Time Banking Within the Natural History of Debt

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Anthropological research has established what philosophers knew for thousands of years – money and monetary debt arose not out of any economic necessity, but as instruments of domination. Their source was in violence and they comprise the sublimation of violence, which is the nature of all government/corporate power. This is part of what I’ve meant when I call today’s forms of money command currencies. By its empirical definition, money is created and enforced by a command economy.

 

So it’s not only false that today’s financialization performs any constructive social function. It’s false that finance in any form ever performed any necessary function. (Acting to maintain and manage an unnecessary structure is obviously not to do anything necessary.) It’s never been anything but the tool of empire, the better to subjugate its own populace and force these to serve as the fuel of empire.

 

Anthropologist David Graeber has researched this and recently compiled his findings in his book Debt: the First 5000 Years. He featured his basic idea in this post at Naked Capitalism.

 

It goes: First, and for the vast majority of humanity’s natural history, organic communities based themselves upon close social networks, moral relations, and the sense of community obligation, including in transactions among individual community members.

 

Then, nascent elites, previously basing their power on direct violence and plunder, saw how they could accelerate class stratification and magnify their power by sublimating this violence by formalizing exchange and debt. To do this, they came up with money, and began measuring transactions and recording debts based upon it.

 

How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”

Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. “You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…” Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their creditors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, “wait a minute, who owes what to who here?” And of course for thousands of years, that’s what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers’ language, you’re admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing. That’s the situation the religious thinkers were stuck with, so they started with the language of debt, and then they tried to turn it around and make it into something else.

 

Thus we have top-down formal money, formal credit, formal debt, as opposed to the bottom-up vernacular manifestations of these, as the organized crime outgrowth of much less organized direct violence. This command economy is embodied violence.

 

Then, at the opposite end, where this system starts to break down, we start to find the popular conception of “barter” – the direct exchange of goods on a mercenary basis. But this is just the aftertaste of the money-driven market, not a primal inefficiency that money once improved upon way back when. That popular conception is simply a lie told by today’s economic elites.

 

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

 

(This also refutes the scam of plunking the idea of barter into the middle of an otherwise globalized, “capitalist” environment, and then triumphantly declaring it unworkable. Well yes, but that’s because barter is the attempted continuation of that same framework, not because that framework works.)

 

In the same way that Somalia is not “anarchy”, but the result of the collapse of capitalism, so the inefficiencies of barter as we know it are just the inefficiencies of the market and its mores, carried over to a post-money environment. The true primeval exchange was enfolded within ongoing community relations, and could function perfectly well under community debt auspices. Today co-production and time banking constitute an attempt to develop a new version of that ancient socioeconomic network.

 

We have a vicious circle of money/debt backed by violence. This dominates all human relations and disintegrates community, civil society, and democracy. The liquidation of these in turn tends to generate ever more mercenary and nihilistic attitudes which then intensify the horrors of money/debt servitude and accelerate money’s assault on all human relations. This is the circle.

 

(We see how debt inevitably compounds to the point that it destroys civilization. At this point jubilee, one way or another, is the only possible outcome. It’s similar to how capitalism naturally stagnates and must repeat the primitive accumulation, i.e. the massive plunder grab to provide the seed capital, or else break down completely.

 

We also see how taxes serve no economic purpose but are only weapons to enforce this command economy of money and debt. The MMTers, who wish to continue with all this but in a “reformed” version, are at least honest about using taxation as a mode of social control.)

 

One possible way to break free of the whole viciousness is by renouncing money and monetary debt (which ought to be common sense, as the amount and preponderance of money we have available plummets ever more steeply). One alternative is time dollars and time banking.

 

Time banking is a formal framework for organizing the true economy (everything devalued by the money/debt system, including what’s written off as the “informal economy”) along the lines of reciprocal gifting of work. It’s especially versatile for the exchange of services, but can be used for goods as well with a version of the labor measure of value. Goods can be valued according to the time that goes into manufacturing them.

 

This framework is enfolded within the concept of co-production, which is a transitional concept between capitalism and full economic democracy. Time banking as a framework and time dollars as a measure are part of this transition to such consciousness of economic community and freedom that we can dispense with formal measurement completely and restore the wholesome primal system of social credit which originally preceded money for tens of thousands of years.

 

As Graeber describes:

 

Anyway it only makes sense if you assume those premises; that all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts. This flies in the face of everything we actually know or experience of human life. But once you start thinking that the market is the model for all human behavior, that’s where you end up with.

If however you ditch the whole myth of barter, and start with a community where people do have prior moral relations, and then ask, how do those moral relations come to be framed as ‘debts’ – that is, as something precisely quantified, impersonal, and therefore, transferrable – well, that’s an entirely different question. In that case, yes, you do have to start with the role of violence.

…in my own way I think of myself as working very much in the Maussian tradition. Mauss was one of the first anthropologists to ask: well, all right, if not barter, then what? What do people who don’t use money actually do when things change hands? Anthropologists had documented an endless variety of such economic systems, but hadn’t really worked out common principles. What Mauss noticed was that in almost all of them, everyone pretended as if they were just giving one another gifts and then they fervently denied they expected anything back. But in actual fact everyone understood there were implicit rules and recipients would feel compelled to make some sort of return.

 

So the natural history of debt, as documented by the evidence, is that exchange was naturally enfolded within networks of social bonding and mutual obligation. State money and the formalization of debt only arose later as instruments of domination.

 

Since time banking and co-production seek to create new networks of such bonding and obligation, they’re basically an attempt to reconstitute primal modes of reciprocal community exchange. Time banking is a transitional framework between formally quantified mercenary exchange and this primal quasi-reciprocity. So there’s the context of time banking within the natural history of humanity.