Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 3, Primordial Debts, Debt The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
What and why do we owe society? Why do some debts can never be repaid?
It is timely that I just had a book club session with fellow nerds last night. We talked about the same issue in this chapter, primordial debts.
That is, debts that can never be fully paid, despite having paid it
Debts that can never be fully paid, thus payments will be made in perpetuity
Translating transactions and relations into the debt paradigm leads to servitude or bondage with no recourse to freedom. I define the debt paradigm as a financial quantification of value between two objects, persons, or intangible objects into a bookkeeping ledger of profit and loss. Graeber calls this the violence of impersonal arithmetic.
In this chapter, Graeber introduces primordial debts to answer why we feel some debts cannot be fully paid and why social consequences linger after we pay a financial debt.
What is a primordial debt?
Graeber cited British sociologist Geoffrey Ingham’s definition,
Primordial debt is that owed by the living to the continuity and durability of the society that secures their individual existence.
Graeber wants to tackle two points about debt (and its confusion):
Why do we feel like we owe society or state an unpayable debt?
Conversely, what right does the state have to extract payments and speak for us?
These questions are important because they show how much confusion occurs when we translate non-equivalences into bookkeeping ledgers. Plus, money payments do not completely erase debts.
It is not just cases of colonised states that have to deal with indenture
Case: Germany’s debt payments
Two of my book club members hail from Germany and we discussed how every German raised after World War II feels the tug of guilt. Being German means you continue to feel the burden of Nationalist Socialist consequences, despite monetary reparations, says F.
Germany was made to pay for World War I enshrined in the Versailles Agreement of 1919 charging about 269 billion gold marks and a guilt clause. The Germans refused the outrageous financial and punitive costs as well as the moral demands of this agreement. The financial burden was initially envisioned to ensure that Germany would pose no threat in the future.
Ironically, these punitive measures backfired on the European continent. With the citizenry facing unemployment, hyperinflation, and tattered social fabric, the reparations drove people to the Nazi Party. The National Socialists used the World War I reparations to reignite pride and part of Adolf Hitler’s platform included the refusal of payments.1
You could say World War II was also a war against reparations.
Unfortunately, the defeat of Germany once again, incurred another round of financial reparations. This time, lessons were learned from the past. War criminals were punished but not the citizenry. Economic rebuilding was the goal this time around. Instead, payments went directly to the aggrieved parties. The Luxembourg Agreement of September 1952 set payments of 3 billion Deutsche Marks to the state of Israel and 450 million Deutsche Marks to the Jewish Claims Conference, which represents 23 Jewish organisations and 280,000 living Holocaust survivors. Associated Press reports that Germany has now paid 80 billion euros for the last 70 years. They will continue to compensate annually.
Despite this, F’s point is that guilt is not erased by financial payments. There were protests in Israel about accepting the blood money payment. Similarly, Poland also refused compensation after the war but occasionally dangling calculations of reparations for political purposes.
F’s guilt and continued guilt emerged from the modern state as Graeber argues. Our obligation to ‘society,’ he says, stands in for our idea of the ‘nation.’ Auguste Comte’s notion of ‘social debt’ has its roots in (Christian) religious exchange with gods, more commonly known in anthropology as ritual sacrifice.
Myths of Sacrifice to the Gods
One of the more common interpretations of the origins of guilt is from the debt of life incurred from supernatural beings and the grace of God. This is debt that can never be fully repaid except upon death or perpetually paid through one’s descendants.
However, Graeber dispels these:
If the gods already have everything they want, what exactly do humans have to bargain with?
The state could not have appropriated obligation to the gods (guardians of the primordial debt) and replaced it with the state framework because early societies (Mesopotamian Temple societies) did not necessarily pay taxes until much later in human history.
Rather, Graeber argues that sacrifices to the gods or cosmic entities are dissimilar to commercial financial debts. Graeber interprets ritual sacrifice as uniting the cosmic relationships with ancestors or gods. Whereas, commercial debts, are transactions of equality and separation. If we equate debt payments as ritual sacrifice it does not guarantee freedom from the debt relationship easily.
What Graeber is saying is that cosmic debts are not debts per se. This is an erroneous analysis or word choice for relationships that require periodic reunification. For other types of ‘debts,’ Graeber proposes creativity in our approach to debt repayment.
… so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human freedom would then be our ability to decide for ourselves how we want to do so.
Challenge: Blood Money
In Sharia Law as practised in Saudi Arabia, crimes against another individual especially murder, include financial compensation, or blood money. Do you think this reparation falls under cosmic unity (religious mandate) which could grant freedom to the aggrieved party?
These mixed ‘debt’ payments approach accounting-type transactions in other cases such as when deaths of vulnerable domestic workers flare in the region.
Round-Up
We started with two puzzles in the beginning.
Why do we feel some debts cannot be fully repaid?
And if they are repaid, why do we still feel indebted?
As our case shows, debt has moral imperatives that are being translated into financial ledger sheets. Recipients entangle guilt and moral questions into financial payments that mark citizens like F into a perpetual cultural cycle of guilt.
Is there a way out of our analytical conundrum? Graeber suggests untangling two components:
distinguish ‘debt’ relationship with the cosmos from commercial debt; the former offers social freedom because rituals are uniting practices while the latter form, even when concluded, does not guarantee freedom from guilt
questioning how the state came to exert and socially represent debt holders that ties its citizens to perpetual financial and social indenture
The interest payments were restructured in 1953. The final payment of 70 million Euros was completed in 2010, twenty years after German reunification, and almost ninety years since the debt payment was demanded.