What're some of his points? Any lectures to recommend?
His Talk at Google is good, but I can give you the gist
The idea that debt = morality goes way back: In Aramaic, the word for "debt" and "sin" are the same. Much of the moral language of the bible is built off debt/financial language. The Lord's Prayer ("forgive us our trespasses") originally uses the Aramaic for debt (See
Etymology). Perhaps the earliest known word for freedom means freedom from debt.
Debt permeates ancient society and its thought. Plato's Republic opens with Kefalos suggesting morality is equivalent to paying your debts and not lying. The "standard" economic story, originating with Adam Smith, is that barter is inconvenient and replaced by money. This story seems false based on our anthropological study of surviving hunter-and-gatherer societies. Instead, ancestral communities used credit systems of gift-giving, mutual indebtedness, with informal and approximately quantified tallies.
Debt forgiveness, especially, crops up a lot in world history and governance—see the Biblical Jubilee, or Mesopotamian traditions. Too much debt makes society fragile, and this leads the ruling class to forgive. This segways into Graeber's prescription: we need widespread debt forgiveness, both of the Global South and of everyday American citizens. That this seems strange or immoral or "unfair" reflects a misunderstanding of what debt, fundamentally or historically, is: a negotiable contract, not something written in stone, that can and must be forgiven.
If democracy is to mean anything now it means that everybody gets to weigh in on what kind of promises are made, what kind of promises are kept, and when circumstances change, what sort are renegotiated. I think that's the political moment that we're in right now.
Part of this is that, while debt makes sense between equals (e.g. two companies in the open market), Graeber argues it takes on a very different meaning when it occurs between asymmetrically powerful parties (e.g. large, wealthy institutions lending to less-wealthy individuals), which he calls "structural coercion." And this is the deal he think has been struck between large institutions and everyday Americans, or between first world nations and the Global South.
Moreover, debt is in a sense normal, healthy, and socially stimulating. It provides a basis for interaction. In ancestral communities, debt is a perpetual ongoing mutual indebtedness of each villager to the other, structured by ongoing favors and repayments that bind the community together while also enabling a better standard of living for all those involved (they can live beyond their strict means; they can insure their standard of living; they can smooth out instability).
He tells an interesting story about a New Zealander named Te Ringa that reminded me of the opening scene of
The Wire:
Graeber said:
In many human societies it is the case that if you praise somebody else's possession it's almost impossible not to give it to the person who praises it. This is another one of those things which has a very strange moral power, so much so that you really can't break out of it. There's a great story I always tell from New Zealand, a guy named Te Ringa who was a notorious glutton. He rarely did much fishing himself, everybody else in the neighborhood was a fisherman, and he would walk up and down the beach looking for people coming back from fishing and check out their catch and say, Oh look, squid, that's my favorite, or Wow, that's a beautiful fish. Okay, here's your fish, here's your squid. You just have to give it to him. After about two years people got fed up so they formed a war party and they killed him... Such is the moral power of some customs.
And
The Wire scene:
The Wire S1E1
Man On Stoop: I’m sayin’, every Friday night in an alley behind the Cut Rate, we rollin’ bones, you know? I mean all them boys, we roll til late.
McNulty: Alley crap game, right?
Man On Stoop: Like every time, Snot, he’d fade a few shooters, play it out til the pot’s deep. Snatch and run.
McNulty: What, every time?
Man On Stoop: Couldn’t help hisself.
McNulty: Let me understand. Every Friday night, you and your boys are shooting craps, right? And every Friday night, your pal Snot Boogie… he’d wait til there’s cash on the ground and he’d grab it and run away? You let him do that?
Man On Stoop: We’d catch him and beat his ass but ain’t nobody ever go past that.
McNulty: I gotta ask ya: If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and run away, why’d you even let him in the game?
Man On Stoop: What?
McNulty: If Snotboogie always stole the money, why’d you let him play?
Man On Stoop: Got to. This America, man.
Anyway, Graeber goes on to give a history of the world through the perspective of debt.
Graeber said:
The vast majority of rebellions, revolutions, insurrections, peasant revolts that you see... they're not about caste systems, they're not about serfdom, absolute declared systems of inequality. They're always about debt. Moses Finley, the great classicist, once said there was basically one revolutionary program throughout antiquity: cancel the debts and redistribute the land, in that order. When peasants take over a town, the first thing they do is find the debt recrods and burn them. After that they find the land records and tax documents. [John Adams] says Well, we can't have majority vote, we have two million people with property and nine million without it, what's gonna happen? The moment we allow everybody to vote they'll cancl the debts, after that they'll redistribute the lands. It's just common sense.