This is one of a series of posts that will ask what the most pertinent question raised by a prominent influencer of political economy might have been, and what the relevance of that question might be today. There is a list of all posts in the series at the end of each entry. The origin of this series is noted here.
After the first two posts in this series, the topics have been chosen by me, and this is one of those. This series has been produced using what I describe as directed AI searches to establish positions with which I agree, followed by final editing before publication.
David Graeber is appearing because Jacqueline and I were, during a coffee whilst on our weekend away, discussing people whose books have influenced me. This is the second of three posts that follow on from that discussion.
David Graeber was the anthropologist who re-framed economics by showing that its most basic assumptions were myths.
Where conventional economists traced money to barter and exchange, Graeber traced it to trust and relationships. He argued that the origins of money lay not in markets but in morality: in obligations, promises, and the human capacity for cooperation.
But he also showed how those promises were corrupted: how debt, once a symbol of mutual responsibility, became a mechanism of domination.
Hence the David Graeber Question: if money began as a promise of mutual trust, when did it become the instrument of control that imprisons us?
The false origin story
Economics, Graeber noted, begins with a fable. The claim is that there were once isolated individuals trading goats for grain. Then money evolved to simplify that exchange, after which states and banks came later. This story, told in some way in almost every economics textbook, is almost entirely untrue.
Instead, in every known society, people first organised economic life through relationships of credit and trust. “I owe you” came before “I pay you.” Money began as memory and not as a metal coin.
Graeber's anthropology restored the social dimension that economics had erased: people do not trade because they are selfish, but because they live together.
Debt and domination
Graeber traced the long arc of civilisation through cycles of credit and violence. Periods of trust and mutual obligation gave way to eras of hierarchy, slavery, and debt peonage, when the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment.
Debt then became a weapon. Kings, priests, and empires used it to bind the powerless to the powerful. Today, that same dynamic persists: in the relationships between banks and households, creditors and governments, the global north and the global south.
Debt is not merely financial; it is moralised subordination.
The moral inversion of obligation
Graeber's greatest moral insight was that those who owe the most are the least blamed, and those who owe the least are shamed most.
When banks collapse, we bail them out. When citizens default, we punish them. When corporations exploit tax havens, we call them efficient. When the poor ask for help, we call them lazy.
He called this moral inversion the defining hypocrisy of capitalism, which is a system that preaches responsibility but rewards irresponsibility at scale.
Work, bureaucracy, and meaning
In The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber explored how bureaucracy and finance have fused into a single system of control, but I would argue that Debt: The First 5,000 Years is his most important work.
Capitalism, he argued, now survives not through production but through paperwork, including endless forms, metrics, and managerial hierarchies, that reinforce the entrapment of people that debt creates, with people trapped in jobs that serve no purpose except to sustain debt, discipline, and obedience. Work has become theatre; labour, a ritual of compliance.
This, Graeber wrote, is the real crisis of modernity: the loss of meaning disguised as efficiency, but which is actually control.
The anthropology of hope
Unlike Marx's determinism or Keynes's pragmatism, Graeber's vision was profoundly humanist.
He believed that because our institutions are human creations, they can be remade. History, he showed, is full of moments when people simply stopped obeying, meaning hierarchies collapsed because they lost legitimacy.
His activism, from the Occupy movement to debt strikes, was a living experiment in alternative economics and in the reconstruction of reciprocity beneath the ruins of neoliberalism.
Graeber's hope was anthropological: he knew that cooperation is as ancient as competition, and that freedom lies in the capacity to imagine something different.
What answering Graeber requires
To answer the Graeber Question, we must rehumanise money and reclaim the politics of debt. That means:
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Reasserting money as a public good: governments must issue credit for collective purposes, such as housing, care, and the green transition, rather than claiming that they are leaving money creation to private banks is the solution.
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Liberating the indebted, meaning governments must assist in the cancellation of unpayable and unjust debts and end the moral stigmatisation of the poor.
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Redefining value because honour, care, creativity, and community are the true measures of wealth.
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Reclaiming time, freeing people from meaningless labour so they can contribute meaningfully to society.
The moral economy of freedom
Graeber taught that economics is always moral because debt is always a relationship between people. To reform money is to reform power.
Our age of financial abstraction has severed money from morality and replaced promises with punishment. But if debt once enslaved, it can also be redeemed, and not just be forgiven but redefined as a bond of mutual care.
The task is not to abolish obligation, but to turn it back into solidarity.
Inference
The Graeber Question is the spiritual twin of the Judt Question. Both ask how a civilisation founded on care and promise lost its moral compass.
Graeber's answer is that our debt is not financial but ethical: we owe one another the duty to imagine better.
Money began as trust. It can be trust again.
The future will belong to those who understand that economics is not about exchange, but about relationship, and not about repayment, but about repair.
Previous posts in this series
- The economic questions
- Economic questions: The Henry Ford Question
- Economic questions: The Mark Carney Question
- Economics questions: The Keynes question
- Economics questions: The Karl Marx question
- Economics questions: the Milton Friedman question
- Economic questions: The Hayek question
- Economic questions: The James Buchanan question
- Economic questions: The J K Galbraith question
- Economic questions: the Hyman Minsky question
- Economic questions: the Joseph Schumpeter question
- Economic questions: The E F Schumacher question
- Economics questions: the John Rawls question
- Economic questions: the Thomas Piketty question
- Economic questions: the Gary Becker question
- Economics questions: The Greg Mankiw question
- Economic questions: The Paul Krugman
- Economic question: the Tony Judt question
- Economic questions: The Nancy MacLean question
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Wow. What an excellent piece Richard, thank you.
Thanks. As Javqueline said to me this morning, “I like David Graeber”. She reckoned I did OK by him in this.
Richard – as a Graeber ‘ultra fan’ you have done more than OK by him. I hope this series will be available in the pdf format.
A smashing piece of work.
These will become a PDF
Agreed.
As a David Graeber ‘Superfan’ I also think you’ve done OK by him here.
Debt is the tool used by neoliberalism to control people and their countries.
Every interest payment means that people and countries are not investing in infrastructure, or their futures, and the money trickles upwards to the well-off.
Very much so Ian. If I was in charge I would simply clear the real part of the national debt and then there’d be none of the transfers to the rich to worry about. We’d also end that 3k per household interest bill which could go to the government instead.
Exceot we need the national debt, as I have explained many times before. What we do not need are excessive interest rates or the enrichment of banks.
Richard your first sentence after the “The moral inversion of obligation” heading seems to be the wrong way round? Should “owe” be “own”? Or are you saying banks “owe” the most but are lauded for doing so?
The sentence is right – but I agree it is a buit opaque. The rich, through corporate leverage, actually owe most, and the poorest least. But you would not know from public commentary.
Richard, an excellent summary,especially
“the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment”
I suppose it’s a question of what is more important to society – politics or trust ie power and control v. cooperation
A bit of a never- ending story
My copy of “Debt..” is dog-eared there’s so much in the book
Mine has been nicked by James, my son. I must get another.
You’ll find your answer why “the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment” here:-
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mUdisni1J9dGtVA2thBRVHJDb30ciLSx/view
I think you have to be careful with Graeber in that he does in my view over-romanticise the extent of reciprocity amongst hunter-gatherers. Best to balance him out with the work of Christoper Boehm and his “reverse dominance” argument:-
https://takku.net/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20150105180501874
I agree with you – David was a romantic – but I can live with that.
Even more reading. I can’t keep up!
🙂
Me neither.
David Gaerber is someone who influenced me in a positive way. He made me question what I assumed I knew of Adam Smith. Every now and then when I do read Adam Smith, David Is there helping me navigate.
“What is freedom?” ask Graeber and Wengrow in
“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” (Penguin, also available on Kindle)
1. Freedom to move away – and to find a safe and charitable welcome when you do.
2. Freedom to refuse an order – to say “No”.
Those two underpin the third, and final, freedom.
3. Freedom to shape entirely new social realities – in your own society or another, including “taking lessons” from neighbouring societies.
As librarians and booksellers like to say, “If you enjoyed “Debt” you’ll enjoy this.”
Recommended because the evidenced narrative clearly points out that any socio- or politico-economic story that sets out saying “This is inevitable and true” without describing the alternatives available to the society under inspection is a myth.
And because those three Freedoms seem to me to make an admirable template against which to measure our own democracy.
Thanks
Good post! The only thing to add is life in the universe ensures we are born with a debt – that of balancing self-caring with other-caring. The development of democracy is all about seeking that balance and our development of monetary debt means that must be democratised too. Interestingly in the American professor Charles Tilly’s book “Democracy” when he reviews the the historical development of democratisation he tells us the Quakers were one of the early democratisers. It would be interesting for you to enlarge on reasons for this at some date.
Balance is key
The debits really should equal the credits
Wow! More morality! I like it!
As you are discussing debt, I thought I would share this –
I was reading Nehemiah Ch 5 the other day.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Nehemiah%205&version=CEV
Nehemiah, a noble Jewish leader in exile in Babylon (after the Babylonians had invaded Judah and deported the leading families around 597BC), has been given authority (and some imperial subsidy) to return to Jerusalem, and repair its walls, and eventually, its temple. Everyone buckles down to the task – well, almost everyone.
Some nobles (from Tekoa, the town that earlier had produced Amos, who was a shepherd turned prophet a few years earlier but that’s another story) felt this was beneath them, and other wealthy families with spare capital, decided that a fast buck could be made out of their fellow Jews, from slavery and usury, at a time of economic hardship and military insecurity. Nehemiah is not impressed and gives the wealthy, exploitative families a public tongue-lashing. He also points out what he as governor has been doing to help the poor. Interestingly, at a time when the emphasis was very much on Jerusalem’s vulnerability to its enemies, Nehemiah is also sharing (v17) with those who have come into Jerusalem as “foreign visitors from surrounding lands”. No speeches about “an island of strangers” from Nehemiah, despite the external threats.
It struck me how enormous the moral gulf was between our neoliberal leaders of today, and the example set here by Nehemiah, and how rare it is for us to hear our own leaders give such a strong moral lead (by example as well as by exhortation).
Would Nehemiah have taken bungs (sorry, “donations”) before making important public appointments, like Lisa Nandy or Keir Starmer did?
Has Starmer ever got as close to his people as Nehemiah did?
Could our political leaders point to their OWN ethical standards and actual caring behaviour as examples to be emulated?
Thanks