Chapter 11 (Part 7): The Gambler in Western Casino Capitalism
The gambler figure in casino capitalism risks his entire life and universe to potentially win big but without playing by the rules
If you are new here, we are reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Catch up and join us on Thursdays in 2025. My first slow read here on Substack in 2023 was David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything. These two books showcase his thesis on the development of humanity by looking at how people organise themselves and their world around human values and choices. Unique among his peers, Graeber still asks the big questions in anthropology.
Dear Reader,
Desolate. Inhuman urban place. Bleak. Herstal was once a sprawling steel and manufacturing town that employed thousands, thanks to the FN Herstal weapons factory, but no more. (With automation and sold off to Browning, it was not as it once was, a generation ago.)
This is, of course, an inaccurate glimpse, but nonetheless grim. Sitting in the midst of this is Our Lady of Licourt, its environment sliced and diced. (I am hopeful that the urban regeneration spreading out from Liege will eventually reach this area, about fifteen kilometres or so away).
The people and children come. A young forty-year-old, Father Kaminski, holds court and keeps the small community going.
It’s no different as we discuss the apocalypse that capitalism brings to the human condition.
Onward,
Melanie
The Endless Apocalypse of Western Capitalism
In the concluding section of Chapter 11, we come to a head and ponder the problem that grapples capitalism: its apocalypse. Or more accurately, its cyclical threat of human destruction.
To understand this, Graeber identifies two components:
the long arm of time—the futurism necessary for credit to fuel capitalist enterprises
the figure of the gambler or the high-risk taker
Mix the two and you have the formula for the permanent boom and bust cycle of capitalism that leaves no escape hatch for humanity.
The Gambler
The figure of the gambler or the high-roller has been a necessary character in mercantile capitalism. After all, the adventure of trade required courage to face the unpredictable, like the Genoese, who must be part-time pirates to challenge any armed threat on the high seas or trading destinations.
But what Graeber is talking about is a peculiar type of gambler—a speculator willing to wager his entire life, kingdom, and the world. However, there are two types of bettor—an honourable one and a cheat. The cost is the price of an empire.
This takes us back to the gambling tables in Mexico between Moctezuma and Cortés. We return once again to the Aztec land and wonder how a band of several hundred came to conquer the hundreds of thousands. (Or why Moctezuma did not simply kill them when he could have).
How did Moctezuma lose his Aztec Empire?
Easy. He bet on his honour and lost everything, as an honourable warrior was expected to do. It was a case of mistranslation that cost him victory, as recounted by the social historian and anthropologist, Inga Clendinnen, who reconstructed the Mexica view of the Spanish invaders.
One important feature was what she called the unfolding of destiny that defined the becoming of men or warriors in the public arena. The social face gained in one event could just as easily be reversed in another. The reduction to helplessness is a real threat. Yet, victory could also be at hand. The high status achievement of victory is what Clendinnen notes as the reason for high-stakes gambling.
It is this figure of extraordinary luck that seemed to underscore most games of chance among the Aztecs. One example is their ballgame ullamaliztli, in which a rubber ball must be launched across the court that measures about 9 meters x 45 meters (30 feet x 150 feet long) using only the hips and buttocks. The objective was to keep the ball in play otherwise, the point is awarded to the enemy team.
It seems simple, but this game was brutal, leading to internal bleeding and death. Even the modern version warned of body bruising due to the high-velocity hits.
The scoring system is slow; it could take reputedly days, but the rewards were great. There is a feat of seeming impossibility of driving the ball through one of the rings that delivers instant victory (like capturing the Golden Snitch in Quidditch ends the game). The prize was fame. And also all the riches wagered and the ‘right to pillage the cloaks of onlookers.’
This luck, or fate, however you see it, was the ultimate game of control and the unfolding of destiny—death or glory, winner-take-it-all and the desolation of one’s enemy, they take nothing. The pleasure for any warrior is achieving both. Without risk to one’s own life, there is no reward. It is this wait-and-see attitude that Clendinnen attributes to Moctezuma’s decision-making.
The game of destiny
Clendinnen described how the appearance of Cortés, their horses, and armoury was a total unknown. Without affiliation to any known city or territory, the Spanish contingent could not be coerced, bought, influenced, or terrified under their empire. They used displays of wealth as ‘statements of dominance,’ but it ended up being interpreted by the Spanish as gifts of submission—the ritual of gift denigration taken seriously by their foes.
Moctezuma invited them into the city as another display of strength, but Cortés eventually made him a hostage in his own palace. It is during this imprisonment that we find Moctezuma playing cards with Cortés.
During his captivity the Mexica ruler Moctezuma would play with Cortés a board game called totoloque, of which we know little. In one engagement the tlatoani (Moctezuma) discovered Pedro de Alvarado to have been persistently mis-scoring, of course in Cortes’ favour. Diaz read Moctezoma’s unconcern at this discovery as evidence of lordly liberality and the untroubled acceptance of losses (they were playing for gold). Perhaps so. But perhaps it could point to a quite different locus for the meaning and excitement of the game: Moctezoma may have been intent on watching the way the counters fell.
p. 205, Chapter 5 Aztecs
Rather than the aggregate total of skills like other board games, perhaps chance played a dominant role here. It was not about the gold, as Graeber observes. This obsession with games of chance was like an augury, something astrologically determined, a revelation from the gods, or not. As Clendinnen remarked,
Through that play they could enjoy a fleeting sensation of control, as they pressed the future, in one small aspect, to reveal itself. And so, perhaps, they could ease the chronic and pervasive uncertainty which was the human condition.
p. 206-207, Chapter 5 Aztecs
We have here, as Graeber observes, an honourable Aztec warrior, risking victory and destruction by the rules, and his opponent flouting them. Two different rules and honour loses. Moctezuma, waiting for a chance for the tides to turn, despite all the signals of doom from the Spaniards behaving greedily in front of gold, slaughtering unarmed warriors, dancing at the time of Toxcatl, and not following the game rules.
Too late, Moctezuma was stripped of who he was during his incarceration
…they clustered around him, gazing into his face, touching and prodding him, and then shackled him to teach him fear, his sacred power drained away. Then, during Cortes’ enforced absence from the city to repel another Spanish force, armed Spaniards slaughtered unarmed warriors dancing in the sacred precinct (it was the time of Toxcatl), so unequivocally identifying themselves as ‘enemies’. Cortes’ return with reinforcements did nothing to quell Mexica rage; the Spaniards were driven from the city with terrible losses. In the course of that great ‘uprising’ Moctezoma was killed, but he knew before he died that he had been replaced as tlatoani: Moctezoma manhandled by strangers was Moctezoma no longer.
p. 379
A king is made and unmade. A warrior is only as good as his victory, but Moctezuma proved to be one when he equally accepted his defeat and destruction.
Doomsday
We return to the conquest of Mexico repeatedly because the Aztecs were now looped into the capitalist enterprise an ocean away. For the Aztecs, struggling with their own regional political tension, Cortés brought doom, but with hints of potential reversals as the Aztecs fought hard against them every step of the way.
Capitalism subjected the Aztec empire and the region to an unknowable and unpredictable set of rules. The figure of the gambler is fittingly an essential component in this wild casino but demands a different sort of risk-taking, in which honour or a playbook is best shelved.
Round-Up
Today’s post focuses on one of two components of the apocalypse in capitalism: the gambler. Roped in the entrails of the gold/silver rush in Western Europe, the Aztecs were thrust into a new casino economic system in which the rules of warrior honour do not apply. Not even their own high-stakes gambling rules.
This unpredictability is what I have been describing as casino capitalism or hypercapitalism, a unique offshoot from Western Europe. It brings with it an accursed reality that portends annihilation. The conquest of the Aztecs consigned the culture, language, and people to absolute erasure.
Sources:
Clendinnen, Inga. [1991] 2014. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, Bruno. [trans. Catherine Porter] 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Find your way around: the book outline
Re-read the previous post:
Chapter 11 (Part 6): The Paradox of Freedom and Debt in Western Capitalism
The concept of freedom/debt is the two distinctive features of Western capitalism: the market as freedom paid on the backs of indentured service, free labour, and/or slavery