While I respect what he is trying to do to advance his beliefs, I have to disagree with his ideas about the nature and origins of money and consequently how it relates to debt (two things the article considers the center of what protesters are angry about):
"Economics textbooks tell a story in which money and markets arise out of the human tendency to “truck and barter,” as Adam Smith put it. Before there was money, Smith argued, people would trade seven chickens for a goat, or a bag of grain for a pair of sandals. Then some enterprising merchant realized it would be easier to just price all of them in a common medium of exchange, like silver or wampum. The problem with this story, anthropologists have been arguing for decades, is that it doesn’t seem ever to have happened. 'No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,' writes anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, in a passage Graeber quotes.
People in societies without money don’t barter, not unless they’re dealing with a total stranger or an enemy. Instead they give things to each other, sometimes as a form of tribute, sometimes to get something later in return, and sometimes as an outright gift. Money, therefore, wasn’t created by traders trying to make it easier to barter, it was created by states like ancient Egypt or massive temple bureaucracies in Sumer so that people had a more efficient way of paying taxes, or simply to measure property holdings. In the process, they introduced the concept of price and of an impersonal market, and that ate away at all those organic webs of mutual support that had existed before."
Here we go again.
Let me answer by using a famous philosophical thought question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I know we are scientist and it is of great prerogative that we base our findings in facts that are observable and backed by proof. But even if we don't have proof, it doesn't mean the fact is not true. It's just that we don't have enough evidence to prove the fact is true. Just like in statistical regression analysis, you don't say you do not reject the null hypothesis for higher p-values: you say you fail to reject the null hypothesis.
Because if this is not the case, I can argue against Graeber using the same reasoning: are there proofs that it was governments/states that created money? I don't think there are. So now we have to base our conclusions on two conjectures. Which one is stronger?
That money is created by the state is a weak conjecture based on the simple fact, which is true then and is still true today, that any one single entity (individual or government) is not omnipotent--such entity will never have all information. How did governments choose which is the right form of money to create? Did the emperor woke up one morning and thought, "Ooo, I like them shiny things. Let's use gold as our money!" Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Ancient Egypt and Sumer, so it will be a wonder at what point did the state decide what type of money and when to implement the use of the money. Surely the state has to be extremely knowledgeable about the workings of markets and transactions to be able to come up with the perfect medium of exchange. But this again is likely not the case. As Friedrich August von Hayek states it in one of his famous works, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), "a centrally-planned market could never match the efficiency of the open market because any individual knows only a small fraction of all which is known collectively":
"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given' resources-if 'given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these 'data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality."
Now let's turn to the other conjecture. Is it possible that the origin of money is an evolutionary process which began in barter trade and ultimately ended up in more manageable and saleable form that greatly improved exchanges and transactions? I see this as a more stronger conjecture. Carl Menger was one of the first to point this out, in his famous work, "On the Origin of Money" (1892). In it, he says that money is not created by a state edict, but money evolved in the marketplace. It was the individuals who decided what is the most marketable good that can be used as a medium of exchange. It is the market that chose which commodity is best as a medium for exchange in terms of saleability, durability, and transportability. Money did not come immediately, but instead evolved through time as the market discovers new commodities that are more saleable, more durable, and more transportable. For Menger, the state only came in to perfect what the market considered was money by recognizing and regulating the medium:
"Money has not been generated by law. In its origin it is a social, and not a state-institution. Sanction by the authority of the state is a notion alien to it. On the other hand, however, by state recognition and state regulation, this social institution of money has been perfected and adjusted to the manifold and varying needs of an evolving commerce, just as customary rights have been perfected and adjusted by statute law."
The development of money is one example of Menger's complete theory of social institutions. For Menger, social institutions arise from individuals interacting with each other, and each with his or her own subjective knowledge and experiences. Together and through time, these human actions spontaneously evolved and eventually created institutions. Money is an institution, where individuals find certain patterns of behavior, such as the use of gold coins as a medium of exchange, that helped in attaining a person's goals more efficiently, such as for transactions, and then adopt such behavior.
Bottomline is, money itself has desirable qualities, among them are three things that Menger points out--saleable, durable, and transportable. It's highly unlikely that any one person, and at a very short time, can come up with one commodity that has these properties. The creation of money is evolutionary, and it involves more than one person accepting such commodity as medium of exchange.
So let's give up on this no-proof-of-barter-economy argument, shall we?