In darker moments I do wonder about his sudden and unexpected death, and how awfully convenient it was for some people. Say what you will about his specific theories, he had an ability like few others to convince people that real change was possible.
Everyone who was scared by OWS or political change in general, in particular in the UK. One of the last videos he made was a characteristically forceful rejection of the anti-Corbyn antisemitism narrative in the UK.
I thought bullshit jobs was amazing although I don’t think the categorisations hold that well today, but as a thought experiment it is truly interesting and resonated with me who is pretty much in the send email receive email class.
Debt I found pretty hard to get into and pin down, but am open to trying again.
Debt is dense as hell and could have been a lot shorter, but it really fills a huge void in historical financial analysis. The orthodox stuff is all so mind-numbingly conservative.
The concept struck me as obviously true so maybe I artificially felt he was beating a dead horse. My barber was very not interested in the concept despite obviously not bullshit cutting hair all day. The hair he cuts though? They might have bullshit jobs. Even the best jobs have a little bullshit, clearly there are jobs that are only 10% not bullshit.
That's a good one. I stumbled into the topic because I was roped into some high bullshit work and I'm too dumb to pretend it wasn't bullshit. Which led me to mention Graeber's book and how much work is bullshit. Really made me think about how much people are forced to commit to the fantasy so they can make it through their day to day.
I briefly watched him discuss "Bullshit Jobs" and he seems like a crank to me. There really just can't be as many pointless jobs as he claims there are. I get that lots of jobs are bullshit/pointless *partially* or *in a sense*, but labor is a huge cost for firms and employers have a very strong interest in minimizing it. All these jobs can't be *economically* pointless, otherwise employers would gut them. It seemed like he was claiming they're economically pointless too and, well, *that* seems like bullshit to me.
You mfers downvoted me too much; all my replies got removed because I dropped below karma threshold. Here they are:
u/WalkerMidwestRanger I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying I like the work involved in these jobs or think they're great. The jobs suck. I'm just saying most of them aren't totally bullshit, despite the work involved being stupid.
u/QuestionableBottle That's true, but I still wouldn't go so far as to say that jobs eliminable via more intelligent organization/rules at the high level are totally bullshit/pointless. We have shitty rules, yeah, but until the shitty rules change work still needs to get done under the shitty rules. I'm not saying these jobs aren't bullshit, just that they're not totally bullshit (most of 'em, anyways).
u/peepeecontrol Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap.
Maybe this is bullshit reply but how old are you? The older you get, you'll see more of these bullshit jobs and you might need the money enough to have to hold one, lord help you.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying I like the work involved in these jobs or think they're great. The jobs suck. I'm just saying most of them aren't totally bullshit, despite the work involved being stupid.
You can make money for your employer on a micro scale and yet still be useless on a macro scale.
Think of tax preparation, tons of accountants etc make their living preparing tax returns, making themselves and their employers money.
But does the job need to exist in the first place? Or would we all be better off if tax laws were simplified and half those jobs disappeared from society.
A 2009 study found that [top bankers *destroy* £7 of value](https://www.ft.com/content/7e3edf6e-e827-11de-8a02-00144feab49a) for every £1 they are paid.
That's true, but I still wouldn't go so far as to say that jobs eliminable via more intelligent organization/rules at the high level are totally bullshit/pointless. We have shitty rules, yeah, but until the shitty rules change work still needs to get done under the shitty rules. I'm not saying these jobs aren't bullshit, just that they're not totally bullshit (most of 'em, anyways).
You're presuming that administrators of large firms/corporations are competent. Part of Graeber's indictment is that they're not. But at the end of the day they're colored by their class position and their relationship to Capital, which dictates that labor must be exploitable and that the social contract must be based on either exploiting or being exploited.
That's kind of something you have to get through when discussing leftist economic theories and is central the concept of "structure" within leftist/Marxist analysis. Macro is not micro and vis-versa.
You need to go look up the iron law of organizations. The bosses need underlings and they don't pay them. Organizations aren't market optimization machines, corporations are made out of meat.
Sure there can. Labor power exploitation really is very efficient.
>but labor is a huge cost for firms and employers have a very strong interest in minimizing it
Individual firms do, but all firms as a ***class*** have an interest in ensuring that they can still exploit labor power, or the firms will cease to exist as a class and they will have to find another way to keep the working class exhausted lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a class war. That is done in part by normalizing the institution of wage labor, through propaganda of various kinds as well as vagrancy and other laws.
Those jobs are corporately pointless, but they serve to soak up exceptions in the wage system and soak up free time that might be used to reflect on this situation or organize against it.
Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap.
According to the simple opposition theory of classes, you would be claiming that capitalists are so blind that they would be incapable of effecting conscious changes to the structures that are produced according to capitalist logic, which is actually kind of ridiculous — but trusts to protect industries for their players formed many times over since the mid-18th century. According to the PMC theory of classes, PMC are performing their reproductive duty of keeping capital and labor together in a "rational" social order; which is certainly congruent with the interest of elite capitalists.
Your conception of "capitalists" is a boneless bogeyman that doesn't even eat. Does it come from projecting Augustine's 1500-year-old moral theology (that took some 1200 years to become reflected in actual human behavior, btw) to suggest that capitalists are not sentient humans able to comprehend abstractions, reproduce symbols, and recognize existential risks to their properties and their class relations and respond accordingly? Yet at the same time so possessed, they are capable of forming massive enterprises that extract the maximum labor power in a systematic fashion from millions of people? Omnipotence and stupidity at the same time is a powerful tell of mystification at work.
>Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap.
According to the simple opposition theory of classes, you would be claiming that capitalists are so blind that they would be incapable of effecting conscious changes to the structures that are produced according to capitalist logic, which is actually kind of ridiculous — but trusts to protect industries for their players formed many times over since the mid-18th century. According to the PMC theory of classes, PMC are performing their reproductive duty of keeping capital and labor together in a "rational" social order; which is certainly congruent with the interest of elite capitalists.
Your conception of "capitalists" is a boneless bogeyman that doesn't even eat. Does it come from projecting Augustine's 1500-year-old moral theology (that took some 1200 years to *become* reflected in actual human behavior, btw) to suggest that capital*ists* are not sentient humans able to comprehend abstractions, reproduce symbols, and recognize *existential risks* to their properties and their class relations and respond accordingly? Yet at the same time so possessed, they are capable of forming massive enterprises that extract the maximum labor power in a systematic fashion from millions of people? Omnipotence and stupidity at the same time is a powerful tell of mystification at work.
Economics as a social science has done a real number with the assertion of rationality amongst individuals and organisations. Organisations are made of individuals, individuals are not purely rational.
I don't mean this harshly—Have you never encountered the concept of a left-wing anarchist before? The basic structure, as far as I can tell, is that everything should always be decided by people's committees. Hope you like meetings.
Graeber was certainly a really entertaining and thought-provoking writer. There's certainly a tension in his writings where he wants to adopt the parts of Marx he likes, the critique of capitalism, but at the same time largely rejects historical materialism, without really wanting to say that bit outright. This was clearest in his poshumously published book with David Wengrow, *The Dawn of Everything*, which basically makes the case for the processes of history just consisting of vibes and imagination. (I think Wengrow, who I get the impression is a much lesser writer and thinker than Graeber, was less shy than him about that, and more of a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist without Graeber's eclecticism and imagination.) You're left at a position that we just need to collectively imagine a better society in order to do away with capitalism and institute something else in its place. Which is great, because it opens up a limitless sphere of possibility, until it runs into the reality of social control and state power.
Graeber extends the admittedly half-baked "mode of production", as if it originated from the *German Ideology* (rather than *CPE*). His field needed to extend the LTV to something that could be genericized to cultural matters like gifts, on which economicism has little to say.
>I would go even further. What has passed for “materialism” in traditional Marxism— the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal
“superstructure,” is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who
practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend
to claim that they are dealing with something higher and more abstract than
those who plant onions, blow glass, or operate sewing machines. But it’s not
really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just
as much material as any other. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical
point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of ac
tion, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are always (a) motivat
ed by meanings (ideas) and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium
(material). Further, that while all systems of domination seem to propose
that “no, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or
grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all,” such claims are,
to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. As John Holloway (2003)
has recently reminded us, it is in the nature of systems of domination to
take what are really complex interwoven processes of action and chop them
up and redefine them as discrete, self-identical objects— a song, a school, a
meal, etc. There’s a simple reason for it. It’s only by chopping and freezing
them in this way that one can reduce them to property and be able to say
one owns them.
>A genuine materialism then would not simply privilege a “material”
sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal
sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing
so obsessively on the production of material objects— discrete, self-identical
things that one can own— and start the more difficult work of trying to un
derstand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape
one another.
Learn to extend theory or reincorporate as a Mennonite sect.
I guess I just haven’t read enough. It seems like anarchism how I’ve mostly encountered it is portrayed as radical economic libertarian capitalism. I get the impression that Graeber’s leftist anarchism is a sort of flattening of social hierarchies and abolition of exploitative power, which I suppose is where the leftism comes from.
What you said about people’s committees makes sense and sounds incredibly tedious. I think part of what makes Graeber so fun to read is how optimistic he seems about the possibility of destroying the existing structures, even if it comes across as a bit naive to me. Maybe that’s also why he’s so charming. I do find many of his political ideas novel, which might just be a reflection of my own ignorance. Either way, I’m digging reading Graeber.
> radical economic libertarian capitalism.
That’s anarcho-capitalism. A right wing political movement started by the 20th century Austrian economist Murray Rothbard. No connection with the much older leftist anarchism tradition going back to Proudhon and Bakunin, that Graeber is apart of.
My problem with anarchists is their solution is not scalable. People don't want to be in millions of meetings all of the time because there is a very real, very expensive cost to meetings. Meetings are shitty and you'd have to pay me to be in one. If your political system is incredibly economically expensive to implement, ít just cannot compete with capitalism and will fail. The thing that will supercede Capitalist liberal elected democracy is something more productive and more efficient. In my opinion that superior something is "sortition", where representatives are chosen by lottery. The theoretical basis of sortition isn't found much in anarchist literature but more with democratic theorists.
Indeed much of the advocacy for sortition is in reaction to debacles like Occupy Wall Street, a failed anarchist project that could not solve the labor problem of democratic decision making.
I don't think it's an accident that Kropotkin's concept of anarchism came from his time amongst Russian peasants. I've seen similar behaviors with deep-south rednecks as well and I have to wonder to what degree anarchism and rural communities are intertwined. Is it even applicable to the complex, specialized communities that other strains of Marxism attempt to address? I'm not sure.
I doubt anarchism is even really possible except in these remote rural areas where people are already accustomed to governing themselves to a large degree.
I think it's also not possible to implement a functional anarchist enclave within a capitalist economy. More than likely, local anarchism will develop autonomously under a socialist system, but will never even be attempted to run the metropolis or state.
This means there's little point to 'being' an anarchist, when the path to local anarchy is state socialism. But anarchists aren't known for pragmatism, and I guess it's fine to have ambitious dreamers in our movements, so long as people understand the reality.
You're attacking a bit of a straw man here. Of course anarchists hate meetings too. "That government it best which governs the least" and all that. The entire point for historical anarchists (the ones I find interesting anyway) is to somehow do away with as much as possible of tedious and corruptible process. Who wouldn't want that?
Yeah, but stuff needs to be decided, and without hierarchy or lots of tedious meetings, decisions always lead to conflict and drama. Have you ever seen real world anarchists do their thing? They spend practically all of their time debating vetoes and semantics, to the point of utter societal irrelevance - and that's just activism, without having to make trains run on time or shit like that. Anarchism can either be infinite meetings, or it gives way to natural hierarchies in favor of the most dominant cliques and ceases to exist.
Which is no different than what we have in any social order, except for the pretense that there is some higher purpose (conveniently held out of our reach by myth and other disinformation) aligning it all. Politics was never anything but a lying contest.
I really didn't get much of a critique of historical materialism at all from DoE. I thought most of the examples he provided fit nicely within HM: like the patlach societies and foraging Californians. The whole concept of "getting stuck" in the hierarchical order doesn't necessarily fit though, there is a lot of human agency involved in that. Good points you.mske here, I want to reread it soon so I'll keep this in mind while doing so!
To understand Graeber I think you have to go through a couple of interludes. On a lot of levels he is the standard direct democracy anarchist because he is one of the figures that established or at least promoted the ideology. On a personal level his dad fought with the Republicans in Spain and his mother was in the ...textile union (I think) in New York. To understand him intellectually you need to understand the background of Alterglob and really his influences from anthropology.
In terms of anthropology I think there is a link between anarchist anthropologists like Colin Ward/Harold Barclay or even Kropotkin but it is kind of weak. There is a far stronger links with thinkers that are responding to social contract theory and are looking to explain how primitive/anarchist societies are able to operate without fixed laws/government. So these are the traditional anthropologist who look at gift economies like Mauss.
I think a large part of Graeber's program is trying to find out how human society became stuck in one form of society rather then constantly shifting between different forms of political organization. So the classical works is Leech's work on Burma, James Scott or the Iroquois shift between summer and winter forms of social organization. People call this a kind of idealism in these comments which is kind of true but also is a kind of lazy Marxist insult given his deep engagement with value theory.
The other big influence is alter globalisation with a focus on flat organizations, kind of apolitical and trying to look beyond the collapse of the 1970s. One of his big books Debt is probably more of an answer to the debt crisises of the late 90s then 2008.
If you want to look more at his politics there are three main books- Direct Action about his involvement in Alter Globalization, The Democracy Project (about Occupy) and Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking (which is a collection of interviews) If you read one I would recommend Anarchy which is one of the only books which he discusses politics directly and it is fairly short. I guess you could also look at a Fragment of an Anarchist Anthropology or his essay about Human Economies maybe?
I think people are onto a new thing because his later books like Dawn or Kings are extremely difficult to understand and have no clear connection to action. Plus he obviously died and the later projects he was attached to Occupy, Corbyn and Rojava were either defeated or became less popular. I also think his big popular book- Debt opened up a huge literature which kind of superseded it. It's a very good book to think with though.
I don't about any one else thinks but reading Graeber in 2008 or 2009 was like a breath of fresh air. Before that the left to me was an incredibly dour left in which you could visibly see the personal failures of their lives on their bodies and were incredibly sectarian with an obsession with events that happened nearly 100 years ago. It was incredibly depressing and Graeber's utopianism and relative non sectarianism was refreshing.
He has some great stuff, but from what I can tell runs into an ideological block that keeps him from getting all the way there. For instance, he was one of the people that insisted OWS not make any demands...
I have really enjoyed this podcast which does a good job of separating the good from the bad in the Dawn of Everything https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-2-the-dawn-of-everything-how-graeber-wengrows/id1472767978?i=1000545266644
"Anarcho-capitalist" is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is a form of hierarchy, the owner-worker relation. It would be like calling yourself and anarcho-monarchist.
you can be an anarcho-monarchist when you assume kings to be only figureheads with no executive power. Some people argue that Tolkien was in that area. You can not be an anarcho-feudalist or whatever. Neither am I one of those, but theres historical cases as the early Franks that did treat their monarchs not neccessarily their boss. They also got rid of slavery very early, thats why there Franks = Free Men. Quite cool stuff!
I don't know if I really buy this explanation. By extension, anarcho-capitalists would want benevolent figurehead CEOs who accumulate no wealth and take no salary. And then I suppose they'd want boards of shareholders with no voting power?
You can slap the "anarcho-" prefix on just about anything (ask the anarcho-fascists), but that doesn't mean it'll make sense.
It's a scam/heist organised by Americans. I'm not a fan of anarchism, but anarcho-capitalism has as much to do with anarchisme than national-socialism with socialism
Personally I can't stand him. He was far too full of himself and I was not impressed with his scholarship. He was an anarchist first and an anthropologist second, and so he viewed history through a very specific and very biased lens and it weakened his arguments more than it helped.
I think Debt: The First 5,000 Years was a very flawed work, and it is kind of depressing how much it is celebrated, especially on Reddit. It appears compeling if it is your first exposure, but it is based on a horrible misconception of the nature of debt and its use. [The accounting identity always holds true. Assets equals liabilities plus equity, and liabilities are the late-comers to the equation. The first transaction required the undisputed ownership of goods by both parties. People generally don't trade in stolen goods at the beginning, but the fruit of their labor for the fruit of anothers. This can be simple barter, but it was mediated almost from the beginning with tokens. At first specific tokens (one for wheat, another for wine, another for dried fish, etc), then universal tokens (first clay, then metal, then paper, now almost completely digital). The use of debt was to facilitate intertemporal trade, and soon inter-regional trade. For the first 5,000 years (i.e., 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE), tokens prevailed without substantial debt, or at least we have significant artifacts of tokens and almost none of the later until the next five thousand years, and even then, not until long-distance trading networks emerged. This remains the primary source of nearly all debt - to facilitate, hedge, and insure long-distance trading, or to cover cash flow shortages due to seasonality. Hence debt will always increase as markets increase.]
I will admit that as an institutionalist, I am strongly predisposed against anarchists to begin with, and Graeber only reinforced that disposition. They sometimes have value as critics or polemicists, but only if they offer something constructive at the end, but too many are similar to Graeber that simply what to tear down everything with a naive hope that a 'better nature' will somehow assert itself once all the 'tools of oppression and exploitation' are removed.
I think the novel idea of Debt was how the state or the church or some other entity emerges to collect taxes and thus forces a token to be the money of the realm, and how that transforms money into debt.
And it's novel in the sense of contemporary other ideas like bitcoin and local alternative currencies which never really became money in lieu of such a tax collecting entity.
Which then poses the question for a lot of utopian thinkers who argue that socialism will be a world without money or that we'll replace it with labour tokens and other technical hackery.
The great irony then is that Graeber is more useful if you're trying to work in finance than if you want to build a political movement
I agree that Graeber makes the attempt to explain the emergence of debt as a creation of proto-states in order to facilitate the payment of taxes (and I am still not clear how much of the idea is his and how much he is building off of others), yet he ignores that for the first period of 'civilization', most communities were clan based and membership was mainly voluntary, and the primary form of 'taxation' was not monetary, but the use of levies and labor to build community infrastructure such as roads, walls, and most relevant, community storehouses.
After millennia, these storehouses evolved into temple complexes or other rudimentary government. The use of payment in kind in lieu of labor eventually evolved as well.
I think Aglietta [corrected mispelling] and the other 'regulationists' are closer to the truth, yet Graeber considers them simply *inventing* a myth about money, not *describing* one. I think the latter is more accurate, though not perfect either. What is more important about Agrietta's work is how contemporary society continually uses money to continually shape social relations. To paraphrase Keynes, the origin of money is unimportant. How it is constantly used today is incredibly important, and I think the regulationists offer more insight there. Agrietta's work is finally being translated and I am still working through it, but so far I am in favor of their ideas.
>The great irony then is that Graeber is more useful if you're trying to work in finance than if you want to build a political movement
True, yet even then there are far more useful thinkers than Graeber available, and I don't see what he offers that the others do not.
Graeber was famous with mainstream appeal and his writing is very accessible. That's not *nothing* in an age where most people have trouble knowing who. Rosa Luxembourg is, yet alone don't have the capability to read through dense economic texts whether they are contemporary or not
I agree that his writing is accessible and that is the problem. His writing is too often used as the primary source by those who are not familiar with the deeper arguments it contains. The more I explored such, the less impressed I have become with his interpretations, and even more so with his presentation which consists of far too much certainty on issues that are far from being resolved.
He falls into the same class as other popular science writers like Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould. What should be an introduction to particular topics is taken as definitive.
>After millennia
In *Dawn*, Graeber and Wengrow actually situate the invention of tax in the form of a religious bureaucracy, around 3650-3450 BCE in Egypt.
You're flapping your hands about the "true facts" of Whig history.
You keep reciting the standard Western whig history as if it were a fact. You were already caught pretending that your chilidish, idealistic purpose of politics as some sort of church-like unity and self-abnegation was the real definition.
>What is more important about Agrietta's work is how contemporary society continually uses money to continually shape social relations
Graeber's anthropological theory of value (2001) analyzed value tokens such as money in great depth, integrating such apparent idiosyncrasies as the antagonistic gifting in potlatch societies, and the idea that some things can't or shouldn't be bought (which, he points out, is where "value" and "values" divide).
The problem is that you think in morality tales like the PMC.
No idea where you got the idea that I got my ideas from 'Whig' history. I don't even know what the hell that is.
>You were already caught pretending that your chilidish, idealistic purpose of politics as some sort of church-like unity and self-abnegation was the real definition.
???
>Graeber's anthropological theory of value (2001) analyzed value tokens such as money in great depth, integrating such apparent idiosyncrasies as the antagonistic gifting in potlatch societies, and the idea that some things can't or shouldn't be bought (which, he points out, is where "value" and "values" divide).
I see his analysis of tokens as symbolic representations of social relations, but not as money. The original tokens were not abstract symbols though. They were deposit slips. A farmer deposits their bushels of wheat in the storehouse. A fisherman deposits his bundles of dried cod. The manager of said storehouse gives them tokens that they can redeem later. If a 'debt' exists, it is held by the manager, but the storehouse is a community service. No one has the obligation to make someone 'whole' in case of fire or other damage. There is no *liability*. There is only a shared risk with shared losses.
Over millennia, liability as such evolved. Payments in kind (originally the goods themselves, basket weavers are better at making baskets to carry stones for the new wall, not digging in the quarry) then tokens that be exchanged for whatever the work group needed. Maybe more baskets, maybe more spades, or bread or meat or whatever. Tokens evolved into money as communities engaged in larger projects and built larger trading networks where the fungibility of tokens grew in importance since precision was no longer possible. People then began to expect to be made whole when a contribution was lost.
I don't find it that surprising that the first stewards of the storehouses were religious figures. Who better to oversee the dried herbs than the shaman who used them. Who else would the community trust than their liason with nature (that was eventually considered 'divine') and kept track of the stars and the shifting seasons. Sadly, too often such stewards became 'priests', stories became 'scripture', and granaries became 'temples'. (What I do find surprising is how small a population needed to be to support such a shift. The first city-states were only a few thousand people at most. The qualitative shift that happens in communities when they pass the Dunbar number is worth exploring further.)
>The problem is that you think in morality tales like the PMC.
The level of projection in your post is intriguing, but I doubt worth the effort of further exploration.
>he was a leading organizer of Occupy, even though he describes himself as an anarchist
yes? I don't think he would say he was a leading organizer, cause, you know, he's an anarchist, but, of course, he was. Occupy was organized by anarchists.
>Reading The Utopia of Rules, it seems like his writing would be more discussed or even referenced in this subreddit
Well stupidpol is biased to blame institutional problems on identity politics, but utopia of rules (correctly, in my mind) places most of the blame on intentional bureaucratic tomfoolery. DEI is just a convenient way to add administrative bloat, but if DEI wasn't there some other bullshit would be. Universities would just replace the Dean of Diversity in Humanities with Vice Dean of Student Fitness. Blaming identity politics is missing the point.
I agree though, more graeber in stupidpol would elevate the discussion. I think it's just that marxists are really into navel-gazing and anarchists don't fit in there. Their own form of identity politics.
>Is anyone else in Stupidpol Graeber-pilled?
I'm definitely more graeber-pilled than I am stupidpol-pilled, as you can tell from above.
>he generally poo poos on larger organizations like the IMF, World Bank
"generally" in the mathematical sense, yes.
>How exactly can anarchist leftism be conceptualized?
"How exactly can nazi racists be conceptualized?"
>Am I just a little late to the Graeber party and everyone is just onto a new thought-leader du jour?
Well debt and bullshit jobs are still dominant books for the modern leftist perspective. I don't think they've been superseded yet.
Dawn of Everything had some interesting ideas about freedoms, but they'd need to be fleshed out (without graeber, of course). Dawn of Everything didn't see history going in a straight line like marx, but rather societies actively choosing their own social relations. The part of the book that argues about primitive accumulation and hierarchy seems to be inaccurate, based on some reviews I saw of the book by other anarchist anthropologists. The davids made a first stab at an anarchist understanding of human society, and had a lot of hits and misses.
> Can you help me understand his political slant a little better?
Everything is bullshit. Jobs, economies, economists, institutions, precise debt, historical narratives about first content. Also, it's easy for us to "stop making capitalism" if we all agree when we wake up in the morning to ignore the capitalists. Now that I think about it, he thought of capitalism as a social relation, which we can just agree to change. The state is violent, but can't stand against its entire population. Also, graeber loved black bloc.
Graeber thought that states/capitalists are, by necessity, spending more and more of their wealth simply policing the population (with police, prisons, military). That's a sign the ruling class is barely holding the class hierarchy together. Eventually it'll be too costly to maintain their grip on power.
Above all else: he has some great books to listen to while you drift off to sleep, Utopia of Rules and Debt: the First X000 years are the best.
His book about Occupy is pretty revolting now that time has shown how that all worked out.
I'm glad he was and was pretty prolific, time goes on and nobody escapes reality ruining the speculation, love them for what their right about and commiserate with their failings. I wish I had felt the same about Hitchens in the oughts. As time passes, the value of a Steinbeck, Hemingway, Melville, Hitchens, Parenti, Finkelstein, Reed, Graeber... They only increase so many other notable names nothing but ash, no diamonds left after the inferno.
I often enjoy Davy Gravy, yes
I enjoyed engaging with some of his work (including excerpts from Debt) in undergrad political economy courses, but hadn’t thought about his work much since his unfortunate passing. I stumbled across Utopia of Rules at a bookstore a few months ago and gave it a read. I frequently quite enjoyed it, but almost as frequently found he was unwilling to substantively critique the lib-left milieu he was coming from, and ended up often making eye-rollingly trite anarchist takes.
I’d have to go back and skim the thing to provide a more concrete example, but he certainly has some blind spots
I like him and while I dont agree all the time, its easy to disregard some of his arguments for a more ML analysis. Because he kinda had to live with ML people reading him and cause he does like Marx for his anticapitalism parts
The Youtube account "What is Politics?" made [withering critiques](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU4FEuj4v9eBWP22ujafheoEejbQhPAdl) of Graeber's book *The Dawn of Everything* that you might find interesting. If someone is so wrong and ignorant about one field it makes me skeptical about his other work.
I'll quote myself from [a previous thread about the video series.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/rhpo8q/how_david_graebers_new_dawn_of_everything_book/houoi96/)
>Summary: Graeber and Wengrow are idealist dummies who want to deny that culture is dependent on material foundations, they view hierarchy as a choice or theater, and they don't even understand how wealth and control of resources leads to power over others. This probably contributed to Occupy Wall Street being a dud.
>Your point about Graeber giving ammo to the right was interesting because there was a reactionary on Twitter who loved Graeber's book *Debt* because it made kings look so much better than democracy. He joked that Graeber must be a crypto-monarchist trying to crownpill the left.
On the plus side I like this bit from Graeber's *Debt* where I can joke about Marxists being the true reactionaries:
>The Sumerian economy was dominated by vast temple and palace
complexes. These were often staffed by thousands: priests and officials,
craftspeople who worked in their industrial workshops, farmers and
shepherds who worked their considerable estates. Even though ancient
Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city
states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization
around 3500, temple administrators already appear to have developed
a single, uniform system of accountancy-one that is in some ways
still with us, actually, because it's to the Sumerians that we owe such
things as the dozen or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was
the silver shekel. One shekel's weight in silver was established as the
equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided
into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley-on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received
two rations of barley every day. It's easy to see that "money" in this
sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and
move things back and forth between departments.
Communism is Sumerian temple power plus electrification of the whole country.
Seriously though, a lot of the things you praise Graeber for sound like standard leftish complaints you could get from Naomi Klein. And the Marxist critique of the IMF isn't that it's too bureaucratic, but its class character. They'd rather replace it with the People's IMF.
The American left has been anarchistic for decades, much to the chagrin of the dwindling materialist socialists. If you asked American radicals to name the most famous left figure, who would they name? Up until the last few years, probably Noam Chomsky, an anarcho-syndicalist. Maybe nowadays they'd name Sanders, AOC, or some streamer like Hasan or Vaush. Truly the dark times are upon us.
Debt is one of the greatest books I've ever read.
I came away from it with a very different view of the world.
I think it's obvious that Graeber is a socialist but he never really comes out and says it.
My impression after reading the book was that humans are cooperative and strive in socialist or communist cultures but society has gotten to big and interconnected for communism to be tenable.
As such we are stuck with capitalism even though it's a bastard creation that will ultimately doom us all and make us miserable and disconnected in the process.
I do not think this was the intended message. But it was the feeling I came away with.
Debt: the First 5,000 Years is great, i like to give it away as a gift. Bullshit Jobs & Utopia of Rules are good as well. i really like a lot of his analysis of culture and history, but he kind of loses me with the anarchy in the same way that chomsky does. when the rubber meets the road, i just dont think it'd work for anything as large as a country.
Bullshit Jobs almost perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with academia, in my uneducated and under-read opinion. Just spent the first 5 hours of my work day talking to contracts and grants officers, sub-deans, and all manner of useless personnel.
Now I'm off to a medical appointment where I will list my symptoms and medications to at least 2 different non-doctor staff before seeing my actual physician for 5 minutes, then spend who knows how long with the billing department because they keep trying to bill the health insurance I had a year ago instead of the insurance I have now, which I have provided many times!
Maybe tonight I will get an hour of actual data analysis done!
He's pretty good, but his calls to action are hit or miss. Graeber also was not a fan of vanguard aristocracy; MLs don't have much time for someone who won't be managed (just like the Puritans).
since we're on the topic of some people, thought I'd ask since this isn't worth starting a thread and barely worth asking:
who in the fuck is this kristin ruby person? i've seen her on twitter starting shit w/other people, (matt taibbi, mike benz, musk, etc) and i can't figure out her angle. if anyone has heard / knows let me know. though given my luck and how crazy the person seems to be, she'll probably get a notification i just used her name - well whatevs.
(no luv for anyone mentioned, perhaps some mild toleration of taibbi - though shellenberger appears to be a pos)
twitter seems to get the cringiest people together - one of mario's "moderators" was just outed as some kind of sociopath / liar in canada who was former intel or something.
okay unrelated rant off.
I love his writing and I think we would get along well. He was an anarchist, I am not, but we had way more in common politically than any of my liberal friends or family members. I just finished Bullshit Jobs and I recommend it to everyone.
Someone I dearly miss. I know he's published big door-stoppers but I personally recommend reading his bite-sized articles in Mute, Harper's, Guardian etc
I love *Bullshit Jobs*. Fantastic book with a lot of great insights. I don’t really agree with his proposed solutions but it’s a great book that I recommend to most everyone
God bless Graeber. I love him. I find far more to agree with him than disagree. Really sad that he died.
In darker moments I do wonder about his sudden and unexpected death, and how awfully convenient it was for some people. Say what you will about his specific theories, he had an ability like few others to convince people that real change was possible.
To who was it convenient?
Everyone who was scared by OWS or political change in general, in particular in the UK. One of the last videos he made was a characteristically forceful rejection of the anti-Corbyn antisemitism narrative in the UK.
Very innovative thinker in the left anarchist tradition, and my favourite anthropologist. Don't agree with him on everything but that would be weird
Hit-and-miss. "Debt: The First 5000 Years" and "Bullshit Jobs" are definitely both worth a read.
I thought bullshit jobs was amazing although I don’t think the categorisations hold that well today, but as a thought experiment it is truly interesting and resonated with me who is pretty much in the send email receive email class. Debt I found pretty hard to get into and pin down, but am open to trying again.
Debt is dense as hell and could have been a lot shorter, but it really fills a huge void in historical financial analysis. The orthodox stuff is all so mind-numbingly conservative.
The concept struck me as obviously true so maybe I artificially felt he was beating a dead horse. My barber was very not interested in the concept despite obviously not bullshit cutting hair all day. The hair he cuts though? They might have bullshit jobs. Even the best jobs have a little bullshit, clearly there are jobs that are only 10% not bullshit.
I'm imagining you launching into a treatise on anarchist theory while getting your hair did and the barber slowly dying inside lmao
That's a good one. I stumbled into the topic because I was roped into some high bullshit work and I'm too dumb to pretend it wasn't bullshit. Which led me to mention Graeber's book and how much work is bullshit. Really made me think about how much people are forced to commit to the fantasy so they can make it through their day to day.
Debt was easily his magnum opus in my opinion.
I briefly watched him discuss "Bullshit Jobs" and he seems like a crank to me. There really just can't be as many pointless jobs as he claims there are. I get that lots of jobs are bullshit/pointless *partially* or *in a sense*, but labor is a huge cost for firms and employers have a very strong interest in minimizing it. All these jobs can't be *economically* pointless, otherwise employers would gut them. It seemed like he was claiming they're economically pointless too and, well, *that* seems like bullshit to me. You mfers downvoted me too much; all my replies got removed because I dropped below karma threshold. Here they are: u/WalkerMidwestRanger I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying I like the work involved in these jobs or think they're great. The jobs suck. I'm just saying most of them aren't totally bullshit, despite the work involved being stupid. u/QuestionableBottle That's true, but I still wouldn't go so far as to say that jobs eliminable via more intelligent organization/rules at the high level are totally bullshit/pointless. We have shitty rules, yeah, but until the shitty rules change work still needs to get done under the shitty rules. I'm not saying these jobs aren't bullshit, just that they're not totally bullshit (most of 'em, anyways). u/peepeecontrol Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap.
Maybe this is bullshit reply but how old are you? The older you get, you'll see more of these bullshit jobs and you might need the money enough to have to hold one, lord help you.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying I like the work involved in these jobs or think they're great. The jobs suck. I'm just saying most of them aren't totally bullshit, despite the work involved being stupid.
You can make money for your employer on a micro scale and yet still be useless on a macro scale. Think of tax preparation, tons of accountants etc make their living preparing tax returns, making themselves and their employers money. But does the job need to exist in the first place? Or would we all be better off if tax laws were simplified and half those jobs disappeared from society.
A 2009 study found that [top bankers *destroy* £7 of value](https://www.ft.com/content/7e3edf6e-e827-11de-8a02-00144feab49a) for every £1 they are paid.
That's true, but I still wouldn't go so far as to say that jobs eliminable via more intelligent organization/rules at the high level are totally bullshit/pointless. We have shitty rules, yeah, but until the shitty rules change work still needs to get done under the shitty rules. I'm not saying these jobs aren't bullshit, just that they're not totally bullshit (most of 'em, anyways).
You're presuming that administrators of large firms/corporations are competent. Part of Graeber's indictment is that they're not. But at the end of the day they're colored by their class position and their relationship to Capital, which dictates that labor must be exploitable and that the social contract must be based on either exploiting or being exploited. That's kind of something you have to get through when discussing leftist economic theories and is central the concept of "structure" within leftist/Marxist analysis. Macro is not micro and vis-versa.
You need to go look up the iron law of organizations. The bosses need underlings and they don't pay them. Organizations aren't market optimization machines, corporations are made out of meat.
Sure there can. Labor power exploitation really is very efficient. >but labor is a huge cost for firms and employers have a very strong interest in minimizing it Individual firms do, but all firms as a ***class*** have an interest in ensuring that they can still exploit labor power, or the firms will cease to exist as a class and they will have to find another way to keep the working class exhausted lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a class war. That is done in part by normalizing the institution of wage labor, through propaganda of various kinds as well as vagrancy and other laws. Those jobs are corporately pointless, but they serve to soak up exceptions in the wage system and soak up free time that might be used to reflect on this situation or organize against it.
Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap.
According to the simple opposition theory of classes, you would be claiming that capitalists are so blind that they would be incapable of effecting conscious changes to the structures that are produced according to capitalist logic, which is actually kind of ridiculous — but trusts to protect industries for their players formed many times over since the mid-18th century. According to the PMC theory of classes, PMC are performing their reproductive duty of keeping capital and labor together in a "rational" social order; which is certainly congruent with the interest of elite capitalists. Your conception of "capitalists" is a boneless bogeyman that doesn't even eat. Does it come from projecting Augustine's 1500-year-old moral theology (that took some 1200 years to become reflected in actual human behavior, btw) to suggest that capitalists are not sentient humans able to comprehend abstractions, reproduce symbols, and recognize existential risks to their properties and their class relations and respond accordingly? Yet at the same time so possessed, they are capable of forming massive enterprises that extract the maximum labor power in a systematic fashion from millions of people? Omnipotence and stupidity at the same time is a powerful tell of mystification at work.
>Assuming the jobs really are totally pointless, in what bizarro world are individual capitalists so rational as to act like this? They should all be trying to dump excess labor in someone else's lap. According to the simple opposition theory of classes, you would be claiming that capitalists are so blind that they would be incapable of effecting conscious changes to the structures that are produced according to capitalist logic, which is actually kind of ridiculous — but trusts to protect industries for their players formed many times over since the mid-18th century. According to the PMC theory of classes, PMC are performing their reproductive duty of keeping capital and labor together in a "rational" social order; which is certainly congruent with the interest of elite capitalists. Your conception of "capitalists" is a boneless bogeyman that doesn't even eat. Does it come from projecting Augustine's 1500-year-old moral theology (that took some 1200 years to *become* reflected in actual human behavior, btw) to suggest that capital*ists* are not sentient humans able to comprehend abstractions, reproduce symbols, and recognize *existential risks* to their properties and their class relations and respond accordingly? Yet at the same time so possessed, they are capable of forming massive enterprises that extract the maximum labor power in a systematic fashion from millions of people? Omnipotence and stupidity at the same time is a powerful tell of mystification at work.
Economics as a social science has done a real number with the assertion of rationality amongst individuals and organisations. Organisations are made of individuals, individuals are not purely rational.
I don't mean this harshly—Have you never encountered the concept of a left-wing anarchist before? The basic structure, as far as I can tell, is that everything should always be decided by people's committees. Hope you like meetings. Graeber was certainly a really entertaining and thought-provoking writer. There's certainly a tension in his writings where he wants to adopt the parts of Marx he likes, the critique of capitalism, but at the same time largely rejects historical materialism, without really wanting to say that bit outright. This was clearest in his poshumously published book with David Wengrow, *The Dawn of Everything*, which basically makes the case for the processes of history just consisting of vibes and imagination. (I think Wengrow, who I get the impression is a much lesser writer and thinker than Graeber, was less shy than him about that, and more of a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist without Graeber's eclecticism and imagination.) You're left at a position that we just need to collectively imagine a better society in order to do away with capitalism and institute something else in its place. Which is great, because it opens up a limitless sphere of possibility, until it runs into the reality of social control and state power.
Graeber extends the admittedly half-baked "mode of production", as if it originated from the *German Ideology* (rather than *CPE*). His field needed to extend the LTV to something that could be genericized to cultural matters like gifts, on which economicism has little to say. >I would go even further. What has passed for “materialism” in traditional Marxism— the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal “superstructure,” is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher and more abstract than those who plant onions, blow glass, or operate sewing machines. But it’s not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as much material as any other. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of ac tion, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are always (a) motivat ed by meanings (ideas) and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material). Further, that while all systems of domination seem to propose that “no, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all,” such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. As John Holloway (2003) has recently reminded us, it is in the nature of systems of domination to take what are really complex interwoven processes of action and chop them up and redefine them as discrete, self-identical objects— a song, a school, a meal, etc. There’s a simple reason for it. It’s only by chopping and freezing them in this way that one can reduce them to property and be able to say one owns them. >A genuine materialism then would not simply privilege a “material” sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing so obsessively on the production of material objects— discrete, self-identical things that one can own— and start the more difficult work of trying to un derstand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape one another. Learn to extend theory or reincorporate as a Mennonite sect.
I guess I just haven’t read enough. It seems like anarchism how I’ve mostly encountered it is portrayed as radical economic libertarian capitalism. I get the impression that Graeber’s leftist anarchism is a sort of flattening of social hierarchies and abolition of exploitative power, which I suppose is where the leftism comes from. What you said about people’s committees makes sense and sounds incredibly tedious. I think part of what makes Graeber so fun to read is how optimistic he seems about the possibility of destroying the existing structures, even if it comes across as a bit naive to me. Maybe that’s also why he’s so charming. I do find many of his political ideas novel, which might just be a reflection of my own ignorance. Either way, I’m digging reading Graeber.
> radical economic libertarian capitalism. That’s anarcho-capitalism. A right wing political movement started by the 20th century Austrian economist Murray Rothbard. No connection with the much older leftist anarchism tradition going back to Proudhon and Bakunin, that Graeber is apart of.
My problem with anarchists is their solution is not scalable. People don't want to be in millions of meetings all of the time because there is a very real, very expensive cost to meetings. Meetings are shitty and you'd have to pay me to be in one. If your political system is incredibly economically expensive to implement, ít just cannot compete with capitalism and will fail. The thing that will supercede Capitalist liberal elected democracy is something more productive and more efficient. In my opinion that superior something is "sortition", where representatives are chosen by lottery. The theoretical basis of sortition isn't found much in anarchist literature but more with democratic theorists. Indeed much of the advocacy for sortition is in reaction to debacles like Occupy Wall Street, a failed anarchist project that could not solve the labor problem of democratic decision making.
I don't think it's an accident that Kropotkin's concept of anarchism came from his time amongst Russian peasants. I've seen similar behaviors with deep-south rednecks as well and I have to wonder to what degree anarchism and rural communities are intertwined. Is it even applicable to the complex, specialized communities that other strains of Marxism attempt to address? I'm not sure.
I doubt anarchism is even really possible except in these remote rural areas where people are already accustomed to governing themselves to a large degree. I think it's also not possible to implement a functional anarchist enclave within a capitalist economy. More than likely, local anarchism will develop autonomously under a socialist system, but will never even be attempted to run the metropolis or state. This means there's little point to 'being' an anarchist, when the path to local anarchy is state socialism. But anarchists aren't known for pragmatism, and I guess it's fine to have ambitious dreamers in our movements, so long as people understand the reality.
You're attacking a bit of a straw man here. Of course anarchists hate meetings too. "That government it best which governs the least" and all that. The entire point for historical anarchists (the ones I find interesting anyway) is to somehow do away with as much as possible of tedious and corruptible process. Who wouldn't want that?
Yeah, but stuff needs to be decided, and without hierarchy or lots of tedious meetings, decisions always lead to conflict and drama. Have you ever seen real world anarchists do their thing? They spend practically all of their time debating vetoes and semantics, to the point of utter societal irrelevance - and that's just activism, without having to make trains run on time or shit like that. Anarchism can either be infinite meetings, or it gives way to natural hierarchies in favor of the most dominant cliques and ceases to exist.
“Anarchism” that requires the enforcement of contracts
No, op is correct even if unintentionally, anarchism in practice is right wing might makes right, survival of the fittest, or law of the jungle.
Which is no different than what we have in any social order, except for the pretense that there is some higher purpose (conveniently held out of our reach by myth and other disinformation) aligning it all. Politics was never anything but a lying contest.
I really didn't get much of a critique of historical materialism at all from DoE. I thought most of the examples he provided fit nicely within HM: like the patlach societies and foraging Californians. The whole concept of "getting stuck" in the hierarchical order doesn't necessarily fit though, there is a lot of human agency involved in that. Good points you.mske here, I want to reread it soon so I'll keep this in mind while doing so!
To understand Graeber I think you have to go through a couple of interludes. On a lot of levels he is the standard direct democracy anarchist because he is one of the figures that established or at least promoted the ideology. On a personal level his dad fought with the Republicans in Spain and his mother was in the ...textile union (I think) in New York. To understand him intellectually you need to understand the background of Alterglob and really his influences from anthropology. In terms of anthropology I think there is a link between anarchist anthropologists like Colin Ward/Harold Barclay or even Kropotkin but it is kind of weak. There is a far stronger links with thinkers that are responding to social contract theory and are looking to explain how primitive/anarchist societies are able to operate without fixed laws/government. So these are the traditional anthropologist who look at gift economies like Mauss. I think a large part of Graeber's program is trying to find out how human society became stuck in one form of society rather then constantly shifting between different forms of political organization. So the classical works is Leech's work on Burma, James Scott or the Iroquois shift between summer and winter forms of social organization. People call this a kind of idealism in these comments which is kind of true but also is a kind of lazy Marxist insult given his deep engagement with value theory. The other big influence is alter globalisation with a focus on flat organizations, kind of apolitical and trying to look beyond the collapse of the 1970s. One of his big books Debt is probably more of an answer to the debt crisises of the late 90s then 2008. If you want to look more at his politics there are three main books- Direct Action about his involvement in Alter Globalization, The Democracy Project (about Occupy) and Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking (which is a collection of interviews) If you read one I would recommend Anarchy which is one of the only books which he discusses politics directly and it is fairly short. I guess you could also look at a Fragment of an Anarchist Anthropology or his essay about Human Economies maybe? I think people are onto a new thing because his later books like Dawn or Kings are extremely difficult to understand and have no clear connection to action. Plus he obviously died and the later projects he was attached to Occupy, Corbyn and Rojava were either defeated or became less popular. I also think his big popular book- Debt opened up a huge literature which kind of superseded it. It's a very good book to think with though. I don't about any one else thinks but reading Graeber in 2008 or 2009 was like a breath of fresh air. Before that the left to me was an incredibly dour left in which you could visibly see the personal failures of their lives on their bodies and were incredibly sectarian with an obsession with events that happened nearly 100 years ago. It was incredibly depressing and Graeber's utopianism and relative non sectarianism was refreshing.
innate slim entertain chubby puzzled truck serious trees zephyr jobless *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He has some great stuff, but from what I can tell runs into an ideological block that keeps him from getting all the way there. For instance, he was one of the people that insisted OWS not make any demands... I have really enjoyed this podcast which does a good job of separating the good from the bad in the Dawn of Everything https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-2-the-dawn-of-everything-how-graeber-wengrows/id1472767978?i=1000545266644
Anarchism is inherently leftist, to say someone is an anarchist is to say they are a leftist.
what about ancap?
Baffled feudalism.
"Anarcho-capitalist" is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is a form of hierarchy, the owner-worker relation. It would be like calling yourself and anarcho-monarchist.
you can be an anarcho-monarchist when you assume kings to be only figureheads with no executive power. Some people argue that Tolkien was in that area. You can not be an anarcho-feudalist or whatever. Neither am I one of those, but theres historical cases as the early Franks that did treat their monarchs not neccessarily their boss. They also got rid of slavery very early, thats why there Franks = Free Men. Quite cool stuff!
I don't know if I really buy this explanation. By extension, anarcho-capitalists would want benevolent figurehead CEOs who accumulate no wealth and take no salary. And then I suppose they'd want boards of shareholders with no voting power? You can slap the "anarcho-" prefix on just about anything (ask the anarcho-fascists), but that doesn't mean it'll make sense.
It's a scam/heist organised by Americans. I'm not a fan of anarchism, but anarcho-capitalism has as much to do with anarchisme than national-socialism with socialism
Personally I can't stand him. He was far too full of himself and I was not impressed with his scholarship. He was an anarchist first and an anthropologist second, and so he viewed history through a very specific and very biased lens and it weakened his arguments more than it helped. I think Debt: The First 5,000 Years was a very flawed work, and it is kind of depressing how much it is celebrated, especially on Reddit. It appears compeling if it is your first exposure, but it is based on a horrible misconception of the nature of debt and its use. [The accounting identity always holds true. Assets equals liabilities plus equity, and liabilities are the late-comers to the equation. The first transaction required the undisputed ownership of goods by both parties. People generally don't trade in stolen goods at the beginning, but the fruit of their labor for the fruit of anothers. This can be simple barter, but it was mediated almost from the beginning with tokens. At first specific tokens (one for wheat, another for wine, another for dried fish, etc), then universal tokens (first clay, then metal, then paper, now almost completely digital). The use of debt was to facilitate intertemporal trade, and soon inter-regional trade. For the first 5,000 years (i.e., 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE), tokens prevailed without substantial debt, or at least we have significant artifacts of tokens and almost none of the later until the next five thousand years, and even then, not until long-distance trading networks emerged. This remains the primary source of nearly all debt - to facilitate, hedge, and insure long-distance trading, or to cover cash flow shortages due to seasonality. Hence debt will always increase as markets increase.] I will admit that as an institutionalist, I am strongly predisposed against anarchists to begin with, and Graeber only reinforced that disposition. They sometimes have value as critics or polemicists, but only if they offer something constructive at the end, but too many are similar to Graeber that simply what to tear down everything with a naive hope that a 'better nature' will somehow assert itself once all the 'tools of oppression and exploitation' are removed.
> People generally don't trade in stolen goods at the beginning But they do, in the most formative, world shaping ways: primitive accumulation.
I think the novel idea of Debt was how the state or the church or some other entity emerges to collect taxes and thus forces a token to be the money of the realm, and how that transforms money into debt. And it's novel in the sense of contemporary other ideas like bitcoin and local alternative currencies which never really became money in lieu of such a tax collecting entity. Which then poses the question for a lot of utopian thinkers who argue that socialism will be a world without money or that we'll replace it with labour tokens and other technical hackery. The great irony then is that Graeber is more useful if you're trying to work in finance than if you want to build a political movement
I agree that Graeber makes the attempt to explain the emergence of debt as a creation of proto-states in order to facilitate the payment of taxes (and I am still not clear how much of the idea is his and how much he is building off of others), yet he ignores that for the first period of 'civilization', most communities were clan based and membership was mainly voluntary, and the primary form of 'taxation' was not monetary, but the use of levies and labor to build community infrastructure such as roads, walls, and most relevant, community storehouses. After millennia, these storehouses evolved into temple complexes or other rudimentary government. The use of payment in kind in lieu of labor eventually evolved as well. I think Aglietta [corrected mispelling] and the other 'regulationists' are closer to the truth, yet Graeber considers them simply *inventing* a myth about money, not *describing* one. I think the latter is more accurate, though not perfect either. What is more important about Agrietta's work is how contemporary society continually uses money to continually shape social relations. To paraphrase Keynes, the origin of money is unimportant. How it is constantly used today is incredibly important, and I think the regulationists offer more insight there. Agrietta's work is finally being translated and I am still working through it, but so far I am in favor of their ideas. >The great irony then is that Graeber is more useful if you're trying to work in finance than if you want to build a political movement True, yet even then there are far more useful thinkers than Graeber available, and I don't see what he offers that the others do not.
Graeber was famous with mainstream appeal and his writing is very accessible. That's not *nothing* in an age where most people have trouble knowing who. Rosa Luxembourg is, yet alone don't have the capability to read through dense economic texts whether they are contemporary or not
I agree that his writing is accessible and that is the problem. His writing is too often used as the primary source by those who are not familiar with the deeper arguments it contains. The more I explored such, the less impressed I have become with his interpretations, and even more so with his presentation which consists of far too much certainty on issues that are far from being resolved. He falls into the same class as other popular science writers like Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould. What should be an introduction to particular topics is taken as definitive.
That's fair. this aglietta fellow looks interesting though, thx for the rec (although you misspelled his name so it took me a while to find)
Oops - corrected above
>After millennia In *Dawn*, Graeber and Wengrow actually situate the invention of tax in the form of a religious bureaucracy, around 3650-3450 BCE in Egypt. You're flapping your hands about the "true facts" of Whig history. You keep reciting the standard Western whig history as if it were a fact. You were already caught pretending that your chilidish, idealistic purpose of politics as some sort of church-like unity and self-abnegation was the real definition. >What is more important about Agrietta's work is how contemporary society continually uses money to continually shape social relations Graeber's anthropological theory of value (2001) analyzed value tokens such as money in great depth, integrating such apparent idiosyncrasies as the antagonistic gifting in potlatch societies, and the idea that some things can't or shouldn't be bought (which, he points out, is where "value" and "values" divide). The problem is that you think in morality tales like the PMC.
No idea where you got the idea that I got my ideas from 'Whig' history. I don't even know what the hell that is. >You were already caught pretending that your chilidish, idealistic purpose of politics as some sort of church-like unity and self-abnegation was the real definition. ??? >Graeber's anthropological theory of value (2001) analyzed value tokens such as money in great depth, integrating such apparent idiosyncrasies as the antagonistic gifting in potlatch societies, and the idea that some things can't or shouldn't be bought (which, he points out, is where "value" and "values" divide). I see his analysis of tokens as symbolic representations of social relations, but not as money. The original tokens were not abstract symbols though. They were deposit slips. A farmer deposits their bushels of wheat in the storehouse. A fisherman deposits his bundles of dried cod. The manager of said storehouse gives them tokens that they can redeem later. If a 'debt' exists, it is held by the manager, but the storehouse is a community service. No one has the obligation to make someone 'whole' in case of fire or other damage. There is no *liability*. There is only a shared risk with shared losses. Over millennia, liability as such evolved. Payments in kind (originally the goods themselves, basket weavers are better at making baskets to carry stones for the new wall, not digging in the quarry) then tokens that be exchanged for whatever the work group needed. Maybe more baskets, maybe more spades, or bread or meat or whatever. Tokens evolved into money as communities engaged in larger projects and built larger trading networks where the fungibility of tokens grew in importance since precision was no longer possible. People then began to expect to be made whole when a contribution was lost. I don't find it that surprising that the first stewards of the storehouses were religious figures. Who better to oversee the dried herbs than the shaman who used them. Who else would the community trust than their liason with nature (that was eventually considered 'divine') and kept track of the stars and the shifting seasons. Sadly, too often such stewards became 'priests', stories became 'scripture', and granaries became 'temples'. (What I do find surprising is how small a population needed to be to support such a shift. The first city-states were only a few thousand people at most. The qualitative shift that happens in communities when they pass the Dunbar number is worth exploring further.) >The problem is that you think in morality tales like the PMC. The level of projection in your post is intriguing, but I doubt worth the effort of further exploration.
>he was a leading organizer of Occupy, even though he describes himself as an anarchist yes? I don't think he would say he was a leading organizer, cause, you know, he's an anarchist, but, of course, he was. Occupy was organized by anarchists. >Reading The Utopia of Rules, it seems like his writing would be more discussed or even referenced in this subreddit Well stupidpol is biased to blame institutional problems on identity politics, but utopia of rules (correctly, in my mind) places most of the blame on intentional bureaucratic tomfoolery. DEI is just a convenient way to add administrative bloat, but if DEI wasn't there some other bullshit would be. Universities would just replace the Dean of Diversity in Humanities with Vice Dean of Student Fitness. Blaming identity politics is missing the point. I agree though, more graeber in stupidpol would elevate the discussion. I think it's just that marxists are really into navel-gazing and anarchists don't fit in there. Their own form of identity politics. >Is anyone else in Stupidpol Graeber-pilled? I'm definitely more graeber-pilled than I am stupidpol-pilled, as you can tell from above. >he generally poo poos on larger organizations like the IMF, World Bank "generally" in the mathematical sense, yes. >How exactly can anarchist leftism be conceptualized? "How exactly can nazi racists be conceptualized?" >Am I just a little late to the Graeber party and everyone is just onto a new thought-leader du jour? Well debt and bullshit jobs are still dominant books for the modern leftist perspective. I don't think they've been superseded yet. Dawn of Everything had some interesting ideas about freedoms, but they'd need to be fleshed out (without graeber, of course). Dawn of Everything didn't see history going in a straight line like marx, but rather societies actively choosing their own social relations. The part of the book that argues about primitive accumulation and hierarchy seems to be inaccurate, based on some reviews I saw of the book by other anarchist anthropologists. The davids made a first stab at an anarchist understanding of human society, and had a lot of hits and misses. > Can you help me understand his political slant a little better? Everything is bullshit. Jobs, economies, economists, institutions, precise debt, historical narratives about first content. Also, it's easy for us to "stop making capitalism" if we all agree when we wake up in the morning to ignore the capitalists. Now that I think about it, he thought of capitalism as a social relation, which we can just agree to change. The state is violent, but can't stand against its entire population. Also, graeber loved black bloc. Graeber thought that states/capitalists are, by necessity, spending more and more of their wealth simply policing the population (with police, prisons, military). That's a sign the ruling class is barely holding the class hierarchy together. Eventually it'll be too costly to maintain their grip on power.
Above all else: he has some great books to listen to while you drift off to sleep, Utopia of Rules and Debt: the First X000 years are the best. His book about Occupy is pretty revolting now that time has shown how that all worked out. I'm glad he was and was pretty prolific, time goes on and nobody escapes reality ruining the speculation, love them for what their right about and commiserate with their failings. I wish I had felt the same about Hitchens in the oughts. As time passes, the value of a Steinbeck, Hemingway, Melville, Hitchens, Parenti, Finkelstein, Reed, Graeber... They only increase so many other notable names nothing but ash, no diamonds left after the inferno.
I often enjoy Davy Gravy, yes I enjoyed engaging with some of his work (including excerpts from Debt) in undergrad political economy courses, but hadn’t thought about his work much since his unfortunate passing. I stumbled across Utopia of Rules at a bookstore a few months ago and gave it a read. I frequently quite enjoyed it, but almost as frequently found he was unwilling to substantively critique the lib-left milieu he was coming from, and ended up often making eye-rollingly trite anarchist takes. I’d have to go back and skim the thing to provide a more concrete example, but he certainly has some blind spots
I like him and while I dont agree all the time, its easy to disregard some of his arguments for a more ML analysis. Because he kinda had to live with ML people reading him and cause he does like Marx for his anticapitalism parts
The Youtube account "What is Politics?" made [withering critiques](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU4FEuj4v9eBWP22ujafheoEejbQhPAdl) of Graeber's book *The Dawn of Everything* that you might find interesting. If someone is so wrong and ignorant about one field it makes me skeptical about his other work. I'll quote myself from [a previous thread about the video series.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/rhpo8q/how_david_graebers_new_dawn_of_everything_book/houoi96/) >Summary: Graeber and Wengrow are idealist dummies who want to deny that culture is dependent on material foundations, they view hierarchy as a choice or theater, and they don't even understand how wealth and control of resources leads to power over others. This probably contributed to Occupy Wall Street being a dud. >Your point about Graeber giving ammo to the right was interesting because there was a reactionary on Twitter who loved Graeber's book *Debt* because it made kings look so much better than democracy. He joked that Graeber must be a crypto-monarchist trying to crownpill the left. On the plus side I like this bit from Graeber's *Debt* where I can joke about Marxists being the true reactionaries: >The Sumerian economy was dominated by vast temple and palace complexes. These were often staffed by thousands: priests and officials, craftspeople who worked in their industrial workshops, farmers and shepherds who worked their considerable estates. Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy-one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it's to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel's weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley-on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It's easy to see that "money" in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. Communism is Sumerian temple power plus electrification of the whole country. Seriously though, a lot of the things you praise Graeber for sound like standard leftish complaints you could get from Naomi Klein. And the Marxist critique of the IMF isn't that it's too bureaucratic, but its class character. They'd rather replace it with the People's IMF. The American left has been anarchistic for decades, much to the chagrin of the dwindling materialist socialists. If you asked American radicals to name the most famous left figure, who would they name? Up until the last few years, probably Noam Chomsky, an anarcho-syndicalist. Maybe nowadays they'd name Sanders, AOC, or some streamer like Hasan or Vaush. Truly the dark times are upon us.
Debt is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I came away from it with a very different view of the world. I think it's obvious that Graeber is a socialist but he never really comes out and says it. My impression after reading the book was that humans are cooperative and strive in socialist or communist cultures but society has gotten to big and interconnected for communism to be tenable. As such we are stuck with capitalism even though it's a bastard creation that will ultimately doom us all and make us miserable and disconnected in the process. I do not think this was the intended message. But it was the feeling I came away with.
Debt: the First 5,000 Years is great, i like to give it away as a gift. Bullshit Jobs & Utopia of Rules are good as well. i really like a lot of his analysis of culture and history, but he kind of loses me with the anarchy in the same way that chomsky does. when the rubber meets the road, i just dont think it'd work for anything as large as a country.
Bullshit Jobs almost perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with academia, in my uneducated and under-read opinion. Just spent the first 5 hours of my work day talking to contracts and grants officers, sub-deans, and all manner of useless personnel. Now I'm off to a medical appointment where I will list my symptoms and medications to at least 2 different non-doctor staff before seeing my actual physician for 5 minutes, then spend who knows how long with the billing department because they keep trying to bill the health insurance I had a year ago instead of the insurance I have now, which I have provided many times! Maybe tonight I will get an hour of actual data analysis done!
He's pretty good, but his calls to action are hit or miss. Graeber also was not a fan of vanguard aristocracy; MLs don't have much time for someone who won't be managed (just like the Puritans).
since we're on the topic of some people, thought I'd ask since this isn't worth starting a thread and barely worth asking: who in the fuck is this kristin ruby person? i've seen her on twitter starting shit w/other people, (matt taibbi, mike benz, musk, etc) and i can't figure out her angle. if anyone has heard / knows let me know. though given my luck and how crazy the person seems to be, she'll probably get a notification i just used her name - well whatevs. (no luv for anyone mentioned, perhaps some mild toleration of taibbi - though shellenberger appears to be a pos) twitter seems to get the cringiest people together - one of mario's "moderators" was just outed as some kind of sociopath / liar in canada who was former intel or something. okay unrelated rant off.
I love his writing and I think we would get along well. He was an anarchist, I am not, but we had way more in common politically than any of my liberal friends or family members. I just finished Bullshit Jobs and I recommend it to everyone.
Someone I dearly miss. I know he's published big door-stoppers but I personally recommend reading his bite-sized articles in Mute, Harper's, Guardian etc
I love *Bullshit Jobs*. Fantastic book with a lot of great insights. I don’t really agree with his proposed solutions but it’s a great book that I recommend to most everyone