On social currencies and human economies: some notes on the violence of equivalence – David Graeber

Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual

currency, an invention of society.

Quando os economistas falam sobre a origem do dinheiro, por exemplo, eles sempre consideram a dívida algo secundário. Primeiro vem o escambo, depois o dinheiro; o crédito só se desenvolve posteriormente. Mesmo quando consultamos livros sobre a história do dinheiro, por exemplo, na China, França ou Índia, o que geralmente encontramos é uma história

(say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth),

Money is merely a social agreement, a story that assigns meaning and roles. The classical definition of money—a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account—describes what money does, but not what it is. Physically, it is now next to nothing. Socially, it is next to everything: the primary agent for the coordination of human activity and

those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’.