02: Making a Market for Plunder

Ch 2: How to Dismantle an Empire, Section One: Pieces of Slave

There have been periods of history
in which episodes of terrible violence 
occurred but for which the word 
violence was never used. ... 
Violence is shrouded  in justifying 
myths that lend it moral legitimacy, 
and these myths for the most part 
kept people from recognizing
the violence for what it was.

—GIL BAILIE

If nothing else, it is surely significant 
that all the Axial Age religions 
emphasized the importance of 
charity, a concept that had barely 
existed before. Pure greed and pure 
generosity are complementary 
concepts; neither could really be 
imagined without the other; both 
could only arise in institutional 
contexts that insisted on such pure 
and single-minded behavior; 
and both seem to have appeared 
together wherever impersonal, 
physical, cash money also 
appeared on the scene.

—DAVID GRAEBER

While politics decides what should be done, economics determines how. In order for any action to be taken by governments, they first need money to pay the workers. This money is collected in taxes that are, purportedly, intended to carry out the will of the governed for their collective good. Money facilitates trade between people, replacing the inconvenience of barter and providing a form in which labor can be "stored." And while money enables reciprocity between those who are capable of work, taxation enables generosity to those who are not. Both are good and necessary for a civilized society, or so society says.

In this chapter, anthropologist David Graeber explores the barter story of money. He gives evidence that coinage and taxation were designed by rulers as a system of bribes and threats to make their conquest self-funding, not to enable exchange and reciprocity.

Understanding the original purposes of money and taxation are important. If money and taxation were intended to extend empires and this has been their result for 3500 years, they may be performing the function for which they were designed. In that case, taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth would be like asking for a better cut of the spoils—it wouldn't address the actual problem. But perhaps you’ll decide we don’t need to dig this deep; read on and reach your own conclusions.

---

the cheating game

In the beginning was the gift, at least according to anthropologist David Graeber. In Debt: the First 5000 Years, he delves into the misconception that before there was money there was barter. Economics 101 teaches that exchange without currency required a “double-coincidence of wants.” What are the chances that the person with an extra fish will find the person with the coveted knife before the fish starts to stink? They'd be going from hut to hut, seeing what anyone has to swap and, meanwhile, their catch would spoil. Money therefore facilitated trade by providing a medium that was easy to transport, didn’t go bad, and was good for buying anything.

Graeber, however, has found that this trajectory was backwards. In ancient cultures there was first a system of gift exchange, then money was imposed, and then—when money itself was scarce—barter became an exception within the money paradigm. Barter is a calibrated exchange. There’s a particular value attached to the item that the trader wants to get back, if not more. The quality of the trade matters but not the character of the person with whom the trade is done. In fact, a stranger or a near-enemy is better than a neighbor or friend because then negotiations can be ruthless.

In the “pre-civilized” world this is exactly how barter was used— against those outside the community whom one was unlikely to ever see again. It was considered a sport among men and conferred bragging rights on the winner of the deal. The one who was taken advantage of could try to pawn off the inferior object on the next near-enemy to whom hospitality was not due. But a respectable person would never behave so unscrupulously towards their own kin or clan.

With examples ranging from the Nambikwara of Brazil to the Gunwinggu of Australia, Graeber demonstrates that the daily exchanges of the clan or kin happened through an extensive gift circle among men and women. It even had its own protocol, jokes, assumptions, and rituals to make sure that everyone saved face:

[If] one cares enough about someone—a neighbor, a friend— to wish to deal with her fairly and honestly, one will inevitably also care about her enough to take her individual needs, desires, and situation into account. Even if you do swap one thing for another, you are likely to frame the matter as a gift.

Within the community the onus was therefore reversed—the ongoing relationship with the person was more important than getting a bargain (a barter-gain). In the complex web of gift giving, it was a point of honor to be considered generous. The recipient of a gift would wait a decent interval, and then give back a little more or a little less. Sometimes less is more: by giving more they might, paradoxically, be taking honor away from the first giver and upping the ante.

But the ultimate insult would be to repay the debt exactly. It would be like slapping your hands together and declaring yourself quit of the relationship. In order to keep the exchange going there always needed to be some residual obligation. It was this virtual credit system that preceded money, not a system of barter.

---

coinage makes barter better

The primordial exchange, as anthropologists term it, was credit with no obligation other than the bonds of courtesy, and sometimes not even that. Graeber cites the indignant refusal of a Greenland Inuit to accept thanks after sharing several pounds of seal meat, exclaiming:

Up here in our country we are human! ... And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. We say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

This is not the world of barter that Adam Smith imagined in Wealth of Nations. Having invented the barter myth, however, Smith then used money to solve the dilemma that never was, at least according to Graeber. In the memorably titled chapter, “Games with Sex and Death,” Graeber writes that:

...the economists’ insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else... is touchingly utopian.

Coinage, goes the economic trope, makes barter better. Graeber shows that coinage from its very outset was not designed to facilitate trade in the same way that democracy, from its outset, was not designed to facilitate equality.

---

coining the spoils

Graeber points out that coinage and most of the world’s major religions developed together: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam. The oldest coins were struck in Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey, and spread to Greece and the Persian Empire in 547 BCE soon after Solon’s reforms. Pythagoras, Confucius and the Buddha shared a single century from 570-470 BCE, in the same time and places where coinage first emerged.

This period also saw the rise of the trained professional army and, in particular, the sought-after Greek mercenary warrior. Solon’s new hierarchy was so effective that more soldiers were produced than Greece could use and they became their own commodity class. Although land within Greece was reserved for the eldest son through an arbitrary system of inheritance called primogeniture, younger sons could make their fortunes on the battlefield.

While rulers with imperial aspirations coveted the trained armies, there was a hitch. The kings needed to find a way to feed and equip them during their conquests and occupations. Moving around herds of cattle and wagons of provisions was risky and laborious. And the soldiers who survived had to be rewarded in a form that they could bring back home without carrying off the treasure for which the invasion was launched.

The solution was to pay the mercenary armies in units made from the melted spoils of conquest but stamped with a higher value. The real genius of the scheme, however, was requiring the inhabitants of conquered territories to pay taxes to the king in the freshly minted coin of the realm—rather than paying the king a portion of the harvest that had to be transported, stored, and distributed. Now the conquered peoples would have to provide food, shelter, equipment, sex, or other services directly to the soldiers to get the needed coins. The coins would gravitate back to the royal treasury, the replenished soldiers would conquer the next territory, and the cycle would start again.

---

the vast extraction machine

Through coinage the king was relieved of having to provision his armies with food to last through the battles, but this was the least of his benefits. Although his plundered treasure was melted down and circulated, the king’s investment returned to him a hundred-fold. Instead of metal hidden away in a vault, he instead had the power of unlimited militarism enforcing his decrees.

Violence put down the odd rebellion with ruthless efficiency but, significantly, most people didn’t rebel. Most figured out a way to garner the needed coins, which meant they served the interests of the king voluntarily. Some even made out like bandits. Force had been replaced with the enticement to collaborate in conquest from the safety of your own home. Graeber writes:

In fact, the entire Roman empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and distribution to the military—combined with taxation policies designed to encourage conquered populations to adopt coins in their everyday transactions.

Rather than imposing power through the military, extortion was now part of the legal and judicial system through tax collectors backed by armed guards. The same mechanism that protected the person and property of citizens also legitimized the right of the king. This reserved the power of the military for making new conquests.

When desperate enough, the peasants sold their wives or children into bonded labor. Those who still couldn’t pay were forced into slavery themselves while those who rebelled were sent to the mines, the worst form of slavery. The metals they unearthed created more coins, which paid the army to conquer more lands, which sent more slaves into more mines, ad infinitum. Thus was born the military-coinage-slavery complex.

In an insidious cycle, those who had much were served by those who had some who were served by those who had little. But those who had none were only good for extracting more coins from the earth.

---

moving up the pyramid

The need for coins to pay the tax established that even a free man was not free to eke out a subsistence living from the land. He was required instead to unwittingly collaborate with the king by supporting the military in its quest to undermine the sovereignty of other people. No matter what activity he did to get the coins, he served the king’s interests. His labor might be a dozen steps removed, but it still fed into the material network for an occupying army. Yet the services he rendered bought his own and his family’s freedom for another year, essentially paying their ransom or slave price.

The ease with which one could acquire money determined the type of slave one was. Those who enforced the tribute as collectors or “tax farmers” could skim a fine profit. They could then loan excess coins to those who were desperate to avoid a short and brutish life in the mines. Through this strategy, the lender could come to possess the borrower’s home, his land and livestock, and sell his children as slaves and his wife as bondswoman, all while sending the debtor himself to prison.

As distant as the entrepreneur and the impoverished peon seemed, it was a difference in style and degree, not substance. Both were slaves to an economic system that served the ruling class. Money was a unit of labor owed to the crown. This labor rewarded the soldiers who occupied the barbarian’s country and the magistrate who enforced the laws that favored the collaborator. The armed mercenaries were slaves of a different sort who chose to send other people into slavery in order to buy their own freedom.

---

the coin of the realm

A treatise from India in the 3rd-century BCE confirms the military-coinage-slavery cycle: “The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth.” Slavery in the mines filled the treasury, which paid the army. Taxation replenished the treasury and made sure that goods and services would be readily supplied to the soldiers, with the threat of slavery in the mines always in the background.

Taxation made life itself into a tribute owed to the king—paid by colonies, smallholders, and freemen under threat of appropriating all that they had, including themselves and their families. The taxes paid a military that could be used against them or their neighbors in a revolt.

Graeber explains that:

Greek cities tended to adopt legislation limiting or abolishing debt peonage altogether, and then, to forestall future crises, they would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children of the poor to found military colonies overseas. Before long, the entire coast from Crimea to Marseille was dotted with Greek cities, which served, in turn, as conduits for a lively trade in slaves.

The sons of Greek peasants became an occupying army that sent an influx of chattel slaves back to Greece, so many that even Greeks of moderate means could rise above menial labor. In these far-flung realms, coins made of precious metals were instrumental to conquest, land theft, and slavery.

Extraction of value without returning an equal value—or any value—required anonymous forms of money independent of relationship or place. Trade, by its very nature, could not have served the purpose. Neither could a token for trade that would have no value outside the community. The commodification of gold and silver was essential to the commodification of people.

---

the one-way migration of goods

The labor of citizens, however, was not the primary value that backed the coins. Citizens provided one another with services and refined goods made from the raw materials of the colonies. None of these goods and services flowed back to the peasants in return for their minerals and produce—trade was a one-way migration.

If the empire had disappeared in a flash of lightning, the territories would most likely be no worse off. But if the occupied territories fell off a cliff, the value of coins would plummet right after. Food and goods would become too precious to trade for mere bits of metal. Without the influx of free materials from conquered territories and the free labor of enslaved people, the economic system would collapse.

What this indicates is that whenever money changed hands, it was really the pieces of a vanquished, occupied country broken into tradable increments. Rather than commerce conducted in the products of free labor, they traded in pieces of slave. Whereas the credit system of the ancient village had been intensely personal and based on the reputation of the debtor, coinage introduced a system in which the money itself was “good” and the reputation of the person who held it didn’t matter.

---

religion mirrors the market

With this forced materialism of the Axial Age came the belief that people were, by their very nature, selfish and profit-seeking. This was considered rational, the logic of the market. But side-by-side grew its mirror image—the selfless altruism of the new religions. Both extremes, however, negated the everyday give-and-take of the former time, a reciprocal generosity in which people produced real goods and took care of each other without a religious imperative.

In the new era, greed and charity both became institutionalized and both depended on first acquiring money. Charity might begin at home but the slavery that backed it happened abroad. They were two ends of the same continuum. Graeber writes:

The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion. To put the matter crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant; that selfishness—even the self—are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive.

---

will the real barbarians please stand up?

Graeber phrases the central question of his book as follows:

How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts, and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?

He answers the question by distinguishing between human economies, where money acts as a social currency to establish and maintain relationships, and commercial economies, where money buys things. A human economy is community-sized; each person is unique and surrounded by a nexus of relationships in which that person is irreplaceable. But to turn a person into an object of exchange, they have to first be ripped from their context. In that way they become generic, interchangeable, a unit that can be used to pay off a debt in a commercial economy.

The new Greek democracy was the veneer of a human economy over the substance of a commercial economy. Within the top layers of the pyramid a human economy flourished, arts and culture abounded, and fine points of law were argued. But this rested on a market in flesh, bought and sold like any other commodity, with which the owner could do as he pleased. The thin blanket of civilization left women, slaves, the landless, and the subsistence farmer out in the cold. And it certainly excluded the barbarians both within and without the gate.

At the same time that Athenian law forbade the debt bondage of fellow Greeks, the enslavement of barbarian races reached massive proportions toiling in the silver mines at Laureion and serving in the households of Athenians. A modern article asks why we denounce only barbaric acts done by foreigners but not our own. However, the question is redundant. By definition a barbaric act is an act done by a barbarian, a word that merely means an outsider.

With perfect ethnocentric pitch, barbarians were described as vicious, cruel, and cowardly by those who bound and beat them. They were scorned as lazy by those for whom they labored. Most importantly, they were legally termed incapable of reason and self-governance. This law enabled barbarian daughters, sisters, and wives to be turned into currency for their own betterment.

---

coding the barbarian

After the implosion of the Roman Empire in the 600-700s CE, the Visigoths, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons were ruled by what came to be known as the Barbarian Law Codes. The descendants of these barbarians are today’s German, French, English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, among others.

The codes were written in Latin by the ruling class and stated the penalties for insults or injuries, real or imagined. They are an important source for anthropologists because they record the transition from agrarian societies holding land communally to feudal class structures divided into large landowners and dependent peasants.

As described by The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Barbarian Law Codes were a synthesis of the pre-Roman tribal structure of these ter- ritories combined with “elements of the slave-owning system and its spiritual culture (Roman law, literature, religion and so on).” The spiritual culture normalized slave-owning in every element of the society's expression.

Could a tribal structure, in which each person exists in a network of relationships, be synthesized with a slave-owning system without one being subordinated to the other? Numismatist Philip Grierson shows which one predominated by citing some of the currencies from the late fourth through the ninth centuries mentioned in the Barbarian Law Codes:

Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal ...

It’s telling that gold and silver are mixed with cattle and chattel because those who had none of the former became the latter. When the Roman Empire fell, the barbarian countries could have restored their tribal sovereignty and formed an alliance of mutual protection and trade. Instead, the barbarians of France, Spain, Portugal, and England aspired to be like Rome and Greece—the next great empire. Indians, Africans, Americans, and the Celts would be among their next victims.

---

CHAPTER 2 EXERCISES

Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following:

Paradigm Shift #2A

Money is not a unit of trade; it's trading in pieces of slave—a vast machine for extraction, an empire chip to reward collaboration. Money is a mere symbol whose function can be determined by looking at the flow of goods: beneath the symbol, there is no trade.

Paradigm Shift #2B

Greed and charity replaced an everyday reciprocal generosity based on mutual cooperation. Greed and charity arose together after money had divided people into the haves and have-nots.

LEXICON

Imagine what a modern example or parallel might be for the following terms. Are the concepts still valid today?

primordial exchange: the first form in which goods moved between people within communities, assumed in economics theory to be barter but evidenced by anthropological research to be a complex and subtle protocol of gifts.

Axial Age: from approximately 500 BCE (before common era) to 500 CE (common era). Seen as a pivotal time when the seeds of the European worldview, now the assumptions underlying the developed world, were planted.

money: a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever creates it.

credit: an invisible unit of money.

currency: a metal or paper representation of credit.

primogeniture: a system of inheritance in which ownership of family land is both taxed and monopolized by the first-born son, forcing the others to sell their labor to the market or the military.

barbarian: a foreigner who lacks the rights of a citizen, labeled as ignorant by those who don't speak the foreigner's language.

slave: a person whose labor benefits a different class with no reciprocity and no ownership of the products of their own labor.

chattel slave: a person taken away from their lands whose labor is forced through violence to serve a different class.

citizens: members of a country who have access to its currency and ownership of land and property through their labor.

imperial citizens: members of a colonizing country whose labor is paid in a credit or currency that buys a significantly greater amount of labor by the colonized peoples.

imperial credit or currency: a tradable unit of money that circulates freely within a colonizing country and is tightly controlled within the colonies, who have no ability to issue sovereign money.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

Although the system of primogeniture created inequality between siblings, it also kept the property in the family from generation to generation. The modern system of inheritance "splits the baby," ala Solomon, so that it can be equally divided but is dead to the family. All members of the family must sell their labor to buy property anew, generation after generation. Which system is better? Is there another way that could avoid both traps? [thanks to Heather B for this great meme!]

Would a fair exchange of labor reduce the impact of immigration? If communities could set their own exchange value, which trading partners could take or leave, would there be a need to have borders? Would there be a mass desire for people to leave their communities and emigrate because of extremes in quality of life?

Is a gift economy possible between citizens of an empire, if their gifts are produced by people who are excluded? Is a services exchange between consumers the same as a gift economy?

---

I give examples of seeing change where I never expected it, and letting go of things that someone else picks up and loves. Then I read the prelude to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. I talk about rearranging the furniture of your mind and trying on paradigms like a new pair of glasses. I mention books that were a revolution-in-a-box. As the fulcrum on which the scale is tipping, you’re under a lot of pressure! Relax your activism and take care of yourself.

"Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians—those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey." Aristotle

I read Chapter One of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. I describe the origins of democracy in ancient Greece as a shrewd move by the archons to quell rebellion. Greek democracy was a pretty word laid over systemic violence. When debt and slavery had reached a boiling point and commoners threatened to unite, this was a concession that divided farmers against the landless, soldiers against the colonized, and citizens against the enslaved.

The Story of Money

Are we seeing the desperate end-times of empire? It's not too soon to start planning the next system we want. But first we need to understand how money began and what it really is. In this episode I explain the second chapter of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. Called Making a Market for Plunder, it quotes the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber on his book, Debt: the first 5000 years, and Gil Baile on the justifying myths of violence. I conclude that money, from its inception, was trade in pieces of slave and that coinage coopted us into being shareholders in conquest.