David Graeber - Where Did Money REALLY Come From?

Wikipedia: 

David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American and British anthropologist, left-wing and anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in social and economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

. . .Hans Steinmüller, reviewing On Kings in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, described Graeber and his co-author Marshall Sahlins as “two of the most important anthropological thinkers of our time” and considered their contribution to represent a “benchmark” for the anthropological theory of kingship.

As stated by Penguin Random House editor Tom Penn after Graeber’s death, “David was a true radical, a pioneer in everything that he did. David’s inspirational work has changed and shaped the way people understand the world… In his books, his constant, questing curiosity, his wry, sharp-eyed provoking of received nostrums shine through. So too, above all, does his unique ability to imagine a better world, borne out of his own deep and abiding humanity. We are deeply honoured to be his publisher, and we will all miss him: his kindness, his warmth, his wisdom, his friendship. His loss is incalculable, but his legacy is immense. His work and his spirit will live on.”

Selected quotes from the lecture below by David Graeber:

“The first recorded word for freedom in any human language is the Sumerian word Ama-gi, which literally means return to mother, because that’s what happens. They declare debt cancelation, all the debt peons get to go home.”

“Cash markets, insofar as they seem to first emerge, will tend to emerge right around wherever armies are parked, or where they had recently looted things, and are trying to get rid of the little bits of gold and silver for things that they like.”

“Markets tend to be created by governments as a side effect of military operations. They sometimes take on a life of their own, but the origins are very closely linked.”

“People take these standing armies, they pay them in cash. Alexander’s armies, for example, took half a ton of silver a day to pay the army. Where did they get this silver? Well, the armies would beseige cities, take lots of prisoners, enslave them, send them to the mines, and they’ll make more metal to feed the army again. So it became this giant cycle. So coins are found pretty much where there armies are throughout the ancient world. In Rome it was in Italy. 90 percent of Roman coins are in Italy and along the border where the armies were stationed.”

“In a way we’re doing things backwards. If you do look at this in a broad historical perspective what we learn is that whenever you have a system of virtual money, where people don’t assume money is a thing but assume it’s a promise, it’s an IOU, it’s a social arrangement, such as in ancient Mesopotamia, such as in the Middle Ages, you have to set up some sort of mechanism to make sure the thing doesn’t go crazy. Usually that means setting up some mechanism to protect debtors. So you can have periodic debt cancelation, you can have anti-usury laws . . .There’s a number of things you can do. Usually, it’s a giant, overarching, cosmological system beyond the purview of any state, whether it’s sacred kings, or biblical prophets, or the world religions, Canon law, Sharia. Be that as it may, it has to be something big. 

Now, we do set up giant, overarching institutions like that nowadays. But what do we do? We set up the IMF to protect creditors against debtors. Basically, we did it backwards. You know, the S&P, all these other institutions like that. They come up with this idea that nobody should ever default. It’s absurd. 

And, sure enough, we have an endless series of debt crises.”

Video Title: Where Did Money REALLY Come From? Source: Deficit Owls. Date Published: October 17, 2017. Description:

Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this.