ABSTRACT
David Graeber’s discussion of the primordial debt theory is both his least developed and most overlooked. The “Myth of Barter” is the idea that money arose spontaneously as a solution to the inconveniences of barter; it is possible to approach the truth of this proposition by testing evidence. Anthropological evidence shows that in the human economy money exists, but that it is not used in routine transactions for goods and services. When human economies are taken over or changed into commercial economies, violence increases. In Debt, Graeber argues that the modern economic system centered on debt is actually harmful. One of the main ideas of Debt is that our current economic system is not legitimate because it is built on the idea that debt is simply an impersonal exchange that is not yet complete.
