I forgive my debt, there is no other way. Throughout history, States have done so over and over again, as religions have established, precisely for the duration of the establishment, before, in the death of suffocation, citizens begin to turn into the ass. The one who speaks like this is one of the drivers of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but he is also a famous anarchist anthropologist. David Graeber's debt: The Fist 5,000 Years (Debt, the first 5,000 years) is distributed in libraries here in Spanish under the title In Debt, an Alternative History of the Economy.

David Graeber (USA, 1961) is a British university professor at the Goldsmiths University in London, following the expulsion of the Yale by the Noos Institute. He has previously written, inter alia, an investigation into the traces of slavery among the inhabitants of Madagascar (Lost people: magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar) and Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Argia may one day have the opportunity to broaden her ideas.

Debts existed before the first written vestiges of history appeared, 3,200 years before Christ in Mesopotamia. In other words, sophisticated monetary accounts and complex credit systems already existed; that credit had been created thousands of years before money, contrary to what most economists have said after Adam Smith.

“What we’ve been told about economy over these years is just a big lie,” Graeber said in the interviews. Economists have always said that there has been an exchange between citizens at the root of the economy: “Give me a cow for my 40 chickens.” However, anthropologists have always known that this was not the case, because in ancient peoples who have studied, they have never found that kind of barter.

“What we have seen anthropologists – says Graeberr – in this type of society is that one citizen tells the other ‘what beautiful cow, huh?’ and the other ‘if you like it, take it away’ and with that it stays indebted. (...) The real question is how ‘I’m indebted to you’ becomes a concrete system of measures, how money is created as a counting unit.”

There is an answer to the violence. In war and slavery. Graeber explains through 500 pages the development and periods of the cocktail consisting of money, loans, precious metals, debt, war, empires and slavery.

In the Mesopotamia explained 5,200 years ago by the first writing, the fair was invented within the giant temples with its accounting, loans and debts. Interest also, 20% for 2,000 years.

With debts, forgiveness was also invented, to which historians refer little and economistas.En years of bad weather or epidemics, peasants drowned in debts. Creditors, stripped of livestock, land and the debtor's house, were often enslaved to their children or their wife, and finally to the player himself.

For fear of revolts, the authorities were being crushed, so many debtors escaped to cities to survive in misery or theft. To avoid this, the authorities set up debt jubilee and other write-offs.

Delete all debts from the blackboard

Graeber states that in Sanskrit, Hebrew and Aramaic they are designated with the same words “debt”, “guilt” and “sin”. All the founders who later founded the great religions wore their messages in the language of old debts: “As if they wanted to say that debts are not sacred, that they are indeed sacred acts to forgive debt, to abolish debts, to realize that debts are not real.”

There has been no debt or market without a strong institution, monarchies of divine origin, religious laws or empires such as the Sharia. Like the subjects, the expired ones have to be forced to pay taxes and debts. Returning to the capitalism that has been maturing in these 500 years, the great powers condemned the majority of the world to eternal slavery. There is always mention of the dramatic case of Haiti, which, despite its independence, was indebted to the settlers, and which today is the source of the disaster in half of the island.

Modern capitalist empires have used the model of Rome and Greece to overcome their debt crises: to buy the peace of the local population at the expense of eternal debts of colonized more and more distant countries. After the Second World War, the capitalists, applying the Keynes theses, wanted to give the suspended class struggle, according to Graeber: "To explain it raw, they offered treatment to white workers in the North Atlantic, from the United States to Germany. If they set aside their aspirations to radically change the system, they would allow them to have unions, enjoy a wide range of social advantages…”.

But when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, the capitalist system broke the pact with the workers. After assaulting the trade unions, he invited citizens to act in the market, to enter debt. That is what Graeber calls “debt imperialism.”

The problem is that of the Mesopotamians who invented working with debt, now the capitalist system has forgotten forgiveness, the Jubilee that could make the indebted breathe.

“Instead,” Graeber told Philip Pilkinton of the Naked Capitalism, instead of setting up institutions to protect indebteers, giant institutions have emerged to protect creditors, such as the International Monetary Fund and rating agencies. The agencies argue that, contrary to economic logic, debtors cannot interrupt payment. It goes without saying that the conclusion is catastrophic. We’re seeing what people of ancient times feared the most: hardworking people balancing along the edge of the disaster.”

As the capitalists themselves are also indebted, with the great crisis that erupted in 2008, people have seen that the system or the states, or as Graeber says the “Empire”, have forced poor debtors to rescue the rich debtors.

With Occupy Wall Street Graeber asks for everyone: “Remove all debts posted on the board.” If money is a social creation, a promise that can disappear when the rich demand it, we all have to engage in the process of making promises and negotiating.