Furthermore, the temporal disjunction in gift exchange creates 'debts' 1Īnd therefore social bonds and solidarity, whereas the immediacy of commercial exchange creates no ongoing obligations, and is therefore the form of exchange appropriate for strangers - or enemies. The difference between the two is the difference between 'cheers mate, I owe you one' and 'thank you shopkeeper I owe you £1'. Commercial, market exchange, is of course something we're familiar with. So for example, Marcel Mauss' work on 'The Gift' explores this kind of exchange. everyday objects and sacred objects, which aren't commensurable with each other).
You don't owe a pig in return, but an obligation of roughly equivalent status (Graeber says there are broad categories of object, e.g.
So in many stateless, non-commercial societies, you simply admire the thing you want ('What a lovely pig!') and the possessor makes a gift of it. the obligation isn't necessarily quantified. But it doesn't necessarily mean commodity exchange, i.e. Exchange, for Graeber, implies equality between the parties. By the same token, Graeber argues that this is rarely the whole story, and there's a tendency for communism to slide into other forms of society. He writes that "The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so." I like this formulation, and it echoes a line a line of argument I made in the libcom vs parecon debate. What Graeber calls 'baseline communism', the giving according to abilities and receiving according to needs, is he claims, the "the foundation of all human sociability", the very condition of possibility of society itself. The first thing I'd like to pick up on is Graeber's claim that all societies are a configuration of three fundamental organisational/moral principles: communism, exchange and hierarchy. David Graeber, Debt Communism, exchange and hierarchy Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities.
On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. If you've no idea what the book is about, there's a summary by Graeber here, an interview about it here, and a smack-down on some free-market critics here which give a pretty good idea. Nor am I going to summarise the arc of the book's main arguments. What follows isn't really a review, but some thoughts on some of the concepts put forward and ideas raised in the book.
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