Sadly, or at least sadly for me, many of my previous Xenophilia posts are more-or-less permanently lost, including some of my commentaries on David Graeber’s brillian book, Debt: The First 5000 Years . I have, in the interim, modified my workflow to make sure this doesn’t happen again, even if the blog itself explodes.

As I prepare to teach this book to my students in Abu Dhabi this coming semester, I have come back across one of the most compelling passages and will write about it again–hopefully placing it in a slightly largely context.

The passage is from the section on the development of modern capitalism, and follows a rather thorough debunking of the myth of “free” transactions in this context, whether “free markets” or “free labor,” noting that even Marxist commentaries often assume (with some exceptions) that a certain sort of capitalist-worker relationship is the mainstream of the story of capitalism, the really new and defining moment.

Untrue, argues Graeber. The real story of modern capitalism is, on the one hand, the invention of all of the forms of de-personalizing monetary relationships, “central banks, bond markets, short-selling, brokerage houses, speculative bubbles, securization, annuities—came into being not only before the science of economics (which is perhaps not too surprising), but also before the rise of factories, and wage labor itself (Graeber 2011, Loc. 7204-7206).

And on the other hand, the use of unfree labor–from debt peons to indentured (indebted) “servants” to chattel slaves–as the very basis of capitalist accumulation, long into the so-called modern period.

Wage-labor and the image of capitalism that is so iconic is built on this foundation of anything but “free” labor and “free” markets.  It is only because it ultimately turns out to be more profitable to rent labor than to own it, at least when the state is willing to accept responsibility for contract enforcement and the violence that it will periodically require, that the iconic form of capitalist relationships comes into focus. Even then, free labor has never been more than a minority form, supplemented by a vast, global sea of more-or-less coercive ways of extracting work from people.

Here is the previously quoted passage:

There is, and has always been, a curious affinity between wage labor and slavery. This is not just because it was slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations who supplied the quick-energy products that powered much of early wage laborers’ work; not just because most of the scientific management techniques applied in factories in the industrial revolution can be traced back to those sugar plantations; but also because both the relation between master and slave, and between employer and employee, are in principle impersonal: whether you’ve been sold or you’re simply rented yourself out, the moment money changes hands, who you are is supposed to be unimportant; all that’s important is that you are capable of understanding orders and doing what you’re told (Graeber 2011, loc. 7341-7347).

While it is important not to suggest absolute equivalence between any two forms of exploitation, it is really the concluding sentence here that is most interesting. The question we should ask about our form of economic relations is really a question about our humanity, and if it really is okay for it “not to matter” who we are in the context of work, if our place in the order of a made world (a world of culture) should be considered interchangeable.

The morality of the technocratic, meritocratic world, beyond obscuring the worldwide subflows of devalued, little-protected demi-slaves, domestics, hyper-exploited persons, “illegal” immigrants, contract workers, temps, prison laborers and such like, also idealizes quantifiable idiocies as an index of true humanity, from I.Q. to BMI, to credit scores and net earnings. The impulse is to a morality of reckoning, of cash payment, of discharging debt and owing “no man”–that encourages us to be disconnected and pretend an autonomy that we do not, a one of us, actually inhabit, as well as conveniently forget the devalued work of the un-free on which the entire system is built, now as in the past.

That said, the question is complex. The impulse to rigorous standards of “fairness” in say hiring, payment, and promotion–even when such cannot exist across the profoundly unequal world economy as whole–also supports the possibility of a kind of relative autonomy, for some of us, including the relative autonomy of the young, freed from the family-specific labor demands of out elders, of women whose bodies and reproductive capacities so-often have formed the “elementary” connections and modes of exchange that have given rise to non-capitalist forms of hyper-exploitation.

Graeber’s work suggests that we have to unlearn the questions our very concepts of interest, self-interest, and economics we have so deeply inculcated, even those of us who have an alternative and critical form of political economy to hand (i.e. Marxism and its kin). Instead we need to ask questions about what we really owe to each other, and think instead of discharge debts and perfect freedom, to human relationships that are at once centered around responsibility to each other, sharing life and joy and reflection and possibility, as well as a collective responsibility for containing the abusive tendencies that arise in dense social networks.

This is not utopian. It is not saying abolish the entire gloabl system and start from scratch–hay, that ain’t gonna happen in any way that any sane person wants–but to think more flexibly about issues of debt, exchange, and value across countless transactions over the course of our own lives and what we are willing to advocate for, to pay for, in our own communities. Let us stop making of the market a god that we must serve, and see markets as flexible instruments that can and must be regulated, over and over, to favor human-level transactions, human-level consciousness of connectedness.

Healthcare, food, education, transportation would be excellent places to start; as would energy–in the American context we are on the brink of a new boom of energy resource extraction, in which newer technologies have opened up a new world. Given climactic realities, it may be unwise to exploit all that carbon (mostly in the form of natural gas), but if we think at the level of the human, we will see those resources as a potential collective good, to be nurtured, rather than gaseous profits waiting to be extracted.