Synopsis:
A major argument of the book is that the imprecise, informal, community-building indebtedness of "human economies" is only replaced by mathematically precise, firmly enforced debts through the introduction of violence, usually state-sponsored violence in some form of military or police.
A second major argument of the book is that, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, debt is probably the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments.
Debt, the book argues, has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy. Graeber proposes that the second argument follows from the first; that, in his words, "markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence", though he goes on to show how "in the absence of such violence, they... can even come to be seen as the very basis of freedom and autonomy".
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One of the weird conclusions I got from the first chapters was that in ancient times, sex workers were mostly indebted people forced to work off their or their father's debts. As in, no voluntary sex work. Can anyone confirm or contest this?
There are at least two examples of voluntary sex workers in the Hebrew Bible. Tamar in Genesis and Rahab in Joshua. Granted, the Bible isn’t an impartial document about Iron Age/Bronze Age life. But both women clearly owned their own property based on the stories they were in, though this doesn’t conclusively disprove that they were originally sold by male family into sex work.
I'm not familiar with these stories. Are the two women presented sympathetically or is their sex work used as an excuse to attack them?
not an expert, but they appear to be positive figures. Rahab harbored Israelite spies who were scouting out Jericho, and didn't rat them out to the King when asked.
You should google Tamar and genesis to hear some cool bible stories, she was Onan's wife, and later poses as a "harlot" to fuck his dad and get knocked up..
Rahab is definitely considered righteous, and her descendants are absorbed into the Israelites. Tamar performs trickery, but is essentially good (it’s a strange story).
What would count as voluntary work in ancient times
Work done not under coercion?
People have different definitions of coercion. Are wage labourers in capitalism coerced? Someone might say that a person who is server at a restaurant is doing the work without coercion but I'd disagree. That's why I asked what would be considered voluntary
Right, and you're right that'll be a messy definition. I thought you might be implying that there was no non-coercive work.
If you need to work to survive then you’re being coerced into working. So, some people like retirees/trust-fund kids are probably okay. But for everyone else we need communism to be really free.
I mean, without the direct coercion of debt. Maybe it's stupid but I somehow still rank coercion from being a slave as different than coercion of being hungry.