begin to contribute to the fund as well, thus keeping the Jubilee
rolling. Furthermore, the bigger the Jubilee gets, the more it encourages people to default on their loans. After all, if there is a chance you
might get bailed out by Strike Debt, why not stop making those
monthly payments? Yet despite Strike Debts hopes that default fever
will snowball into capitalist Armageddon, most of the people behind
Rolling Jubilee are as practical and pragmatic as their debt-buying
scheme suggests. They realize that these debt erasures are just a tiny
fraction of the whole. Tuition debt alone in the United States recently surpassed the $1 trillion mark, and one out of seven Americans is
currently being pursued by a debt collector. More than just a means
to wipe out debt, Strike Debt activists see the Rolling Jubilee as a
public education campaign that can help build a national debtors
movement, as well as highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Most important of all, Strike
Debt is hoping that the Rolling Jubilee erodes the moral stigma behind defaulting while legitimizing debt erasures as an acceptable tool
of social policy.
Even conservative pundits writing in venues such as Fortune
magazine have admitted that the Rolling Jubilee is a brilliant idea.
But where did it come from? Why did a bunch of Occupy Wall Street

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activists decide to focus their energies on biblical-style debt forgiveness? Why are they seeking to make debt forgiveness and default
morally legitimate? Why are they hoping to build a national debtors
movement and not, as leftists have been doing for generations, a
national labor movement? In most instances, these types of questions
are some of the hardest for scholars of social movements to answer.
It can be almost impossible to trace those magical moments when
an idea or worldview crosses the threshold from theory to practice.
Social movements are sloppy, conflicting, and chaotic endeavors, so
seeing how ideas turn into social action is usually a very slippery
business. But not in this case. In this instance, the intellectual inspiration and ideological foundation for the Rolling Jubilee is abundantly clear.
Walk into almost any Occupy camp in those heady summer
days of 2011be it Occupy Harvard, Tulsa, or Tuscaloosaand you
would likely find a makeshift library. In that library, there would almost definitely be a dog-eared copy of the anthropologist David
Graebers Debt: The First 5000 Years. Turn to the final page of the
final chapter of this five-hundred-page book and you will find this:
In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals,
but let me end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue
for some kind of biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both
international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not
just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering,
but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that
money is not ineffable, that paying ones debts is not the essence
of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and
that if democracy is to mean anything it is the ability to all agree
to arrange things in a different way.

Intended to serve as a usable and accessible past that could help

the 99 percent fight the forces of Wall Street, every page of Debt
should be read with the idea of a Jubilee in mind. Throughout a
book that weaves together examples from the Tiv people of Nigeria
to the hedge-fund people of Wall Street, Graeber reminds us time

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and again that widespread debt erasure is not as crazy as we might

think. Nearly every plebian revolt in history, he notes, began with
the breaking of tablets, the burning of papers, the destruction of
bureaucracy, the erasure of numbers. In biblical times, the clearing
of debts was so widespread it was even institutionalized to take place
every fifty yearsthe Jubilee. (Imagine trying to sell mortgagebacked derivatives and credit default swaps with a law like that on
the books.)
I used the term the 99 percent here not because of a general
affinity between the messages of Occupy Wall Street and Debt but
because David Graeber coined the term. On 2 August 2011, following years of experience in global social-justice protests that cost him
his position at Yale (you know you must be onto something when
your politics can get you fired), Graeber arrived at Bowling Green,
the Manhattan park with the bull statue, in order to help plan an
occupation of Wall Street. Adbusters, an anticonsumerist Canadian
magazine edited by rogue marketing specialists, had first suggested
the idea of some kind of physical encampment in downtown Manhattan a few weeks before. Disturbed by the vertical and hierarchical
nature of the demonstration, however, Graeber and two of his fellow
anarchist friends moved to the other side of the park and began organizing a more democratic general assembly that would be based on
the principals of horizontal consensus. The group became the core of
the Occupy movement. Graeber participated in a number of different working-group meetings, which planned the occupation, and he
coined the phrase the 99 percent. On 17 September, the night the
occupation began, Graeber helped promote the decision to camp out
in Zuccotti Park, even though that had not been the original plan. A
few weeks later, when Occupy Wall Street was being criticized for
not having any specific demands, it was Graebers articles on the Al
Jazeera website and in the Guardian that articulated the logic behind
the movement. Like any good anarchist, Graeber hates being labeled
the founding father of Occupy Wall Street. But since most of us still
think in vertical terms, that is precisely how we view him. The reluctant head of a headless crusade, David Graeber has become the

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default leader of a social movement that asks us to do one thing

above all else: default.
u

Graebers attempt to write the history of humanitys approach to

debt is filled with contradictions, ambiguities, and conflicts, which
makes it rather difficult to summarize. The fact that Debt spans five
thousand years does not help either. But here it goes: in the beginning, Graeber argues, there were social currencies and human
economies. In an argument reminiscent of French sociologist
Marcel Mausss theory of gift giving, Graeber contends that economic transactions first emerged as social exchanges in which the
central purpose was not to buy or sell goods but rather to foster relations between peoplebe it celebrating marriages, avoiding blood
feuds, consoling mourners, negotiating treaties, or establishing paternity. Graebers point is not to romanticize these early societies (if
anything, his overall view of humanity is somewhat dark for a supposedly wide-eyed anarchist), but rather to show that economic ties
were governed by love, jealousy, hate, anger, envy, and spiteand
everyone knew it. Instead of shying away from the social obligations
that people incur whenever they give or receive a material thing from
someone else, Graeber argues that early societies embraced such ties
as the very essence of social life. They couldnt imagine a society
without such obligations.
Because such transactions were so intertwined with the soap
opera that is everyday life, people never thought these social obligations could (or should) be precisely quantified, returned, or balanced. As in life, the economic debts one incurred to othersbe
they sisters, lovers, rivals, mentors, or companionscould never truly be repaid. Any attempt to do so would have been considered offensive, or simply bizarre. Graeber tries to clarify such a worldview,
so foreign to us moderns, by suggesting that such relations still exist
today within the sacred realm of the nuclear family. Citing a scene
from a Margaret Atwood novel where a young man is handed an
itemized bill of all his childhood expenses, Graeber convincingly

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argues that we would all find such a transaction monstrous. In human economies there is no such thing as debt because social relations
are not quantified, nor can they be. How could you possibly assign a
number that would represent all the social exchanges youve had with
your parents?
Quantification plays a central role in the shift from obligation
to debt, and by quantification Graeber generally means money. Defining debt as an obligation to pay a certain sum of money, he argues that it is the pricing of social obligations that turns morality into
a matter of impersonal arithmetic, thus justifying things that would
otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. Graeber, however, argues
not only that debt cannot exist without money, but that debt is the
very reason money was invented in the first place. It is perhaps here,
on the question of the invention of money, where Graeber is at his
finest. Taking Adam Smith straight on, he convincingly demolishes
what he refers to as the myth of barter, that oft-heard liberal tale
about how money emerged out of peoples natural propensity to
exchange. Citing over half a dozen leading economic textbooks,
Graeber tears into the great founding myth of the discipline of economics with relish:
Its important to emphasize that this is not presented as something that actually happened, but as a purely imaginary exercise.
To see that society benefits from a medium of exchange, write
Begg, Fischer, and Dornbuch, imagine a barter economy. Imagine the difficulty you would have today, write Maunder,
Myers, Wall, and Miller, if you had to exchange your labor directly for the fruits of someone elses labor. Imagine, write
Parkin and King, you have roosters but you want roses. One
could multiply examples endlessly. Just about every economics
textbook employed today sets out the problem the same way.
Historically, they note, we know that there was a time when
there was no money. What must it have been like? Well, let us
imagine an economy something like todays except with no money. That would have been decidedly inconvenient! Surely, people
must have invented money for the sake of efficiency.

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According to Graeber, money did not develop out of commercial exchange because barter was exceedingly rare in world history.
Many historians and anthropologists have sought out the fabled land
of barter only to come up empty. Graeber says this is because barter
is something that need only occur in interactions between strangers.
In the impersonal universe imagined by economists, coins and bills
are needed because ongoing social relations are nonexistent, trust is
lacking, and the exchange must be consummated on the spot. But
throughout most of human history, Graeber points out, the parties
entering into economic relations knew each other reasonably well
and therefore did not need to barter for goods immediately; they
could go into debt. Money, therefore, emerged not out of commercial relations but debtor relations. Metallic coins, meanwhile, were
not even needed in the beginning. The first kind of money was not a
valuable commodity such as gold or seashells, as the liberal myth
goes, but rather a virtual book credit or IOU that someone jotted
down. The origin of money, in short, was not barter but more like the
bar tab.
But how did social obligations (I owe you one) become debt
(I owe you $12.50)? Why did bartenders start jotting down social
obligations in dollars and cents? Graeber argues that the key is violence. To make something saleable in a human economy, one needs
to first rip it from its context. Since social ties were unquantifiable
and incomparable due to the unique conflux of relations people
fostered in human economies, the only way obligations could become debt was by violently tearing some people out of their social
networks. To create money, one first needed to create strangers. Slavery, therefore, with its uprooting of communities and ability to turn
people into priced abstractions, played a central role in the rise of
monied debt. Graeber gives numerous examples for this: in early
medieval Ireland, the first form of money used was the cumala
currency of slave girls. In Africa, the Lele only began pricing women
after they had begun kidnapping females from other tribes. And in
perhaps his most incisive example, Graeber shows how the indirect
cultural repercussions of the Atlantic slave trade led the African

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people of Tiv to quantify and price their women, even though few of
the Tiv were actually captured by Westerners. As in most instances in
this book, while far more historical work needs to be done on this issue, Graeber seems to be onto something: in my own work on the
origins of modern economic indicators such as GDP, for example, I,
too, discovered that the pricing of slaves in the southern United
States played a crucial role in the eventual pricing of everyday life.
Graebers main point here is that in order for reductive, arithmetic, soulless, market exchange to emerge as the main arbiter of social relations, people must first be ripped out of the endlessly
complicated webs of human relationships that make up their social
life. In the case of slavery, people could suddenly be priced and sold
because after being violently dragged off to a foreign world, the only
relation they initially had was with their new owner. While not implicitly saying so, Graeber hints at the notion that today we are all
somewhat enslaved since our human economy and social currencies
have also been taken away from us, and what remains is an anonymous, impersonal cash nexus of dollars, cents, and strangers. So
much, then, for historian Niall Fergusons The Ascent of Money, the
title of both his book and PBS special on the wonders of cash. In
Graebers narrative, money does not levitate humanity to grander
heights but rather serves as a remnant of our darkest hours, the
legacy of war, conquest, and slavery. The Descent into Money is
more like it.
In the second half of his book, Graeber continues by tracing the
history of money and debt through four distinct periods of time, each
divided by the type of money that was used. The Axial Age, from
800 BCE to 600 CE, was marked by the emergence of metallic coins
and the rise of the first great agricultural empires: Mesopotamia,
Egypt, India, and China. Continuing his theme of tracing the development of money not through trade or markets but violence, centralization, and war, Graeber argues that unlike local trade relations that
could be consummated with informal book credit, if one wanted to
conquer foreign lands, one needed to pay strangers to be soldiers.
Peripatetic strangers have no use for bar tabsthey want cold, hard

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coins. With the advent of coinage (which, Graeber reminds us, was
mostly mined by slaves), we have a further dislocation of human
economies as impersonal markets, born of war and centralized power, spread across the globe.
Graeber argues that such impersonal exchanges revolutionized
human culture. In human economies, motives are complex and exchanges of goods are fraught with dozens of layers of intrigue such as
love, envy, or pride. Cash transactions between strangers, on the other hand, are calculating, superficial affairs in which self-interested,
means-to-end thinking dominates. The crucial cultural move in this
era, according to Graeber, occurred when people began to see such
impersonal transactions as the essence of humanity rather than a
bizarre exception. To prove his point, Graeber uses etymology: the
word rational derives from ratiohow much X can go into Y.
Pushing the Frankfurt Schools indictment of the Enlightenment
back some two millennia or so, Graeber suggests that it is in this Axial
Age that a radical simplification of motives surfaces in an attempt
to explain the workings of human societies. The profit motive is born.
Next comes the Middle Ages (6001450 CE), which Graeber
conceives as one big monetary contraction with no Ben Bernanke to
push for quantitative easing. The period is marked with the collapse
of empires and therefore the collapse of hard currencies. The precious coins that had once fueled the rise of both war and the market
now found themselves melted down and reborn as giant images of
god. As money reverted to virtual bar tabs, the Axial Age of metallic
materialism was replaced by a spiritual age of religion and transcendence. You might think that Graeber would celebrate the destruction
of coin and the ascendance of the major world religions as an altogether positive development, but Graebers historical narrative has
few feel-good moments. Instead, Graeber lashes out at religion for
further legitimizing debtor relations and market mentalities. Echoing
Friedrich Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals, Graeber observes that all
the major world religions, save Islam, are framed in the language of
a financial transaction. These religions tell us that human existence
is itself a form of debt and that our lives are on loan from god. The

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Middle Ages, therefore, are not an abrupt shift away from the
monied markets of the Axial Age but rather a continuance, since it is
only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial
transactions that were capable of seeing our relation to the universe
in terms of debt.
Graeber provides some convincing evidence: Jesus, for instance, is referred to as the redeemer. Redemption is a financial
term that means to get back what was given as a security for a loan.
To be redeemed, therefore, is to pay off ones debt. Buddhism does
similar cultural work by stating that humans are in infinite karmic
debt. In these great religions, Graeber notes, the cosmic debt of
your human existence is not something you really want to repay
because that would mean giving your life back to god, which means
you would have to die. As in all debtor relations, paying back the
principal is not nearly as central (or profitable) in these religious narratives as the interest payments. Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, Graeber argues, are salvation on an installment plan. You
make those pesky monthly interest payments in the form of tributes,
tithes, and sacrifices to your local temple, church, or monastery,
and the middlemen pass it along to the big banker in the sky. Life as
an endless burden of debt, Graeber concludes, probably struck most
European, Indian, or Chinese peasants as an apt metaphor since
throughout the Middle Ages that was often the norm for a large segment of the population.
The Middle Ages ended with the European discovery of the
New World and its treasure trove of gold and silver. Metallic money
was soon back with a vengeance and with it a new historical period
(14501971), which Graeber refers to as the Age of the Great Capitalist Empires. The impersonal logic of the market was now given
free rein as capitalism, a system which envisions all money as interest-bearing capital, conquered the globe. And what is interest, Graeber asks, but the demand that money never cease to grow? Interest
is the key to understanding capitalism, according to Graeber, partly
because interest-bearing debt has the power to turn us all into capitalistswhether we like it or not. Seeking to understand capitalisms

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relentless and historically unique desire for endless growth, Graeber

uses Cortss vicious conquest of the New World as a case study.
Why, Graeber asks, was Corts so greedy that he must destroy the
entire Aztec civilization, even though he had already extracted enormous amounts of gold? The answer by now should be obvious:
Corts was in constant debt. People in debt do not have the luxury of
choosing not to maximize profits. Thanks to debt, Graeber implies,
the economists atomistic models of greedy, narrow, calculating selfinterest were being transformed from academic fantasy into everyday actuality.
u

David Graebers biography reads like an Indiana Jones movie

script. He was born in 1961 to a working-class family of self-taught
intellectuals living in a cooperative New York City apartment complex run by trade unionists. An operative in a garment factory, his
mother snared a starring role in the International Ladies Garment
Workers Unions musical-comedy revue, Pins and Needles. When
the show became an overnight sensation, she quit her day job. Graebers father participated in the anarchist-led Spanish revolution in
Barcelona in 1936 and then fought in the Spanish Civil War. As for
young David, by the age of eleven he had already succeeded in translating a series of Mayan hieroglyphics that had never been previously
deciphered. This won him a scholarship to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he began his rise through the ranks of
elite academic institutions that would only come to an end with his
unceremonious departure from Yale (alas, Indiana Jones taught at
Princeton). After teaching for some time at Goldsmiths, University of
London, Graeber was recently hired as a full professor at, ironically
enough, the London School of Economics.
As a graduate student in anthropology at Chicago, Graeber
headed to Madagascar for his fieldwork. Due to harsh spending
cuts brought on by IMF austerity measures, the central government
had little presence in the rural communities that Graeber frequented. In its place, the local inhabitants of the area created an egalitarian

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society that was based on the direct-democracy principles of consensus. To this day, whenever Graeber looks to prove that the consensusbased general assemblies popularized by the Occupy movement
are both plausible and workable, he cites examples from Madagascar.
Madagascar also seems to be his source of inspiration for the human
economies he believes can serve as an alternative to a debt-based
market society. However, while Graeber clearly sees Madagascar as a
model for a better future, he also witnessed there the terrible consequences of the IMFs neoliberal debt policies. For example, Graeber
arrived in Madagascar following a particularly virulent outbreak of
malaria, which erupted after the local government had been forced
to shut down its mosquito eradication program due to IMF-imposed
austerity measures. Arriving as a young assistant professor at Yale in
the early 2000s, his experiences in Africa pushed him to become
more active in the global justice (he hates the term antiglobalization)
movement, leading him to take part in large protests in Quebec City,
Genoa, and New York.
It is no coincidence that Graeber is an anthropologist and not
a historian. No historian would dare write this book. In recent
decades, the discipline of history has ceded big history to the nonhistoriansCharles Tilly, Jared Diamond, Barrington Moore. (Tilly
has a book titled Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons.) There is good reason why historians steer clear of such projects. Much like Tilly and Moore, Graebers narrative is too formulaic
at times, as much of human history often seems logically to flow out
of the distinction between coins, virtual book credit, and paper money. Furthermore, in his desire to cover five thousand years, many
connecting threads in the narrative are glossed over far too quickly.
Lacking a detailed analysis of the critical turning points, the book often reads like a series of sharp, provocative yet disconnected insights.
The crucial link between slavery and markets, for instance, should
have been fleshed out far more. The same can be said of the connection between quantification and money. (What if I count things without pricing them? Is owing someone four carrots different from
owing her four dollars?)

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And yet, despite all this, one cannot help but feel refreshed
and energized by the massive scale of Graebers project and his
willingness to think in terms of big structures, large processes, and
huge comparisons. Theodor Adorno once said of Freuds psychoanalysis that nothing is true apart from the exaggerations. The
same, perhaps, could be said of Graeber. On the microlevel, there
are many gaps to fill. But good history isnt just well researched: its
intuitive. In countless parts of the book, Graeber may not back up
his argument with enough evidence, or trace exactly how a certain
cultural development came about, but nevertheless, it often feels
right. Historians, not usually known for their intellectual chutzpah,
need books like this, if only as a framework they can build upon or
a straw man they can painstakingly tear down. (Some of the best
work in social and political history in the past two decades was driven by the desire to prove political sociologists Barrington Moore
and Charles Tilly wrong. I have a hunch the same could be said of
Freud.)
But to judge Debt solely as a book of history would be shortsighted. Unpretentious and accessible, Debt was written for the
wider public. Its main purpose is not academic interpretation but social revolution. One of its organizing ideas is the biblical-style Jubilee. Yet while Graeber uses the past to show us the narrow
boundaries of our economic imagination today, he also uses human
history not as an inspiration but rather as a warning. For millennia,
Graeber tells us, defaulting on ones debt has been morally reprehensible. Economists, bankers, kings, and priests have created narratives
that link indebtedness to guilt and sin. To get people to stop paying
back their loans, therefore, Graeber believes that he needs to attack
our very definitions of right and wrong, good and bad. As a result, this
is not really the work of an historian or even an anthropologist but
rather that of a modern-day moral philosopher.
If this book had been written six hundred years ago, Graeber
likely would have gone after the priests and rabbis, since they were
the central arbiters of medieval morality and ethics. But today, in order to attack contemporary morals and bring on the Jubilee, Graeber

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expends much of his intellectual energy in trying to tear down the

gospel of modern economics and its clerics, the economists.
Scrubbing away all the things that make us human, modern economics offers us, as Graeber puts it, a sanitized view of society.
Gone are our friends, families, and loved ones; our jealousies, passions, and idiosyncrasies. Gone are also any elements of coercion.
Reducing all human interaction to natural, self-interested exchange
empties the world of powerthat ability to impose ones will on another. Exchange is based on the principal of equivalence, and so, in
the eyes of the economist, we are all equal. No one pushes us around.
If the boss asks us to work a double shift instead of spending time
with our children, economists will tell us that our decision will not be
based on our fear of being fired or losing our health insurance but
rather a cold calculation which balances the social utility we get from
leisure and from labor. If we decide to take that second shift, it is because the exchange of leisure time for money maximizes our utility.
These models not only infer that the game of life is played on a level
playing field, but that we are all, as Milton Friedman famously noted,
free to choose: there is no hierarchical relationship between boss
and employee, no power plays, no intimidationsjust an evenhanded exchange between equals.
What makes modern economics so attractive, and yet at times so
cruel, is this very assumption of equality and freedom in a world of
inequalities and coercion. Such naive (or perhaps cynical) optimism
forms the moral basis of capitalism. Graeber recognizes this, and his
book should be read as a concerted effort to destroy this narrative by
substituting the origin tale of exchange with an origin tale of debt.
After all, debt is everything exchange is not: its hierarchical (there
are creditors and there are debtors); its ongoing (while exchange is
momentary); and its coercive (people in debt often are forced to
make choices based on their creditors interestsand interest rate).
In creating an alternative historical narrative that centers not on
exchange, equivalence, trade, and markets, but debt, hierarchy, violence, and centralized bureaucracies, Graeber is trying to pull the rug
out from under the feel-good story of contemporary economics.

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He is also trying to lay the historical and moral groundwork for the
feasibility of default as an alternate social model. If both contracting sides in a transaction are equal and autonomous, and if no coercion was involved, then any attempt not to repay a debt would be
a failure to honor (Graeber would think this was an interesting
choice of words) what was ultimately a fair bargain. But what if the
contracting parties were not equal? What if coercion played a role
in this credit transaction? Do I need to pay back my student debt
if it was the only way I could get a college education? Do the citizens of Greece need to pay back their creditors through harsh austerity measures if Goldman Sachs pushed Greek leaders to take out
more and more debt? Do I need to watch my salary being garnished every week because my child fell ill, and I did not have any
health insurance?
Graebers call for Jubilee might seem far-fetched, but, as he
points out, this is not your granddaddys capitalism. (He refers to the
neoliberal catastrophe the world has experienced since the 1970s as
the beginning of something yet to be determined.) In 2012, over 13
percent of Americans defaulted on student loans within the first
three years of payment. This might be the start of something. It
might not. Graebers hopes for a Jubilee may lie on the success of his
message. Rolling Jubilee is an excellent example as to how the ideas
raised in Debt could play out on the ground. Yet for defaults to go
from 13 percent to 30 or 40 or 70 percent, Graeber and his Occupy
brethren will need to be able to tell the American public a moralizing
story that makes them feel good about their decision not to repay
their debts. Chelsea Grove, a twenty-four-year-old from a small town
in Ohio, dropped out of Bowling Green State University after three
years and owes $70,000 in student loans. She now works three jobs a
week in order to pay back her loans and has no intention of going
back to school. There are millions like her. Ill be paying this forever, she says. Or will she? What will it take for Chelsea to stop paying
her loans?
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Debt is one of the first major intellectual projects to emerge out

of the ruins of the 2008 financial meltdown. The Great Recession
was, first and foremost, about debt. It was about owing and being
owed, underwater mortgages and overextended bankers. Graebers
book merely follows capitalisms lead in this regard, as it shifts the
focal point of power away from the workshop floor and toward creditor-debtor relations. As a result, this is no Marxist narrative. Wage
laborand labor in generalplays a remarkably small part in this
story. Taking a global perspective on human history, Graeber internalized what historians of Africa and the Global South have been railing about for years: Marxism, with its obsession with industrial waged
labor, can be incurably Eurocentric. For most men and women
throughout history, the main method of surplus extraction and exploitation has not been wage labor but debt.
An anarchist as opposed to a socialist, Graeber has no qualms
about jettisoning Marxism from the center of leftist ideology. Doing
so allows him not only to rewrite the history of human society in a
fresh new light, but also to offer new solutions as to the best way to
bring modern capitalism to its knees. Marx tried to trigger a revolution through irrepressible, and at times deterministic, logic. By removing the veil of commodity fetishism and showing that capitalism
was not only exploitative but destined to fail, he hoped to use such
laws as the labor theory of value, itself a bourgeois invention, in order
to ignite the flames of rebellion. Graebers goal in Debt is different.
He does not want to turn bourgeois morality against itself. He wants
to rewire our moral compass completely.
When it comes to political praxis, Graeber once again reveals
that he is no Marxist. The socialist institutions that transformed
Marxism from theory to practice have historically been either labor
unions or socialist political parties. In both instances, hierarchical
and often bureaucratic meanswhat Graeber would refer to as
vertical organizationswere embraced in order to topple the bourgeois order. Graeber is not a fan of card-carrying verticals. Hes a
proud horizontal. In his historical narrative, the state is just as likely
to be exploitatively antidemocratic as the market. By placing debt

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not laborat the forefront of his narrative, Graeber offers a different blueprint for revolutionthe Jubilee. Rather than rally the laboring class, he looks to mobilize the debtor class. Rather than
placing the blame on your work conditions, Graeber asks you to place
the blame on your credit conditions. Rather than convincing you to
go on strike by not working, Graeber wants you to go on strike by
not paying.
In his still powerful The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter has a chapter on John C. Calhoun titled,
The Marx of the Master Class. According to Hofstadter, Calhoun
was a brilliant political thinker who managed to consolidate Southern
slaveowners into a powerful ruling class partly because he succeeded
in spinning a historical, class-based narrative that legitimized slavery
on moral grounds. What Marx did for the working class with his theories of exploitation, Hofstadter suggested, Calhoun did for the master class with his theories on slavery. While certainly no Marxist,
could Graeber nevertheless become the Marx of the debtor class? An
intellectual force that helps unite people around a specific ethical,
economic, and social worldview?
I dont know. On one hand, Graebers historical narrative is designed to consolidate the power of a debtor classand as the term
the 99 percent reveals, Graeber clearly thinks in class termsby
creating a new moral vocabulary that would legitimize collective action against creditors. What is more, creative projects such as the
Rolling Jubilee suggest that Graebers message can lead to new social
movements, economic structures, and political coalitions. The work
of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is further evidence of
Graebers potential as an ideological cornerstone for a new social
movement. Coming from a working-class background in Oklahoma,
Warren has a far more populist streak in her than most liberals in
the Democratic Party. She is currently (as of this writing) pushing for
a law that would limit student debt interest rates to 0.75 percent
the same rate that Wall Street banks currently receive from the Federal Reserve discount window. (Under the Obama administration,
student interest rates have doubled from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.)

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The main thrust of this bill is not your usual technocratic argument
(it grows the economy!) but rather a moral one: it is unfair and
unethical that Main Street doesnt receive the same interest rates as
Wall Street. Graebers moralizing message could, therefore, help
mobilize a grassroots campaign for Warrens bill.
Yet Warrens bill also reveals precisely why Graeber may ultimately fail to serve as the ideological glue of a consolidated debtor
class. Unlike Rolling Jubileewhich seeks to use the existing laws of
the marketplace in subversive ways from the outsideWarren is
looking to change the laws from the inside through more traditional
legislative methods. As an anarchist, Graeber rejects such methods
because he rejects anything that hinges on the vertical workings of
representative democracy or technocratic bureaucracy. Much like
the nineteenth-century Populists from Oklahoma who fought for
better credit conditions, Warren has no problem with giant bureaucratic institutions of governanceso long as these institutions serve
the people instead of the banks. Graeber, on the other hand, despises
such political mechanisms since he believes that they merely reproduce the hierarchical, antidemocratic structures human beings have
been suffering under for five thousand years. This leaves Graeber
with a fairly limited range of possible political actions. These limits
become most evident in Graebers latest book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. In this book, a disappointing
read compared to Debt, Graeber mostly vacillates between reliving
the successes of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and bitterly attacking the
liberal establishment for not supporting OWS further. For my part, I
am not suggesting that OWS join the Democratic Party political machine or start canvassing for Hillary Clinton. But what about organizing a grassroots, third-party movement like the Populists of old?
Anarchists such as Graeber would hate this suggestion, and I fear
that this may be their undoing.