David Graeber made a bit of a career in taking seemingly innocuous ideas and doggedly picking them apart. His first book "Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value" dealt with the nebulous idea of value (something that comes up a lot in this book also). "Bullshit Jobs" investigated the nature of work in late-stage capitalism, while his final book "The Dawn of Everything" (published after his passing in 2021) sought to understand the sequence of events that took us from nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes into our modern society (busting myths perpetuated by the likes of Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari along the way).
But it is 2011's 'Debt' that is considered his seminal work. In it, Graeber tackles debt not just in the sense of owing money, but as a much broader concept. How is it that 'paying one's debts' is woven so deeply into the social contract that we don't question it? Why does the seemingly mundane concept of usury appear in all major religions? And can one conceive of 'money' itself as merely a manifestation of debt? It turns out that debt underpins our society in a way few other things do.
Though not a difficult read, the book is dense and wide-ranging, and somewhat challenging to summarise neatly. I particularly enjoyed the discussion on the primordial barter myth - the Economics 101 fable that claims that, long before our time, goods were bartered for one another, then came money, and then finally came credit. Indeed, what the anthropological evidence actually points to is a wide range of economic systems, none of which involved barter as the primary mechanism of exchange (and when there was barter, it was generally between strangers). In many cases, it appears forms of credit emerged before money, with IOUs and promissory notes being the major medium of exchange.
There are two small places where I see Graeber's arguments potentially fall apart (or at least become somewhat weak). The first is in his assertion of what is and isn't barter. The idea in a gift economy is that goods are transferred from one individual to another without explicitly demanding anything in return. Of course, one does need to return the favour, upon which a transaction is completed. Gifts don't need to be perfectly equivalent (though many societies had systems of 'rough equivalence', often working via a tiered system where goods can be traded for each other when on the same tier, but goods on different tiers could not be traded). This is essentially barter, just across a longer timescale.
The second place is in Graeber's conception of what he calls everyday communism. This is the idea that humanity's baseline is communist in nature (following the adage to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities). While there's a kernel of truth there (most of us aren't tracking everything we do for our friends and families in credit terms), some of the examples he gave felt overly generous with the definition ("a coworker handing you a spanner when you ask for one" is the most egregious example). Alternative explanations also exist for some of his cited behaviour, such as incentive structures (I pass you the spanner because that's part of my job), social forces (I pass you the spanner because not doing it would piss you off), or just pure self-interest (I pass you the spanner because I want this job finished so I can go home). That's not to say his argument doesn't hold water - evidence of mutual aid from disaster zones is particularly convincing, but I think the reality is somewhat more complex than 'people become altruistic communists in times of disaster'.
These are both nitpicks and don't really affect the broader thrust of his arguments; the book as a whole is well worth reading. To me, the most pertinent point was around the continuous need for capitalism to reinvent itself in the face of a crisis (something elucidated in Jason Hickel's "Less is More" - also worth reading). New technology and innovation are the more innocent engines of this expansion, while war and subjugation of others are the flip side (and, indeed, they often are of the same coin). With the transition of the world into what Graeber conceives of as a 'debt economy,' capital reinvented itself once again, expanding not via innovation, nor spatially, but temporally.
The continuous issuing of debt by the US government, as well as record levels of consumer and household debt, have resulted in a global economic system based on what is essentially hope; the belief that the line will always go up. This is a paradox - there needs to be some kind of end; the party can't go on forever (otherwise one theoretically could just keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, paying off their debts with new debt ad infinitum). More and more, however, it seems that we don't believe that there will be an end. It's the true consequence of Fisher's "Capitalist Realism". Perhaps Marx was right - capitalism will implode on itself under the weight of its own inevitability.