Tag Archives: debt

Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH

Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful.

In this talk I’d like to propose an approach to Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011) that connects the book to David’s earlier work on Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Graeber 2004) and his latest work—with David Wengrow—on The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow 2021). I think there are many different readings of the book on debt. My own reading of David’s work is in light of ten years of ethnographic research with Latin-American migrants in Spain, who became involved in the country’s largest movement for the right to housing—the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—or La PAH for its short Spanish acronym (Suarez 2017, 2020). My research focuses on the relationship between political mobilization, mortgage debt, and transnational migration.

My interlocutors were being foreclosed and evicted from their homes, which were bought during the housing bubble. On average they owed over 250,000 euros. They joined La PAH in despair and out of guilt for not paying their debts. The movement helped them transform their guilt into outrage by shifting the grand narrative from individual failure into a counter-narrative on massive financial fraud.  

In what follows I engage with David’s concepts of debt and freedom, as I try to illuminate some of the challenges I ran into while theorizing what debt meant to my interlocutors and fellow activists. 

It was January 11th, 2012. I had just returned to London from a preliminary field visit to Barcelona. David was on leave that year and in New York but was on a short visit to London. His mind, however, was still in New York, where he had inspired and was collaborating with the Occupy movement. As we ate delicious Thai food, one of his favorite activities, David detailed his time with Occupy. Meanwhile, I was trying to get a word in to figure out my own research.

In between dishes of prawn panang, charcoal duck, lots of white rice, and Thai iced tea, David turned around and said: “What’s interesting here is not only why has debt become the focus of this movement, but why it has been so effective. It’s notorious that debt is very hard to organize around. We keep talking about debt strikes, debt this, debtors that… and everybody keeps trying to come up with a formula but it’s incredibly difficult. Part of the reason why is because this sort of old morality is very hard to, like, convince people it’s not their fault … What’s interesting here is you have a really effective broad grassroots movement focusing on [debt]. You could ask: why debt becomes a focus and why it’s worked in a certain way?” (In discussion with the author, January 2012). The question is: in what way?

So, let me begin with Fragments and its relation to Debt. In Fragments, David describes several “invisible spaces” where direct forms of democracy are already taking place. To him, it is in these spaces that “the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments actually comes” (Graeber 2004, 34). In Debt, on the other hand, David defines the principle of communism as “the foundation of all human sociability” (2011, 96). Communism implies spaces free of debt in which all people can contribute to a common project given the abilities they already have. Unlike hierarchy, communism is not based on relationships of precedent or status, but of cooperation. And, unlike exchange, communism does not intend to end relationships by paying back what is owed, but rather builds a sociality in which one aspires to live in. Communism would then be the moral principle of economic life operating at the heart of the “invisible spaces” suggested by David in his anarchist anthropology.

Now I want to give you an ethnographic vignette to analyze how this moral principle organized the everyday realities lived by Latin American migrants to complicate David’s theorizing. 

Hector was forty-eight at the time of our interview and his family was able to get what many families desired at La PAH: cancelling their mortgage debt after being foreclosed. In Spain, mortgage law dictates that a mortgaged home is not the sole collateral to a debt. A bank can collect on any remaining debt after the house is auctioned. The predatory nature of this law translated into debts in the hundreds of thousands for my interlocutors after having lost the property. So, full cancelation of a mortgage debt felt, indeed, like a “victory”—as Hector put it. Oddly then, most Latin-American migrants end up celebrating losing their house to the bank in exchange for a full debt cancellation. However, Hector came to another realization right at the same time: he and his family had no place to live. His wife’s monthly income of 600 euros could not pay for a place to rent, not if they wanted to pay the bills and have enough to live. They were left with one option: La PAH’s Obra Social, a project based on the re-occupation of buildings belonging to banks rescued with public funds and which sat empty for years. The idea was to relocate families like Hector’s. The name of La PAH’s project is a play on words. Every large bank in Spain has an ‘Obra Social’, a philanthropic entity supporting cultural events or alleviating social problems. In Catalonia for instance, they often funded Catalan language promotion or similar social events. La PAH thought it would establish its own strategy for solving real social problems by occupying empty buildings and using them for what they saw as its intended purpose: to house people.

Image 1: La PAH’s Obra Social, © Maka Suarez

La PAH’s Housing Reoccupation project for evicted families was criticized by both the left and the right. For leftist and long-term squatters, it was not radical enough because the strategy was not a permanent reappropriation. For conservatives, occupation was a crime and a threat to private property. For my interlocutors, it was a respite but not an optimal solution. Hector’s family is just one example. There were a significant number of single-mothers and their children, unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which constituted the greater portion of subprime mortgages in Spain (and other places like the US). When I interviewed Hector and his family, they had been living in the occupied building for four months. The experience had been very difficult for them, and they hoped to buy an apartment again in the future. Hector was just one case among many people for whom homeownership was still the preferred housing option and a marker of success.  

Why did my interlocutors want to own a house or an apartment rather than occupying one or even renting it? To answer this question, I’d like to connect Debt with The Dawn of Everything. One of David’s most important invitations in Debt is to move away from an omnipresent language of debt. Thinking with David means questioning why people narrate their lives in the idiom of debt and examining whether and how an alternative approach is even possible. David goes to extraordinary lengths to illuminate the very mechanisms that prevent us from living without debt. The biggest endeavor of this book—to my mind—is showing us a path to freedom, real freedom we can already access if we choose to recognize that many “big theories” are in fact forms of reproducing a ruling class or the legitimacy of the state. David knew wholeheartedly that anthropology is uniquely well placed to document these sites of moral and monetary indebtedness.

In The Dawn of Everything, David along with David Wengrow, characterize freedom as the potential for doing things otherwise (something they see taking three primary forms). First, freedom to move or relocate, the idea of being free to leave a place in the face of danger or otherwise. Then, freedom to refuse orders or how not to be bound by hierarchy. Finally, freedom to shape new social realities by choosing what is at the center of our existence. I’m interested in following here the first freedom, freedom of movement, as it is key in understanding why Latin-American migrants became indebted in the first place and why they would consider doing it again today. There are two key moments in Latin Americans’ migratory journey in which debt is essential for moving. First, when they decide to travel (irregularly) to Spain. The trip required anything between 4,000 and 5,000 US dollars which were almost invariably a debt acquired in their countries of origin to move to Spain. The second moment is buying a mortgaged property. To bring their families from Latin America to Spain, migrants needed to show adequate proof of housing, buying a home was the fastest route to reunifying with their loved ones, mainly moving children from Latin America to Spain. Let me illustrate this with another ethnographic vignette.

“The thing is I didn’t even want to buy a flat, I was trying to rent one,” said Juan. He had been trying to rent a flat in order to bring his wife, Paulina, and their three children from Ecuador to Spain under a family reunification scheme. They had been apart for nearly two years. It was his reunification application that pushed him to look for a new place to live since he needed to demonstrate to immigration services proof of suitable accommodations for his family in Spain. Like many other migrants, Juan was aware that it was not possible to accommodate family life in small bedrooms that were often no more than lined, adjacent mattresses on the floor, or a few bunked beds in a room. Migrants’ usual shared rentals were legally (and physically) inadequate for bringing families to Spain.

Juan wanted to rent a flat because he thought he would not qualify for a mortgage loan. To him, private property was a superior form of housing. But in addition, he was aware of the ease private property meant when faced with Spanish immigration services. Each autonomous community has its own process of showing proof of adequate housing. In Catalonia, the regional government, through its Department of Family and Social Wellbeing, was responsible for providing a report asserting the quality of housing. According to Juan, if one had a rental agreement, the Department sent someone to check your home to know that it was indeed as you described, that no other people lived with you, and that you were able to house others—particularly children. However, as Juan explained, if one had proof of property, they never sent anybody to check anything at all.

Reading David’s three books together allows me to reflect upon this double-bind of debt as the absence of freedom and its condition of possibility. I want to circle back to David’s initial question: why was this movement so effective in organizing around debt? As an activist of La PAH but also as an anthropologist, I believe the movement was effective because it stuck with the problem of debt. It never tried to solve it but showed when it became excessive and violent. The basic requirements that the movement has long advocated for include stopping home evictions without proper rehousing, making mortgaged properties the sole collateral to a loan, implementing rental caps, and increasing social housing availability.

Although the Spanish movement for the right to housing does not seek a debt jubilee, which David advocated for in his book, it offers us a space to politicize debt relations. David never dismissed the PAH as a bunch of reformists, which several leftist activists and scholars did and continue to do. David was more interested in how people organized around debt collectively than what people did with debt individually. It’s important to highlight that in over a decade, La PAH has gone from a small group of activists meeting weekly in 2009 to becoming the largest movement for the right to housing with over 220 nodes around Spain, and weekly assemblies that gather—to this day—thousands of individuals to discuss mortgage debt and political mobilization. La PAH is an effective intervention into a growing reality of financial predation, a movement that has learned to respond to injustice collectively, and a socially diverse space where ideological conceptualizations (of debt or occupation and others) can change.

La PAH is not an example of how David thought we should deal with debt, and yet David was always ready to learn from other people’s experiences and strategies. This was very much David. A self-absorbed but incredibly generous activist, mentor, scholar, and friend. While at Goldsmiths and the LSE, I often thought I had gone in for a supervision but came out knowing about Occupy, Rojava, or his friendship with Anton Newcombe—the lead singer from the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, upon listening back to each one of our conversations – I recorded many – I found detailed guides for thinking differently about what I was working on. They didn’t seem terribly evident at the time because he was never telling me how to think. Rather, David was thinking with me based on his own ethnographic examples and political aspirations. This, I believe, is a perfect reflection of how he thought and wrote. He was never trying to tell people how to think but was inviting us into his own way of connecting seemingly disconnected phenomena, often going back several thousand years to do that.

Image 2: Alpa Shah, Maka Suarez and David Graeber, © Maka Suarez

I’d like to thank Jorge Núñez for thinking with me about many of the ideas advanced here, and Alpa Shah for the opportunity to engage with David’s legacy at a time when his ideas are greatly needed, and he is so dearly missed. To everyone here today thank you for choosing to do exactly what David said occurs in mourning and other acts of memorialization, these are an essential part of the labor of people-making. Let’s continue making our relationships to each other matter in ways that shape the futures we want to build. Thank you!


Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos, Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.


This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.


References

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: Distributed by University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books.

Suarez, Maka. 2017. “Debt Revolts: Ecuadorian Foreclosed Families at the PAH in Barcelona.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (3): 263–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9455-8.

Suarez, Maka. 2020. “‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona.” Ethnos, February 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539


Cite as: Suarez, Maka. “Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH.” FocaalBlog, 21 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/21/maka-suarez-thinking-about-debt-with-david-graeber-and-la-pah/

Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David addressed these through a focus on debt in broad historical perspective. It is a central issue in global politics today, at every level of society. The class struggle between debtors and creditors to distribute costs after the long credit boom went bust in 2008 is universal.

David held that the social logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved (Hart 2012). Following Nietzsche, he argued that money introduced the first measure of unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Indeed, one school of thought holds that “money is debt”. This includes the French and German traditions. Money was always both a commodity and a debt-token, giving rise to much political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Whereas Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he located the roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute, and organized violence in debt relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, escalating class conflict between creditors and debtors fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and redemption, often involving calls for debt cancellation.

The book contrasts “human economies” with those dominated by money and markets (“commercial economies”). These societies are not necessarily more humane, but “they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings”. They use money, but mainly as “social currencies” which maintain relations between people rather than being used to purchase things.

“In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is in a unique nexus of relations with others”. Yet money forms make it possible to treat people as identical objects in exchange and that requires violence. Brutality is omnipresent. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most “human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is commonplace. This is taken to another level when they are drawn into systems like the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery and freedom — a pair driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness — culminate in the ultimate contradiction of modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated.

David Graeber then organizes the world history of money in four stages: the first urban civilizations; the “axial age” of world religions; the Middle Ages; and “the great capitalist empires” that ended in 1971 when the US dollar abandoned gold. Money oscillates between two broad types, “credit” and “currency” (bullion), between money as a virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as impersonal things made from precious metals. The recent rise of virtual credit money may indicate another long swing in money’s central focus. Ours could be a multi-polar world, more like the Middle Ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis might provoke revolutions. Perhaps the institutional complex based on states, money, and markets (capitalism) will be replaced by forms of society more directly responsive to ordinary people and their reliance on “everyday communism”. David’s historical vision has no room for a Great Transformation in the nineteenth century.

Most anthropologists of the last century conceived of a world safe for fieldwork-based ethnography; another minority interest co-existed with this. I call this “the anthropology of unequal society”. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754) launched modern anthropology as the critique of unequal society. Morgan (1877) and Engels (1884) were heavily indebted to him when they reconstructed human history as the evolution of society from a kinship matrix to states based on class divisions. This genre was continued by Lévi-Strauss (1949), Sahlins (1958) and Wolf (1982), but with less explicit political content. Overlapping the millennium, its main exponents have been Jack Goody (1976, 2013; Hart 2006) and David Graeber (2011).

Goody sought to undermine Western claims to superiority over the main Asian societies. He downplayed the industrial revolution that allowed Europeans to take over the world in the nineteenth century. Following Braudel (1975), Goody (2013) preferred to point to the similarities between industrial capitalism and the “merchant cultures” of pre-industrial civilizations. He claimed that Marx (1867) misread merchant capitalism, but did not address his case for treating industrial capital as strategic. Weber (1922) too gets short shrift for suggesting that modern capitalism differs from its predecessors. Given their common origins in the Bronze Age urban revolution, modern European capitalism diffused faster to Asia than the Italian renaissance to Northwest Europe.

Despite a barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization — territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion, and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). The rebellion of the bourgeoisie against the Old Regime was co-opted by “national capitalism” in a series of political revolutions of the 1860s and 70s (Hart 2009). This severely set back humanity’s emancipation from inequality. Consider the shape of world society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, darker, female, and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, vainly try to stem the inflow of migrants. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime in France before the revolution (Tocqueville 1859). Goody may have a point in asking us to reconsider how exceptional our societies are.

I have taken part in a conference and book, Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (Weisweiler 2022), which was inspired by David’s Debt book. He drew attention to the political economy underpinning a sequence of ancient empires in western Eurasia from the Persians and classical Greeks through Alexander’s conquests to republican and imperial Rome and the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean. Its logic hinged on the need to provision vast armies on prolonged marches. That meant using precious metal coinage, sustained by a network of mines, states and mercenary soldiers, then converting conquered peoples into slaves to be sold for the money needed to complete the cycle. There seems little doubt that western empires from 1500 to 1800 relied on a similar logic. But they were unable to take over the world until industrial capitalism raised their technological competence to a far higher level than the rest.

Marxists and liberals agreed that a world-change was taking place in nineteenth-century Britain. Hegel’s (1821) historical model, however, was very different from Marxism’s successive stages (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism). His three phases were based on the family and the land, the market economy of urban civil society and the modern state respectively. These now co-existed under the coordinating guidance of the state. Both Polanyi (1944) and Marx missed the revolutions of the 1860s and 70s that installed a new class alliance in the leading countries, the partnership between capitalists and the traditional enforcers that I call “national capitalism”. This new alliance soon spawned the legal conditions for modern corporations, as well as a massive expansion of state property and a bureaucratic revolution at all levels of the economy. Mass production and consumption was the result.

Man speaking into microphone, as at a conference, with overlaid book cover of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Piketty.
Image 1: Book cover and economist Thomas Picketty, photo by Frontieras do Pensamento/Greg Salibian (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book on capital was the smash hit of our times. It was based on serious economics, up to two centuries of national income accounting for a few rich countries. An economist who can quote Balzac can’t be all bad. I identify three reasons for his success. First, Piketty brought inequality back onto the mainstream agenda, just as Occupy Wall Street did — “we are the 99 percent”; and this touched a nerve after three decades of neoliberal responses to the financial crisis that included bailing out the rich and making the poor pay. Second, Piketty’s argument rests on two simple equations describing the relationship between capital and labour over the last 200 years; he uses these to demonstrate that capital’s share of national income must always increase. It is unlikely that teeming historical diversity can be captured by timeless categories and equations. Third, against the notion that capitalists make their money by producing competitively for profit, Piketty claimed that property was a growing component of wealth; inheritance and rent are neglected factors in distribution today.

There is something special about the plutocracy built up in recent decades. The rise of modern corporations comes from their being granted the rights of individual citizens by the US Supreme Court in 1884; and they now combine those rights with their long held special privileges, like limited liability for debt (Hart 2005). Even the Romans, not noted as champions of democracy, limited the spending of the rich on political campaigns. The US Supreme Court recently refused to accept any restriction on corporate political spending since it would infringe their “human rights” and allowed companies exemption from government rules on religious grounds.

These corporations once built their wealth by producing industrial commodities for profit at prices cheaper than their competitors. Now they rely on extracting rents (transfers sanctioned by political power) rather than on producing for profit in competitive markets. Thus “Big Pharma” makes more money from patents granted by Congress than the entire Medicare budget. Sony makes 75% of its revenues, not from selling machines, but from DVDs which are reproduced, almost without cost, from movies sold in cinemas; they call duplicating movies “piracy” (Johns 2009). Goldman Sachs retrieved from the US Treasury at full face value the $90 billion lost by insurance giant, AIG in the 2008 crash. These rent-seekers are not punished for stealing from the public, but are bailed out by our taxes and held up as shining examples of super-rich consumption to a public that has exchanged equal citizenship for bread and circuses (reality TV). This is decadence: there are no longer any national political solutions to economic problems that are global in scope.

Marx held that industrial capitalist profit subordinated rent and interest to its logic. This is why he and Engels thought that Victorian England held the future of the world economy. New phases of capitalist development and decline have been identified ever since. The American macro-economist, Dean Baker (2011) provides much insight into rentier capitalism in the US today. Selling stuff for profit means adding value through production. Rent-seeking is “…an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value”. Rent and interest (banking) no longer take their scale, form, and function from industrial capitalist production for profit, as Marx insisted in Capital. Has the focus of political economy tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense) towards rents derived from political privilege? It is hard to see how the richest 1% could have done so well in the last four decades otherwise, given the overall stagnation of production and real wages in this period.

The digital revolution in communications is highly relevant, since many intangible commodities can now be copied easily at no cost. If you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, but no-one loses out if I copy your song. Entertainment is the fastest-growing sector of the world economy after finance. National capitalism’s rise to dominance after the First World War is central to understanding today’s economic crisis, since it has been eroded since the early 1970s. Digital Retail Management regimes now being installed around the world illustrate the dominance of political and legal coercion in the economy now.

Rent-seeking now trumps value-added through production. The war over intellectual property escalates to ever higher levels of absurdity; and the rise of Big Tech, in extending corporate command and control, undermines our ability to make society in the interest of the American Empire. Like Marx and Engels, I believe that the machine revolution can be a force for greater economic democracy; but the open source and free software movements have lost the influence they once promised. Our main hope is to mobilise global networks to develop democracy, knowing that the multitudes are faster than they are. That was certainly David Graeber’s project.

Image 2: Economist Dean Baker, photo by CEPR (CC BY 4.0)

David’s book is or will be the biggest best-seller by an anthropologist, even over Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), the previous frontrunner. In 2011, he spent a sabbatical leave from Goldsmiths in New York where he was able to promote the book heavily before becoming a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was invited by the German President to debate on national television with the leader of the Social Democratic Party and Debt sold 30,000 copies there in two weeks. In the last two decades his books have been translated into many languages. He has a strong following in Japan, Korea, and China.

Debt’s phenomenal success was not an accident or freak of creative genius (Hart 2020, 2021). Anthropology narrowed its scope in the last century to meet the needs of academic bureaucracy and lost its public appeal in the process. David set out to write a big book with big ideas that allowed readers to place themselves in history. Anthropologists, in adopting fieldwork-based ethnography as their standard method, settled for narrow localism and a truncated version of their own history, finding in ethnography a replacement for racist colonial empire, while ignoring the fragmentation of world society into myopic nationalisms. David by-passed all this to resurrect the Victorian polymath and the world thanked him profusely for it. But there were other strings to his methodological bow, chief of them the ability to combine academic life with revolutionary politics when most of his colleagues were trapped in universities committed to bureaucratizing capitalism (Hart 2021). From the time he was a graduate student, he trained himself to write accessibly for the general public. He wrote each piece twice, once for himself and once for everyone else.

David’s intellectual success in a curtailed lifetime drew on self-conscious methods: vision, imagination and endurance through hardship, for sure; reading with no bounds; love of comparative ethnography; writing “to be understood rather than admired and not for knowing and over-acute readers” (Nietzsche); active participation in democratic politics; and returning to anthropology’s original mission as the study of humanity (Hart 2020). Call that genius, if you like; I prefer to call it a personal synthesis built on disciplined hard work over an extraordinary range of human activities. If only we could each aim to emulate him in some respects.


Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and a full-time writer based in Paris and Durban. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes will be published in Spring 2022.


This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.


References

Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive. Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Braudel, Fernand. 1975. Capitalism and Material Life. New York: Harper Collins.

Engels, Friedrich. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder.

Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goody, Jack. 2013. Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An essay on the origins of the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Hart, Keith. 2002. World society as an old regime. In: C. Shore and S. Nugent (eds.), Elite Cultures: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 22-36.

Hart, Keith. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Hart, Keith. 2006. Agrarian civilization and world society. In: D. Olson and M. Cole (eds.), Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 29-48.

Hart, Keith. 2009. Money in the making of world society, C. Hann and K. Hart (eds.), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-105.

Hart, Keith. 2014. Jack Goody: the anthropology of unequal society. Reviews in Anthropology, 43(3): 199-220.

Hart, Keith. 2012. David Graeber and the Anthropology of Unequal Society. https://www.academia.edu/44225307/David_Graeber_and_the_Anthropology_of_Unequal_Society

Hart, Keith. 2020. David Graeber (1961-2020). https://www.academia.edu/44852890/David_Graeber_1961_2020_

Hart, Keith. 2021. Anthropology as a revolutionary project: David Graeber’s political legacy. https://www.academia.edu/48898491/Anthropology_as_a_revolutionary_project_David_Graebers_political_legacy

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010 [1821]. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johns, Adrian. 2009. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949].  The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon.

Marx, Karl. 1970 [1867]. Capital Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 [1877]. Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984 [1754]. Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2004 [1859]. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, Max. 1961 [1922]. General Economic History. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

Weisweiler, John. Ed. 2022. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money and Social Obligation in David Graeber’s Axial Age (c.700BCE–700CE) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.


Cite as: Hart, Keith. 2021. “Comment on Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/keith-hart-comment-on-debt-the-first-5000-years/

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Debt

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keith Hart & Maka Suarez

In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.  


These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.



Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.

Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Chris Gregory & Don Kalb

‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.


These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.



Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.

William Suárez-Gómez and Ismael García-Colón: Puerto Rico: Resistance in the world’s oldest colony

In July 2019, Puerto Rico was in turmoil. An organic movement asking for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló emerged throughout this US colonial territory. After 12 days of mass protests, the governor resigned on 24 July. The international media portrayed his resignation as a successful and peaceful outcome. This is the first time that protests and the will of Puerto Ricans removed an elected governor from office. Yet, his resignation may only be the beginning of an uphill battle against those who benefit from corruption and austerity.

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Ståle Knudsen: Debts and the end for infrastructure fetishism in Turkey

The immense new Istanbul Airport, additional spectacular bridges over the straights, the Marmaray metro/train tunnel under the Bosporus, high-speed trains, highways, extension of the Istanbul metro network, energy projects. These were highlights in a campaign video for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yıldırım in the rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election in June. The video was made by a “social media follower” and acclaimed by Yıldırım, who shared it on his Twitter account. It was accompanied by the text “Well, who made this?”

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Carlos E. Chardón: Masking Puerto Rican state failure

spcWith the recent default on debt payment (see Franqui Rivera and Colón-Garcia 2015), Puerto Rico became a failed state. State failure is the inability or incapacity of a government to provide services it determines are absolutely necessary to its population. Thus, if a government tries to provide services it deems necessary for its population and cannot pay for them or does not have the structure to deliver them, it can drive itself into failure. It is said it is overstretched and that it does not have the income to provide what it promised. This is the case of Puerto Rico—an island in the Caribbean that became a United States colony in 1898 and has been, since after World War II, a US territory with partial autonomy (all federal laws and regulations apply unless specifically exempted from them, but it is not a federal state and lacks any voting representation in the federal government).
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Lisa Jahn & Sarah Molinari: New developments in Puerto Rican economic readjustment?

This commentary comes from a discussion panel hosted on Tuesday, September 8, by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, featuring the authors of the recent FocaalBlog article “Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece: Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism,” Ismael García-Colón and Harry Franqui-Rivera. The authors were joined by Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán on the panel moderated by Teresita Levy.
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FocaalBlog Event: CUNY Panel Discussion on Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis

On Tuesday, September 8, the City University of New York (CUNY) Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies is hosting a free panel discussion and presentation based on the recent FocaalBlog post “Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece: Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism.”

Where: The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 9100: Skylight Room

When: September 8, 6:30–8:30 p.m.

Contact Info: 212-817-8434

The blog authors Ismael García-Colón, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, and Harry Franqui-Rivera, Research Associate at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, will participate in the discussion.

For more details, please visit the event page here.

Ismael García Colón & Harry Franqui-Rivera: Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece

Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism

UPDATE: On Tuesday, September 8, the City University of New York (CUNY) Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies is hosting a free panel discussion and presentation based on this blog post. For more details, visit the FocaalBlog event page here.

Early July 2015, at an event discussing the Greek debt crisis hosted by the German Federal Bank in Frankfurt, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble talked about a sarcastic conversation he’d had with United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Responding to pressure from the US government for a resolution on the pending Greek debt talks, Schaeuble told Lew that the European Union could take Puerto Rico into the euro zone if the US was willing to accept Greece into a dollar union. In the video of the event, one can appreciate people laughing at Schaeuble’s remarks, made in front of a large projection of the event’s theme “Turning points in history: How crises have changed the tasks and practice of central banks.” Interesting enough, his comments say more about Germany’s intentions and its role in the Greek debt default than about Puerto Rico.
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