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. 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. For that reason alone, it’s worth reading. By this, I mean it makes you think again about things you thought you knew already, and can’t be easily assimilated into an existing worldview.
First, I’ll say this is a very unsettling book. I finally finished this book after reading it on and off for months.
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