I’ve just been reading an article presenting salient points about David Graeber’s work on money and debt. Here’s a few sentences from the article.

In the historical record of ancient societies in Mesopotamia, for example, there are prices of things that may be denominated by “money” (what an economist would call the “unit of account”). But merchants “mostly did much of their dealings on credit,” and “ordinary people buying beer from the ‘ale women’ or local innkeepers did so by running up a tab, to be settled at harvest time in barley or anything they had on hand.” Where debt emerged in Sumeria, so did novel forms of social domination, whose eventual effects were so dire as to necessitate harsh management of its lenders. Those early Sumerian loans to peasants quickly led to peonage, with farmers “forced into perpetual service in the lender’s household.” Fields would go unsown or not be harvested as farmers would leave their homes in order to avoid collection. The result was periodic debt amnesties.

Matthew Zeitlin,

I note that mostly, here, so far, I’ve been thinking about emergence in human-centred terms without, yet, considering the place of artefacts (or even of living non-human creation) in corporising the Powers and their cognates. There are a handful of things in that quote that deserve picking up for further development.

One of the things is the issue of trust and debt. Another is the issue of peonage and power and the other that interests me is the need for debt amnesties.

The reason I’m interested in noting about trust and debt is that these are glues or binders which hold human beings together in particular formations. They are interactions and states of mind which help form a collectivity and contribute to co-ordinating action -for good or for ill. Part of that co-ordinating goes to peonage and power: they can determine who makes what kinds of decisions and whom those decisions affect. So these attributes configure the kind of social interactions and the flows of resources. So I’m working with the hypothesis that money acts in the corporisation as a kind of blood supply or hormone -it configures growth or atrophy and layers resources including human resources (remember this as from the perspective of the corporisation -I actually think that we need to find ways to maintain a proper humanism amid the Powers). In some cases we might note that money could stand for a kind of nutrient /food source for some corporisations.

That’s where the debt amnesty comes in. The nature of money-power nexuses is that they tend to compound (“from those who have more is given”) which works to the detriment of the majority who are or become have-nots. I think that this indicates to us that it is important to build in redistributive mechanisms to dilute power and wealth. It would be better to do this as a constant thing rather than having sudden dramatic events of redistribution (arguably?) -though this was almost inconceivable in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean worlds. The periodic redistributive events were a recognition of the cumulative, compounding nature of power. The story of the Tower of Babel is a recognition of this along with an in-principle solution: subsidiarity, de-centralising and power divestment.

And what I think we need to take seriously is this possibility:

… not only did money not arise from barter but also that states and markets worked hand in hand in its creation. And more than that, he wanted to interrogate an economic and historical worldview that tried to “reduce all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined on the terms of a business deal.”

-Matthew Zeitlin, commenting on David Graeber on Debt.

What this tells us is that money is indeed more about the cohesion and control of resources in a particular society than it is about facilitating distributed decision making through so-called free markets. What is different now is that we have a better understanding of how (and why) a state could operate in a manner to benefit the many rather than just the few. We have ways now devised to better enable a corporisation to be controlled and offer mutual benefits.