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Can David Graeber Become the Marx of the Debtor Class?

ELI COOK

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

In December of 2012, forty-four lucky people in upstate New Yorkreceived a package in the mail. Wrapped in festive red paper as if itwere 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 RollingJubilee Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. The RollingJubilee Fund is a project of Strike Debt. The mission of thisproject is to buy and abolish personal debt. We believe that noone should have to go into debt for the basic things in our lives,like healthcare, housing, and education. You no longer owe thebalance of this debt. It is gone, a gift with no strings attached.You are no longer under any obligation to settle this account withthe original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else.

An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Strike Debts Rolling Ju-bilee initiative is both elegant in its simplicity and subversive in itsramifications. After collecting donations via crowd sourcing and indietelethons, Strike Debt enters into the shadowy underworld of thesecondary debt market and begins purchasing debt from banks forpennies on the dollar. Banks sell these risky debts for far less thanthey originally lent out because they are afraid that they will neversee any of these loans paid off and are looking to cut their losses. Inmost instances, high-risk debt is purchased by debt collection spe-cialists who are confident that if they hound and harass people longenough, they can collect more of the debt than the banks had expect-ed, thus turning a nice profit. Strike Debt, however, is not comprised

of your usual debt buyers. After purchasing debt from banks, theydo something very differentthey forgive it. In a trial run in No-vember 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 debtowed by forty-four people in upstate New York. In March of thisyear, Strike Debt wiped out $1 million of debt from emergencyrooms in Kentucky and Indiana. This time, over one thousand peoplereceived a surprise gift in the mail. The Jubilee, meanwhile, shows nosign of stopping: as of this writing, Strike Debt has raised $615,101,which, if you crunch the numbers Occupy-style, should erase rough-ly $12 million of debt. Thats a lot of red wrapping paper.

Strike Debt leaders are hoping that liberated debtors who sud-denly find themselves with more free cash than they expected willbegin to contribute to the fund as well, thus keeping the Jubileerolling. Furthermore, the bigger the Jubilee gets, the more it encour-ages people to default on their loans. After all, if there is a chance youmight get bailed out by Strike Debt, why not stop making thosemonthly payments? Yet despite Strike Debts hopes that default feverwill snowball into capitalist Armageddon, most of the people behindRolling Jubilee are as practical and pragmatic as their debt-buyingscheme suggests. They realize that these debt erasures are just a tinyfraction of the whole. Tuition debt alone in the United States recent-ly surpassed the $1 trillion mark, and one out of seven Americans iscurrently being pursued by a debt collector. More than just a meansto wipe out debt, Strike Debt activists see the Rolling Jubilee as apublic education campaign that can help build a national debtorsmovement, as well as highlight how the predatory debt system af-fects our families and communities. Most important of all, StrikeDebt is hoping that the Rolling Jubilee erodes the moral stigma be-hind defaulting while legitimizing debt erasures as an acceptable toolof social policy.

Even conservative pundits writing in venues such as Fortunemagazine 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 forgive-ness? Why are they seeking to make debt forgiveness and defaultmorally legitimate? Why are they hoping to build a national debtorsmovement and not, as leftists have been doing for generations, anational labor movement? In most instances, these types of questionsare some of the hardest for scholars of social movements to answer.It can be almost impossible to trace those magical moments whenan idea or worldview crosses the threshold from theory to practice.Social movements are sloppy, conflicting, and chaotic endeavors, soseeing how ideas turn into social action is usually a very slipperybusiness. But not in this case. In this instance, the intellectual inspi-ration and ideological foundation for the Rolling Jubilee is abun-dantly clear.

Walk into almost any Occupy camp in those heady summerdays of 2011be it Occupy Harvard, Tulsa, or Tuscaloosaand youwould likely find a makeshift library. In that library, there would al-most definitely be a dog-eared copy of the anthropologist DavidGraebers Debt: The First 5000 Years. Turn to the final page of thefinal 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 overduefor some kind of biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect bothinternational debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary notjust because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering,but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves thatmoney is not ineffable, that paying ones debts is not the essenceof morality, that all these things are human arrangements andthat if democracy is to mean anything it is the ability to all agreeto arrange things in a different way.

Intended to serve as a usable and accessible past that could helpthe 99 percent fight the forces of Wall Street, every page of Debtshould be read with the idea of a Jubilee in mind. Throughout abook that weaves together examples from the Tiv people of Nigeriato 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 mightthink. Nearly every plebian revolt in history, he notes, began withthe breaking of tablets, the burning of papers, the destruction ofbureaucracy, the erasure of numbers. In biblical times, the clearingof debts was so widespread it was even institutionalized to take placeevery fifty yearsthe Jubilee. (Imagine trying to sell mortgage-backed derivatives and credit default swaps with a law like that onthe books.)

I used the term the 99 percent here not because of a generalaffinity between the messages of Occupy Wall Street and Debt butbecause David Graeber coined the term. On 2 August 2011, follow-ing years of experience in global social-justice protests that cost himhis position at Yale (you know you must be onto something whenyour politics can get you fired), Graeber arrived at Bowling Green,the Manhattan park with the bull statue, in order to help plan anoccupation of Wall Street. Adbusters, an anticonsumerist Canadianmagazine edited by rogue marketing specialists, had first suggestedthe idea of some kind of physical encampment in downtown Manhat-tan a few weeks before. Disturbed by the vertical and hierarchicalnature of the demonstration, however, Graeber and two of his fellowanarchist friends moved to the other side of the park and began or-ganizing a more democratic general assembly that would be based onthe principals of horizontal consensus. The group became the core ofthe Occupy movement. Graeber participated in a number of differ-ent working-group meetings, which planned the occupation, and hecoined the phrase the 99 percent. On 17 September, the night theoccupation began, Graeber helped promote the decision to camp outin Zuccotti Park, even though that had not been the original plan. Afew weeks later, when Occupy Wall Street was being criticized fornot having any specific demands, it was Graebers articles on the AlJazeera website and in the Guardian that articulated the logic behindthe movement. Like any good anarchist, Graeber hates being labeledthe founding father of Occupy Wall Street. But since most of us stillthink in vertical terms, that is precisely how we view him. The re-luctant 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 thingabove all else: default.

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Graebers attempt to write the history of humanitys approach todebt is filled with contradictions, ambiguities, and conflicts, whichmakes it rather difficult to summarize. The fact that Debt spans fivethousand years does not help either. But here it goes: in the begin-ning, Graeber argues, there were social currencies and humaneconomies. In an argument reminiscent of French sociologistMarcel Mausss theory of gift giving, Graeber contends that eco-nomic transactions first emerged as social exchanges in which thecentral purpose was not to buy or sell goods but rather to foster rela-tions between peoplebe it celebrating marriages, avoiding bloodfeuds, consoling mourners, negotiating treaties, or establishing pater-nity. Graebers point is not to romanticize these early societies (ifanything, his overall view of humanity is somewhat dark for a sup-posedly wide-eyed anarchist), but rather to show that economic tieswere governed by love, jealousy, hate, anger, envy, and spiteandeveryone knew it. Instead of shying away from the social obligationsthat people incur whenever they give or receive a material thing fromsomeone else, Graeber argues that early societies embraced such tiesas the very essence of social life. They couldnt imagine a societywithout such obligations.

Because such transactions were so intertwined with the soapopera that is everyday life, people never thought these social obli-gations could (or should) be precisely quantified, returned, or bal-anced. As in life, the economic debts one incurred to othersbethey sisters, lovers, rivals, mentors, or companionscould never tru-ly be repaid. Any attempt to do so would have been considered of-fensive, or simply bizarre. Graeber tries to clarify such a worldview,so foreign to us moderns, by suggesting that such relations still existtoday within the sacred realm of the nuclear family. Citing a scenefrom a Margaret Atwood novel where a young man is handed anitemized bill of all his childhood expenses, Graeber convincingly

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argues that we would all find such a transaction monstrous. In hu-man economies there is no such thing as debt because social relationsare not quantified, nor can they be. How could you possibly assign anumber that would represent all the social exchanges youve had withyour parents?

Quantification plays a central role in the shift from obligationto debt, and by quantification Graeber generally means money. De -fining debt as an obligation to pay a certain sum of money, he ar-gues that it is the pricing of social obligations that turns morality intoa matter of impersonal arithmetic, thus justifying things that wouldotherwise seem outrageous or obscene. Graeber, however, arguesnot only that debt cannot exist without money, but that debt is thevery reason money was invented in the first place. It is perhaps here,on the question of the invention of money, where Graeber is at hisfinest. Taking Adam Smith straight on, he convincingly demolisheswhat he refers to as the myth of barter, that oft-heard liberal taleabout how money emerged out of peoples natural propensity toexchange. Citing over half a dozen leading economic textbooks,Grae ber tears into the great founding myth of the discipline of eco-nomics with relish:

Its important to emphasize that this is not presented as some-thing that actually happened, but as a purely imaginary exercise.To see that society benefits from a medium of exchange, writeBegg, Fischer, and Dornbuch, imagine a barter economy. Im -agine the difficulty you would have today, write Maunder,Myers, Wall, and Miller, if you had to exchange your labor di-rectly for the fruits of someone elses labor. Imagine, writePar kin and King, you have roosters but you want roses. Onecould mul tiply examples endlessly. Just about every economicstextbook employed today sets out the problem the same way.Historically, they note, we know that there was a time whenthere was no money. What must it have been like? Well, let usim agine an economy something like todays except with no mon-ey. That would have been decidedly inconvenient! Surely, peoplemust have invented money for the sake of efficiency.

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According to Graeber, money did not develop out of commer-cial exchange because barter was exceedingly rare in world history.Many historians and anthropologists have sought out the fabled landof barter only to come up empty. Graeber says this is because barteris something that need only occur in interactions between strangers.In the impersonal universe imagined by economists, coins and billsare needed because ongoing social relations are nonexistent, trust islacking, and the exchange must be consummated on the spot. Butthroughout most of human history, Graeber points out, the partiesentering into economic relations knew each other reasonably welland therefore did not need to barter for goods immediately; theycould go into debt. Money, therefore, emerged not out of commer-cial relations but debtor relations. Metallic coins, meanwhile, werenot even needed in the beginning. The first kind of money was not avaluable commodity such as gold or seashells, as the liberal mythgoes, but rather a virtual book credit or IOU that someone jotteddown. The origin of money, in short, was not barter but more like thebar tab.

But how did social obligations (I owe you one) become debt(I owe you $12.50)? Why did bartenders start jotting down socialobligations in dollars and cents? Graeber argues that the key is vio-lence. To make something saleable in a human economy, one needsto first rip it from its context. Since social ties were unquantifiableand incomparable due to the unique conflux of relations peoplefostered in human economies, the only way obligations could be-come debt was by violently tearing some people out of their socialnetworks. To create money, one first needed to create strangers. Slav-ery, therefore, with its uprooting of communities and ability to turnpeople into priced abstractions, played a central role in the rise ofmonied debt. Graeber gives numerous examples for this: in earlymedieval Ireland, the first form of money used was the cumalacurrency of slave girls. In Africa, the Lele only began pricing womenafter they had begun kidnapping females from other tribes. And inperhaps his most incisive example, Graeber shows how the indirectcultural 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 ofthe Tiv were actually captured by Westerners. As in most instances inthis book, while far more historical work needs to be done on this is-sue, Graeber seems to be onto something: in my own work on theorigins of modern economic indicators such as GDP, for example, I,too, discovered that the pricing of slaves in the southern UnitedStates played a crucial role in the eventual pricing of everyday life.

Graebers main point here is that in order for reductive, arith-metic, soulless, market exchange to emerge as the main arbiter of so-cial relations, people must first be ripped out of the endlesslycom plicated webs of human relationships that make up their sociallife. In the case of slavery, people could suddenly be priced and soldbecause after being violently dragged off to a foreign world, the onlyrelation they initially had was with their new owner. While not im-plicitly saying so, Graeber hints at the notion that today we are allsomewhat enslaved since our human economy and social currencieshave also been taken away from us, and what remains is an anony-mous, impersonal cash nexus of dollars, cents, and strangers. Somuch, then, for historian Niall Fergusons The Ascent of Money, thetitle of both his book and PBS special on the wonders of cash. InGraebers narrative, money does not levitate humanity to granderheights but rather serves as a remnant of our darkest hours, thelegacy of war, conquest, and slavery. The Descent into Money ismore like it.

In the second half of his book, Graeber continues by tracing thehistory of money and debt through four distinct periods of time, eachdivided by the type of money that was used. The Axial Age, from800 BCE to 600 CE, was marked by the emergence of metallic coinsand the rise of the first great agricultural empires: Mesopotamia,Egypt, India, and China. Continuing his theme of tracing the devel-opment of money not through trade or markets but violence, central-ization, and war, Graeber argues that unlike local trade relations thatcould be consummated with informal book credit, if one wanted toconquer 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, wasmostly mined by slaves), we have a further dislocation of humaneconomies as impersonal markets, born of war and centralized pow-er, spread across the globe.

Graeber argues that such impersonal exchanges revolutionizedhuman culture. In human economies, motives are complex and ex-changes of goods are fraught with dozens of layers of intrigue such aslove, envy, or pride. Cash transactions between strangers, on the oth-er hand, are calculating, superficial affairs in which self-interested,means-to-end thinking dominates. The crucial cultural move in thisera, according to Graeber, occurred when people began to see suchimpersonal transactions as the essence of humanity rather than abizarre exception. To prove his point, Graeber uses etymology: theword rational derives from ratiohow much X can go into Y.Pushing the Frankfurt Schools indictment of the Enlightenmentback some two millennia or so, Graeber suggests that it is in this AxialAge that a radical simplification of motives surfaces in an attemptto explain the workings of human societies. The profit motive is born.

Next comes the Middle Ages (6001450 CE), which Graeberconceives as one big monetary contraction with no Ben Bernanke topush for quantitative easing. The period is marked with the collapseof empires and therefore the collapse of hard currencies. The pre-cious coins that had once fueled the rise of both war and the marketnow found themselves melted down and reborn as giant images ofgod. As money reverted to virtual bar tabs, the Axial Age of metallicmaterialism was replaced by a spiritual age of religion and transcen-dence. You might think that Graeber would celebrate the destructionof coin and the ascendance of the major world religions as an alto-gether positive development, but Graebers historical narrative hasfew feel-good moments. Instead, Graeber lashes out at religion forfurther legitimizing debtor relations and market mentalities. EchoingFriedrich Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals, Graeber observes that allthe major world religions, save Islam, are framed in the language ofa financial transaction. These religions tell us that human existenceis 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 themonied markets of the Axial Age but rather a continuance, since it isonly once we can imagine human life as a series of commercialtransactions that were capable of seeing our relation to the universein terms of debt.

Graeber provides some convincing evidence: Jesus, for in-stance, is referred to as the redeemer. Redemption is a financialterm 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 doessimilar cultural work by stating that humans are in infinite karmicdebt. In these great religions, Graeber notes, the cosmic debt ofyour human existence is not something you really want to repaybecause that would mean giving your life back to god, which meansyou would have to die. As in all debtor relations, paying back theprincipal is not nearly as central (or profitable) in these religious nar-ratives as the interest payments. Buddhism, Judaism, and Christi-anity, Graeber argues, are salvation on an installment plan. Youmake 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 asan endless burden of debt, Graeber concludes, probably struck mostEuropean, Indian, or Chinese peasants as an apt metaphor sincethrough out the Middle Ages that was often the norm for a large seg-ment of the population.

The Middle Ages ended with the European discovery of theNew World and its treasure trove of gold and silver. Metallic moneywas soon back with a vengeance and with it a new historical period(14501971), which Graeber refers to as the Age of the Great Cap-italist Empires. The impersonal logic of the market was now givenfree rein as capitalism, a system which envisions all money as inter-est-bearing capital, conquered the globe. And what is interest, Grae-ber asks, but the demand that money never cease to grow? Interestis the key to understanding capitalism, according to Graeber, partlybecause interest-bearing debt has the power to turn us all into capi-talistswhether we like it or not. Seeking to understand capitalisms

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relentless and historically unique desire for endless growth, Graeberuses Cortss vicious conquest of the New World as a case study.Why, Graeber asks, was Corts so greedy that he must destroy theentire Aztec civilization, even though he had already extracted enor-mous amounts of gold? The answer by now should be obvious:Corts was in constant debt. People in debt do not have the luxury ofchoosing not to maximize profits. Thanks to debt, Graeber implies,the economists atomistic models of greedy, narrow, calculating self-interest were being transformed from academic fantasy into every-day actuality.

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David Graebers biography reads like an Indiana Jones moviescript. He was born in 1961 to a working-class family of self-taughtintellectuals living in a cooperative New York City apartment com-plex run by trade unionists. An operative in a garment factory, hismother snared a starring role in the International Ladies GarmentWorkers Unions musical-comedy revue, Pins and Needles. Whenthe show became an overnight sensation, she quit her day job. Grae-bers father participated in the anarchist-led Spanish revolution inBarcelona in 1936 and then fought in the Spanish Civil War. As foryoung David, by the age of eleven he had already succeeded in trans-lating a series of Mayan hieroglyphics that had never been previouslydeciphered. This won him a scholarship to Phillips Academy in An-dover, Massachusetts, where he began his rise through the ranks ofelite academic institutions that would only come to an end with hisunceremonious departure from Yale (alas, Indiana Jones taught atPrince ton). After teaching for some time at Goldsmiths, University ofLondon, Graeber was recently hired as a full professor at, ironicallyenough, the London School of Economics.

As a graduate student in anthropology at Chicago, Graeberheaded to Madagascar for his fieldwork. Due to harsh spendingcuts brought on by IMF austerity measures, the central governmenthad little presence in the rural communities that Graeber frequent-ed. 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 consen-sus. To this day, whenever Graeber looks to prove that the consensus-based general assemblies popularized by the Occupy movementare both plausible and workable, he cites examples from Madagascar.Madagascar also seems to be his source of inspiration for the humaneconomies he believes can serve as an alternative to a debt-basedmarket society. However, while Graeber clearly sees Madagascar as amodel for a better future, he also witnessed there the terrible conse-quences of the IMFs neoliberal debt policies. For example, Graeberarrived in Madagascar following a particularly virulent outbreak ofmalaria, which erupted after the local government had been forcedto shut down its mosquito eradication program due to IMF-imposedausterity measures. Arriving as a young assistant professor at Yale inthe early 2000s, his experiences in Africa pushed him to becomemore 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 nota historian. No historian would dare write this book. In recentdecades, the discipline of history has ceded big history to the non-historiansCharles Tilly, Jared Diamond, Barrington Moore. (Tillyhas a book titled Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Compar-isons.) There is good reason why historians steer clear of such proj-ects. Much like Tilly and Moore, Graebers narrative is too formulaicat times, as much of human history often seems logically to flow outof the distinction between coins, virtual book credit, and paper mon-ey. Furthermore, in his desire to cover five thousand years, manyconnecting threads in the narrative are glossed over far too quickly.Lacking a detailed analysis of the critical turning points, the book of-ten reads like a series of sharp, provocative yet disconnected insights.The crucial link between slavery and markets, for instance, shouldhave been fleshed out far more. The same can be said of the connec-tion between quantification and money. (What if I count things with-out pricing them? Is owing someone four carrots different fromowing her four dollars?)

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And yet, despite all this, one cannot help but feel refreshedand energized by the massive scale of Graebers project and hiswillingness to think in terms of big structures, large processes, andhuge comparisons. Theodor Adorno once said of Freuds psycho-analysis that nothing is true apart from the exaggerations. Thesame, perhaps, could be said of Graeber. On the microlevel, thereare many gaps to fill. But good history isnt just well researched: itsintuitive. In countless parts of the book, Graeber may not back uphis argument with enough evidence, or trace exactly how a certaincultural development came about, but nevertheless, it often feelsright. Historians, not usually known for their intellectual chutzpah,need books like this, if only as a framework they can build upon ora straw man they can painstakingly tear down. (Some of the bestwork in social and political history in the past two decades was driv-en by the desire to prove political sociologists Barrington Mooreand Charles Tilly wrong. I have a hunch the same could be said ofFreud.)

But to judge Debt solely as a book of history would be short-sighted. Unpretentious and accessible, Debt was written for thewider public. Its main purpose is not academic interpretation but so-cial revolution. One of its organizing ideas is the biblical-style Ju-bilee. Yet while Graeber uses the past to show us the narrowboundaries of our economic imagination today, he also uses humanhistory not as an inspiration but rather as a warning. For millennia,Graeber tells us, defaulting on ones debt has been morally reprehen-sible. Economists, bankers, kings, and priests have created narrativesthat link indebtedness to guilt and sin. To get people to stop payingback their loans, therefore, Graeber believes that he needs to attackour very definitions of right and wrong, good and bad. As a result, thisis not really the work of an historian or even an anthropologist butrather that of a modern-day moral philosopher.

If this book had been written six hundred years ago, Graeberlikely would have gone after the priests and rabbis, since they werethe central arbiters of medieval morality and ethics. But today, in or-der 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 thegospel of modern economics and its clerics, the economists.

Scrubbing away all the things that make us human, modern eco-nomics offers us, as Graeber puts it, a sanitized view of society.Gone are our friends, families, and loved ones; our jealousies, pas-sions, and idiosyncrasies. Gone are also any elements of coercion.Re ducing all human interaction to natural, self-interested exchangeempties the world of powerthat ability to impose ones will on an-other. Exchange is based on the principal of equivalence, and so, inthe 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 timewith our children, economists will tell us that our decision will not bebased on our fear of being fired or losing our health insurance butrather a cold calculation which balances the social utility we get fromleisure and from labor. If we decide to take that second shift, it is be-cause the exchange of leisure time for money maximizes our utility.These models not only infer that the game of life is played on a levelplaying field, but that we are all, as Milton Friedman famously noted,free to choose: there is no hierarchical relationship between bossand employee, no power plays, no intimidationsjust an evenhand-ed exchange between equals.

What makes modern economics so attractive, and yet at times socruel, is this very assumption of equality and freedom in a world ofinequalities and coercion. Such naive (or perhaps cynical) optimismforms the moral basis of capitalism. Graeber recognizes this, and hisbook should be read as a concerted effort to destroy this narrative bysubstituting the origin tale of exchange with an origin tale of debt.After all, debt is everything exchange is not: its hierarchical (thereare creditors and there are debtors); its ongoing (while exchange ismomentary); and its coercive (people in debt often are forced tomake choices based on their creditors interestsand interest rate).In creating an alternative historical narrative that centers not onexchange, equivalence, trade, and markets, but debt, hierarchy, vio-lence, and centralized bureaucracies, Graeber is trying to pull the rugout 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 thefeasibility of default as an alternate social model. If both contract-ing sides in a transaction are equal and autonomous, and if no co-ercion was involved, then any attempt not to repay a debt would bea failure to honor (Graeber would think this was an interestingchoice of words) what was ultimately a fair bargain. But what if thecontracting parties were not equal? What if coercion played a rolein this credit transaction? Do I need to pay back my student debtif it was the only way I could get a college education? Do the citi-zens of Greece need to pay back their creditors through harsh aus-terity measures if Goldman Sachs pushed Greek leaders to take outmore and more debt? Do I need to watch my salary being gar-nished every week because my child fell ill, and I did not have anyhealth insurance?

Graebers call for Jubilee might seem far-fetched, but, as hepoints out, this is not your granddaddys capitalism. (He refers to theneoliberal catastrophe the world has experienced since the 1970s asthe beginning of something yet to be determined.) In 2012, over 13percent of Americans defaulted on student loans within the firstthree years of payment. This might be the start of something. Itmight not. Graebers hopes for a Jubilee may lie on the success of hismessage. Rolling Jubilee is an excellent example as to how the ideasraised in Debt could play out on the ground. Yet for defaults to gofrom 13 percent to 30 or 40 or 70 percent, Graeber and his Occupybrethren will need to be able to tell the American public a moralizingstory that makes them feel good about their decision not to repaytheir debts. Chelsea Grove, a twenty-four-year-old from a small townin Ohio, dropped out of Bowling Green State University after threeyears and owes $70,000 in student loans. She now works three jobs aweek in order to pay back her loans and has no intention of goingback to school. There are millions like her. Ill be paying this forev-er, she says. Or will she? What will it take for Chelsea to stop payingher loans?

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Debt is one of the first major intellectual projects to emerge outof the ruins of the 2008 financial meltdown. The Great Recessionwas, first and foremost, about debt. It was about owing and beingowed, underwater mortgages and overextended bankers. Graebersbook merely follows capitalisms lead in this regard, as it shifts thefocal point of power away from the workshop floor and toward cred-itor-debtor relations. As a result, this is no Marxist narrative. Wagelaborand labor in generalplays a remarkably small part in thisstory. Taking a global perspective on human history, Graeber inter-nalized what historians of Africa and the Global South have been rail-ing about for years: Marxism, with its obsession with industrial wagedlabor, can be incurably Eurocentric. For most men and womenthroughout history, the main method of surplus extraction and ex-ploitation has not been wage labor but debt.

An anarchist as opposed to a socialist, Graeber has no qualmsabout jettisoning Marxism from the center of leftist ideology. Doingso allows him not only to rewrite the history of human society in afresh new light, but also to offer new solutions as to the best way tobring modern capitalism to its knees. Marx tried to trigger a revolu-tion through irrepressible, and at times deterministic, logic. By re-moving the veil of commodity fetishism and showing that capitalismwas not only exploitative but destined to fail, he hoped to use suchlaws as the labor theory of value, itself a bourgeois invention, in orderto ignite the flames of rebellion. Graebers goal in Debt is different.He does not want to turn bourgeois morality against itself. He wantsto rewire our moral compass completely.

When it comes to political praxis, Graeber once again revealsthat he is no Marxist. The socialist institutions that transformedMarxism from theory to practice have historically been either laborunions or socialist political parties. In both instances, hierarchicaland often bureaucratic meanswhat Graeber would refer to asvertical organizationswere embraced in order to topple the bour-geois order. Graeber is not a fan of card-carrying verticals. Hes aproud horizontal. In his historical narrative, the state is just as likelyto be exploitatively antidemocratic as the market. By placing debt

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not laborat the forefront of his narrative, Graeber offers a differ-ent blueprint for revolutionthe Jubilee. Rather than rally the la-boring class, he looks to mobilize the debtor class. Rather thanplacing the blame on your work conditions, Graeber asks you to placethe blame on your credit conditions. Rather than convincing you togo on strike by not working, Graeber wants you to go on strike bynot paying.

In his still powerful The American Political Tradition, the histo-rian Richard Hofstadter has a chapter on John C. Calhoun titled,The Marx of the Master Class. According to Hofstadter, Calhounwas a brilliant political thinker who managed to consolidate Southernslaveowners into a powerful ruling class partly because he succeededin spinning a historical, class-based narrative that legitimized slaveryon moral grounds. What Marx did for the working class with his the-ories of exploitation, Hofstadter suggested, Calhoun did for the mas-ter class with his theories on slavery. While certainly no Marxist,could Graeber nevertheless become the Marx of the debtor class? Anintellectual force that helps unite people around a specific ethical,economic, and social worldview?

I dont know. On one hand, Graebers historical narrative is de-signed to consolidate the power of a debtor classand as the termthe 99 percent reveals, Graeber clearly thinks in class termsbycreating a new moral vocabulary that would legitimize collective ac-tion against creditors. What is more, creative projects such as theRolling Jubilee suggest that Graebers message can lead to new socialmovements, economic structures, and political coalitions. The workof Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is further evidence ofGraebers potential as an ideological cornerstone for a new socialmovement. Coming from a working-class background in Oklahoma,Warren has a far more populist streak in her than most liberals inthe Democratic Party. She is currently (as of this writing) pushing fora law that would limit student debt interest rates to 0.75 percentthe same rate that Wall Street banks currently receive from the Fed-eral 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 andunethical that Main Street doesnt receive the same interest rates asWall Street. Graebers moralizing message could, therefore, helpmobilize a grass roots campaign for Warrens bill.

Yet Warrens bill also reveals precisely why Graeber may ulti-mately fail to serve as the ideological glue of a consolidated debtorclass. Unlike Rolling Jubileewhich seeks to use the existing laws ofthe marketplace in subversive ways from the outsideWarren islooking to change the laws from the inside through more traditionallegislative methods. As an anarchist, Graeber rejects such methodsbecause he rejects anything that hinges on the vertical workings ofrepresentative democracy or technocratic bureaucracy. Much likethe nineteenth-century Populists from Oklahoma who fought forbetter credit conditions, Warren has no problem with giant bureau-cratic institutions of governanceso long as these institutions servethe people instead of the banks. Graeber, on the other hand, despisessuch political mechanisms since he believes that they merely repro-duce the hierarchical, antidemocratic structures human beings havebeen suffering under for five thousand years. This leaves Graeberwith a fairly limited range of possible political actions. These limitsbecome most evident in Graebers latest book, The Democracy Proj-ect: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. In this book, a disappointingread compared to Debt, Graeber mostly vacillates between relivingthe successes of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and bitterly attacking theliberal establishment for not supporting OWS further. For my part, Iam not suggesting that OWS join the Democratic Party political ma-chine or start canvassing for Hillary Clinton. But what about organ-izing a grassroots, third-party movement like the Populists of old?Anarchists such as Graeber would hate this suggestion, and I fearthat this may be their undoing.

100 u rar itan