I’m perplexed by this article’s argument, which seems to be that Graeber is somehow betraying “anarchism” by theorizing the state as ill-defined or non-monolithic, or questioning the concept of “inequality”. All of these arguments seem totally compatible with anarchism, especially the type of modernism-questioning anarchism that would stem from anthropology. To me it feels like the author is coming from an overly rigid or subcultural definition of the term that takes any straying outside its bounds as indication of closet liberal behavior or a radical shift in thought. While it’s possible that his late works were cryptically hinting at a new angle, the inconsistencies in his writing and behavior are also adequately explained by Graeber being merely human and not the ideal paragon of anarchist ideology.
I agree, and I’m also struggling to understand the strong need for labeling. For how I know Graeber, the fact that he definitely changed his views over time is nothing but a positive. If someone in Academia isn’t willing to challenge their views from 10 years prior that’s a pretty bad sign about that person’s thinking and intellectual work.
This reeks a bit of that. It feels like this author values the frameworks more than the concepts.
Dogmatism and sectarianism are rife in political theory and in my view help explain why there hasn't been a successful way to challenge the excessive accumulation of wealth and political power that seems to insist on prevailing over any power structure designed to moderate it.
> All of these arguments seem totally compatible with anarchism, especially the type of modernism-questioning anarchism that would stem from anthropology.
Given that virtually all political theories stem from the structuralist assumptions being questioned, I'm not sure where that leaves us with respect to political labels.
Personally I read Graeber because he's persuasive and argues well. He represents his own political views far more genuinely and forthrightly than the vast majority of people who put a lot of weight in labeling per se.
Moreover, the fact that his later stances seem to ridicule “himself and the Occupy movement” doesn’t make them incompatible with anarchism. It means he reconsidered his earlier beliefs.
"Debt", for me, was one of those life-changing books that completely revised how I think of money and macroeconomics. But I found "On Kings" to be unreadable, deeply mired in esoteric academic theory debates. "The Beginning of Everything" was somewhere in the middle -- it successfully challenged the conventional "Noble Savage" and Lockean views of the emergence of the state. But it was filled with a TON of conjecture, and ultimately made the unsatisfying point that things were very different at different places and times.
I found the conjecture in “The Beginning of Everything” to be so obviously lacking in evidence - like the ideas he was critiquing - that I couldn’t help but think it was intentionally ironic. Much of what Graeber criticized others for, extrapolating physical evidence based on their worldview, is exactly what he did using his own (not as mainstream) worldview.
Graeber’s own conjecture further illuminated the breadth of possible interpretations of the evidence, making his own arguments weaker but also, IMO, reducing the believability of competing perspectives as well.
I wonder if recognition of this is why Graeber was taking a more stereotypical liberal perspective later in his life. It is unfortunate that he is not around to share more about how his perspective evolved.
I feel that Graeber had made a conscious choice to create a new fable, in a sense. That is, to the extent that most people think about the beginnings of civilization at all, they repeat just-so stories invented during the Enlightenment. Those stories wove themselves into our collective subconscious, and guide our collective decisions today. They help provide limits on what we think it is possible for government to be -- or not to be.
Graeber, I think, wanted to change our perceived limits by challenging the old stories and weaving a new one.
This is my excuse when others critique the book as well. I don’t know if it is true, but I like it. The contrast of a new story is needed to understand the limitations of the existing one.
Precisely my view. Just showing people that the default story taught in schools and echoed in documentaries and popular non fiction is arbitrary and full of holes is very useful. A lot of political manipulation found in the wild rests on using these archaic narratives. Even the idea that "civilization started in Mesopotamia" seems to be a gross oversimplification that needs to be revised.
Too much of Western world politics rests on obsolete Enlightenment narratives and questioning them seems to elicit strong reactions.
I have proactively searched for factual critiques of Debt. I've only found quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. If you can show me a more substantive critique, I'd love to read it.
The majority of complaints I’ve seen have been of the sort “he says X is true and doesn’t even bother to consider that Y!”
… but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint.
I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.
More than ten years later this was one of the organiser’s reflection.
> think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims.
I suspect you actually found good factual critiques, but decided to label them "quibbles".
The Fed issues the modern world's most important debt instrument, and has a structure and purpose that Graeber gets fundamentally wrong. The reason critics focus on this is that, if he's lazy and wrong about the modern world's most important debt instrument... in a book about "debt"... it's probably a good sign you can't trust the rest of the book.
I don't agree that Graeber's interpretation was incorrect.
However, regardless of implementation details and nuances, there is one critique which is irrefutable about reserve banking; it is far too complicated to be understood by the majority who rely on it. This complexity obscures the functioning of the most important force in economics and society. It is unacceptable on that basis alone.
People should not be coerced to participate in a system which they cannot understand on the basis of trust alone. Especially when it involves trusting people they've never met and who may have conflicting interests.
People have to rely on complex chemistry and physics they don’t understand too.
Given a choice between a simplistic economic system with worse outcomes and complex system with better outcomes, I’m choosing the better outcomes every time.
that's probably a false dichotomy, though. a lot of us think that the complex system also delivers the worse outcomes. the great depression didn't happen until after the fed existed, after all.
Don't get me wrong, the Great Depression was 100% made worse by the economic thinkers (including the Fed) of the time, but the creation of a central bank was driven by prior problems.
> that's probably a false dichotomy, though. a lot of us think that the complex system also delivers the worse outcomes. the great depression didn't happen until after the fed existed, after all.
I pointed out that a bunch of financial crises happened before the Fed existed. I took your point to be that the Fed made things worse.
> so our next question should be, have the business cycles been cured? no, they certainly haven't.
I'm not sure how that could happen at all, without incredible amounts of totalitarianism. Is that what you expect a central bank to do?
All of life is built on dependencies on systems people don’t understand.
This is a ridiculous position to hold.
Also it’s not complicated. The fed issue money and people buy it. The trust it because it’s backed by the largest military and economy in the world and that combines into an ideology most economies want to support and be a part of.
A dollar is a debt investment in the America ideal. The day we aren’t strong enough or liked enough the system will collapse.
That's true but there are a lot of people who, for example, like to avoid products which contain certain substances which they don't understand or don't want. Many people want to see the ingredients lists.
Everyone shouldn't be forced to depend on things that they don't understand just because the majority are OK with that. When you trust something that you don't understand, you're taking a risk.
Society shouldn't be coerced into taking risks which it (as a whole) doesn't understand. Especially when it comes to something as important as money.
Most people have a completely wrong mental model about money. They think the money supply is limited, that governments only spend the money they receive as taxes, that nobody gets rich from government money and that bank loans come entirely from other people's bank deposits (hence why they receive interest on their deposits). This is all wrong. Most of society is operating on severely flawed assumptions.
I don't see how it can be morally justified that complexity is not a problem when most of the population is being deceived by the complexity.
Not only that, but there is no escape hatch. Even if you're intelligent and you take the time to learn about how the system works, there's no way for you to take advantage of it unless you have significant capital to invest... Meaning, you're already a beneficiary of the system (in which case you probably don't need an escape hatch anyway).
I don't see any moral justification for it. It only benefits insiders who control the system. Insider trading in all but name.
What would be an acceptable “escape hatch” that would primarily benefit the more vulnerable and less well off people in society that does not also benefit those with lots of capital?
Like how would this alternative system be more moral than fractional reserve banking and fiat currency?
For any American there is an obvious escape hatch. You probably just don’t like it and actually like the systems benefits you are criticizing.
You can take a minimal amount of US savings and move to the third or developing world and be totally fine for long periods of time. This escape hatch comes with consequences. You lose the safety and public service benefits the “bullshit economy” gives you.
You also learn it’s not so bullshit.
“Money is something we made up so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat.”
Coercion is such a meaningless term now that libertarians have got ahold of it.
Coercion, in this case, is when a system exists that you don't understand yet you have to follow it's rules.
Which is why mom is clearly being coerced into using the internet.
Don't get me started on how my dad get coerced by logistic networks when he gets a package delivered?
Abstraction and interfaces into complicated systems are the best part of the modern economy yet somehow you found the opposite conclusion.
A good one is the very beginning of the book, where he lambasts the economists use of the coinidence of wants as a just-so story that self-justifies the economists profession.
I chuckled, because his anthropological story of the evolution of money is also a just-so story that self-justifies anthropology though I'm inclined to believe it more.
Furthermore, throwing out the coincidence of wants model as a phenomenology is also probably misguided. I think it's hard to argue that there isn't social efficiency lost in the informal debt and repayment system, which graeber seems to have an overly high respect for, on top of which, that the social and power dynamics of social debt systems seem, in my mind, to be likely to incipiate more corruption and MORE wealth inequality, than the numismatic debt system.
Anyways it's still an incredible (in the good sense) book and everyone should read it for another perspective besides ths neoclassical.
Does this read snarky? I don't mean it that way; AskEconomics just doesn't seem to be a fan of Graeber, so if you're looking for critiques, that's a quick way to find some.
It would be helpful to link to a specific thread or an FAQ page for the subreddit instead of vaguely suggesting to search its archive or create a new thread.
Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.
Graeber pretends that all of economics rests on the Myth of Barter. He ascribes moral positions to Smith that are invented whole cloth, smears all economics with his own fabrications and builds up his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments,that somehow doesn't find any references in Graeber's screed.
Then there's the bizzare Iraq war conspiracy theory, the fundamental mischaracterisation of the safest securities on the planet and a culture essentialist caricature of China.
And for less politicised stuff, there's bizarre descriptions like "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages…". (Graeber blamed his copyeditor, insisted it was an isolated mistake and then got angry at people for listing his other mistakes.)
I actually think the theory of money as debt is broadly correct (and whilst it's not original to Graeber, his treatment is longer and more interesting than others), but it's just very, very sloppy on details. And yeah, you'd prefer a book on debt to not argue that money and bond markets were characterised by people paying tribute...
He also ignores many situations were Barter does happen. He ignores that in economic history economists and others had already studied and written on things like gifts and credit. He ignores much of the moral philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment in general.
Frankly, he simply hates economics and economists. While it is absolutely clear that he has never actually read in economics or economic history. I think he actually literally believes that reading economics will 'taint' him.
Let look at an example. When people pointed to Menger work on some of the things that he praises anthropologists for. He responded with 'all Menger did was some math' or something along those lines. This is pretty baflfing, because anybody with even the most basic knowlage of economic history, knows that this is not true. So where did Graeber get this ridiculous idea?
Turns out, after being informed of these things, he likely just googled the name and found Karl Menger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menger) who turns out is a mathematician. But he is the son of the economist 'Carl Menger'.
And why this is particularly bad, is because Carl Menger is one of the most famous economists, being part of the 'marginal revolution' in economics. And further, he is well known to have written on the exact topics discuss in Graeber book. Basically he would be on of the top 3 people you would start to read if you are interest in the subject of money, money formation, various forms exchange and so on.
All Graeber seems to actually know is a small part of Adam Smith, and even then he is doing his own interpretation. He ignores all other works of Smith and literally all other works by economist.
And even ignoring all those discussion, the conclusion Graeber ends up drawing from this whole debate doesn't actually support by the evidence. So the whole discussion is kind of pointless.
Graeber suggests that Iraq was invaded soon after it started selling oil for euros instead of dollars.
In reality, the switch happened in late 2000 but Iraq wasn't invaded till March 2003. And it happened under the UN's Food for Oil-for-Food program and was authorised by the Security Council: https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html
>The US could have simply vetoed the resolution if it was considered a threat.
I'm not advocating the theory, but W. Bush wasn't inaugurated until early 2001, so if it was a difference between admins it couldn't have been vetoed in time.
It isn't difficult to find critiques of the book from different economists. The problems they find in the book are much more substantial than quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. For example:
> Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact.
> A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”
> Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man.
> A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”?
Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis.
They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.
> And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.
These are good criticisms, but mainstream archaeology has similar issues, their theories just get the benefit of the doubt because they used to have the bulk of evidence on their side. It doesn't mean that David Graeber's contention of how civilization emerged isn't correct. I think it's increasingly clear that ancient forager societies were far more socially advanced than we're willing to give them credit for, with many features of what we'd call a complex "civilization" including urban-like ceremonial and monumental centers and clear evidence of long-distance trade. AIUI, Graham Hancock endorses very similar ideas.
The fact that so much of Çatalhöyük remains unexcavated is one of the reasons I am skeptical of so much speculation on its social structure. A palace could be under the vast majority that has yet to experience a trowel or brush. It, and sites like it, are so early that it is helpful - though extremely difficult - to forget the 9,000 years of future you know will happen to be able judge it on its own terms.
This is a serious study of actual "raw data" that directly contradicts Graeber:
"Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this [Graeber's] theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."
> Contrary to previous studies, it thus finds robust support for Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. At the same time, it also confirms existing evidence on the effects of various other factors, including alienation. Work perceived as socially useless is therefore a multifaceted issue that must be addressed from different angles.
1 many people don’t understand how their jobs fit into a larger system and claim it’s BS
2 People find jobs where they don’t directly benefit from the output as bullshit (I make
Something I don’t use)
3 beaucratic jobs that prevent rather than create can feel like bullshit even though systematically are needed.
4 risk forward jobs can be seems as bullshit as they are part of a spread bet a company makes to survive while any individual can feel like they failed and aren’t contributing.
People he met at parties. That said, it was a popular essay, not academic research.
I’d also say, it is an important question to ask: do our economies deliver meaningful work? Does it matter? Is my job meaningful to me, and what does that mean?
My job is meaningful because I get paid for it. The actual work output produces no value to society - maybe negative value. The same is probably true for lots of people here.
I disagree the the author's assertion about Graeber's becoming less radical. By deconstructing the concept of the state and showing that you don't need any form of 'state' to create advanced societies is radical. Dawn of Everything shows the reader that humanity's history is littered with diverse social structures, and the structures we have today are temporary. It's a freeing book, a very optimistic one, and really opens up possibilities in people's minds.
We don't have to be stuck with our way of life. Another way is possible as demonstrated by Dawn of Everything.
This sort of creative optimism is something we especially need now, as we approach the physical limits of this planet.
I think the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson offers a lens to look at why "anarchism" is betrayed. There is something about being human that creates hierarchies. There is also something about being human that takes these hierarchies and pushes them to any given horizon. My idea being that any given utilitarian hierarchy, over time, becomes a differentiation to create class divisions. I think this lens can be used to resolve the focus of Graeber's criticism of "anarchism" and what it means to remove inequality from a human system.
My own thesis is that when you remove any given inequality from a human system, a power vacuum is created; some other inequality expands to take the place of the removal. This happens when an inequality is reduced, as well. I am unclear as to why and the mechanisms of how.
This does not mean that inequality should not be addressed. It simply means that cognition of the effect of removing or reducing the inequality needs to occur and any action taken be adjusted to address it. The only system, so far, that seems to be dynamic enough to handle this is "small-d" democracy in its various forms. These approaches are not without their criticisms.
> There is something about being human that creates hierarchies.
It's not about being human, it's about being in large groups where horizontal, consensus-driven decision making becomes infeasible. We've known this since The Tyranny of Structurelessness came out (and formal research into Dunbar's number only solidified this basic intuition), anarchists just didn't get the memo.
One anecdote that shows how much David Graeber was popular among the world elites is that a former SWIFT CEO touted his book about money to Graeber followers on the backcover.
I met Graeber once or twice because we went to the same graduate program. He was a very modest person in some ways, almost shy sometimes, while of course quite politically unusual in some ways, and often irascible.
I didn't agree with everything he had to say, and I thought that as he became more successful, his writing got sloppy sometimes. But he had a gigantic impact in the world unlike almost everyone else from academic anthropology, and I'm glad he got to do that.
I was hoping from the headline that the OP would explain why he died so suddenly.
Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on September 2, 2020, while on vacation with his wife and friends in Venice. Graeber died during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead of a funeral, his family organized an "Intergalactic Memorial Carnival" of livestreamed events that took place in October 2020. His wife, Nika, attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, pointing to his prior good health, strange symptoms they both had for months beforehand, and the connection scientists have found between COVID-19 and pancreatitis. [0]
Did he speak about the pandemic much? I think the responses to the pandemic from anarchists are interesting. They seem to range the entire spectrum: from the anti government conspiracy theorist to the enthusiastic state coercion supporter. Maybe the academic theorists were more level headed? He seemed to be saying "lets see what good can come from it afterwards", but I'm curious if there's more he said.
"Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control."
So, as a bit of an “anarcho-pragmatist” myself I found that the pandemic really challenged me in this regard. Ultimately, the conclusion I reached was that the ideal anarchist would mask up, stay home, and wash his or her f-ing hands, not because someone told them too, but because they had an ethical obligation to care for the weak and immunocompromised, but the state had no right to impose restrictions requiring this sort of thing or anything else. That’s tough I know, and practically presents challenges, but there’s a different between how things “are” and how they “ought” to be and the widespread terrible behavior during the pandemic was a result of poor education, selfishness, and bad manners. I tried to contextualize it with other “not necessarily illegal but rude” behavior.
Basically, “look Randy, it’s not illegal to scream racial slurs here on this public sidewalk, and the state doesn’t have the right to stop you, but you’re being an asshole and you should shut up.” We should all aspire to do the right thing, but not everyone is going to. I imagine 10-20% of any group is filled with jackasses, so trying to build society around those people neglects the other 80-90%.
> Say we also reject the notion of social control.
This is like writing a physics paper that starts with "assume humans could jump to the moon" or an international relations paper with "say we could all just get along". You can write anything you want if you start off with assumptions like that.
Most anarchists were indeed social distancing, masking etc. so I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you are mistaking somehow anarcho-capitalism for anarchism, even though it's not anarchism?
Did he write much about the pandemic? I could only find one paper. Did other anarchists? What was their view on the state, use of violence, social control, lockdowns, forced closures of services and shops, travel restrictions, forced vaccinations, freedom and anarchism? I imagine like with non anarchists that there was a wide range of views ranging from the pro-freedom to the pro-lockdown.
The only bit of evidence from Graeber apart from the linked paper was that he did go on vacation in 2020 around the time when many people might not have left their house, and when many people were forced by the state not to travel. This was of course before the vaccination issue. The paper seemed to indicate he viewed it as temporary and one that would provide lessons to people. Do anarchists hold the latter view now? What are these lessons? Is there reflection on the range of views and any conflicts it showed?
I find the range of responses given at the time when it was going on interesting and reflect the conflict between collective responsibility and freedom.
I used to work in ITS looking after a few token Solaris boxen, and played a hand in inviting Stallman down to campus one year in the early-mid 2000s. I had pizza (appiza?) at Yorkside with RMS, and "Three Davey Gs" (my boss (Gewirtz), Graeber and Gelernter).
Graeber was anything but shy that afternoon; he and Stallman were at each other's throats, embarrassingly so. I don't recall their having fundamental philosophical differences… it was just a clash of personalities, I guess.
Being _by far_ the most junior person there, I felt incredibly uncomfortable.
> state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state.
Stuff like this is why anarchist writing is so unreadable and unpersuasive. Like okay you've discarded the entire framework of society and oh I should read your book to find out why... But what would I, given this sample of how inhuman and inane your analysis is?
This stuff is dropped like it's a logical conclusion of a rigorous mathematical framework and therefore incontrovertible. Yet it sounds instead like clear evidence that the logic and the framework are themselves broken, since the conclusions are laughable and absurd. Anarchist writers always seem unable to grasp this. The result is that their body of theory is essentially meaningless to anyone who doesn't already believe in it at a basically religious level.
Obviously I haven't read, like, a majority of anarchist writing. But anyone who's wandered the internet for a while has likely encountered a lot of what I'm talking about.
Dismissing an argument on the basis of its conclusion certainly seems like an odd way to go about things. Many of the social structures we take for granted today would have at one point seemed absurd.
Agreed. For example: Animals in the wilderness also rely on violence and coercion. Even herbivores predate on plants. Clearly this violence and coercion is even less justifiable, as animals as a group have no social contract theory etc to speak of. Therefore, there should be no animals.
There are people who genuinely believe this, such as https://reducing-suffering.org/ . But they definitely don't come at it from such a half baked angle.
I abhor graebers writing,but this conclusion is reasonable. "The entire framework of society" I think the point is, that the entire framework of society developed to enrich people who are already rich. Palace and Temple economies wouldn't have existed if they didn't raid and ultimately conquer their agrarian neighbors. Surely there's a social framework that doesn't require violence? If there isn't, shouldn't there be?
>Anarchist writers always seem unable to grasp this.
>Obviously I haven't read, like, a majority of anarchist writing.
I said it that way on purpose! Of course I haven't read the majority of anarchist writing, because all the anarchist writing I did read had this same fatal flaw that made it uninteresting. It'd be crazy to keep reading.
Its funny because I have the opposite problem. A lot (A LOT) of anarchist writing presupposes a very strong government, but that government gets a pass as not being "The State" because its super nice and gives you bread.
It's refusing to accept that there is a moral basis for initiating force or harm against another.
Now this world really does operate by force, and spends a lot of resources to accommodate its citizens to its force - education, culture, finance, law are all part of the toolbox. It will justify itself, call itself 'good', 'better than other options'.. it will even use its superior forces to undermine any other attempts of living. Anyone who initiates violence against someone is in the wrong - it does not miraculously become 'right' when the government does it, just cos it has written some rules on bits of paper.
So it depends on how you stack things. Is doing things right most important thing? Or is one in thrall to whoever currently holds the levers of power to exercise its force as they see fit? And, a personal question, if it is the latter - do you call this is if force 'good', is government good? Do you accept this authority?
Right but most people won't agree with that premise, about there being no moral basis for harm. It is weird and irrelevant to reality for most of us.
If you are trying to make a point to someone else who doesn't reject that premise, then it does literally nothing to talk about all the conclusions that follow from the premise. It only convinces your audience that they were right to ignore you in the first place because you are discussing an irrelevant contrived question.
It seem like you are writing bullshit because you have no idea what you are talking about. Read about projects like Revolutionary Catalonia or Free Territory of Ukraine to see how anarchists organized on a big scale - through some kind of federated horizontal structures.
> through some kind of federated horizontal structures.
If you federate horizontal structures, what you have is a hierarchy. All this proves is that some kind of hierarchy and delegation of power becomes neessary for large-scale decision making. We see this even in voluntary organizations, such as large firms (including large co-ops, which do have formal management).
Many such cases. When you take a serious postmodern look at classic Marxist and Anarchist theories you begin to see the hidden assumptions they sneak in, and it becomes philosophically untenable. That's why sincere lefties/anarchists mature into left-liberals, and you don't see people like Foucault, Chomsky, or Zizek calling for revolution.
Chomsky is advocating for libertarian socialism, so he is calling for revolution. You probably don't even understand that you don't create libertarian socialism revolution through a coup, even though that's elementary knowledge. You prefigure libertarian socialism, which means you create here and know a network of parallel horizontal institutions that work according to libertarian socialism ideas, and this network is supposed to put up a fight against a current system, the bigger it is the more intense is the fights. That means that the libsoc revolution is actually happening at this moment all over the world, because almost everywhere you can find some libertarian socialist counter-institutions.
No I don't. The realization that Marxist and Anarchist philosophies are stupid leaves people wondering how they can actually help others instead of wanking over their ideology. Many people from the Occupy era have come to realize that their movement was a huge waste of time because it focused all of its energy in vague directions with meaningless slogans. I don't know Graeber's work well, but I get the impression that he feels the same.
> The realization that Marxist and Anarchist philosophies are stupid leaves people wondering how they can actually help others instead of wanking over their ideology
Speak for yourself. That's a terminally online response, and lumping those two things with such a wide sweeping conclusion is meaningless. Marxism contains many parts and includes timeless methods like dialectical materialism which can be used as a framework for direct action.
> Many people from the Occupy era have come to realize that their movement was a huge waste of time because it focused all of its energy in vague directions with meaningless slogans
Nobody worth taking seriously would expect fully automated luxury space communism to unfold the second some disenfranchised people gather in a park, or by backing somebody like Bernie for president. Capital would never let itself lose its dominating power that easily. But the very acts of these gatherings and the energy it carries forward is not insignificant, and something is collectively learned at each turn for those tuned in. And as things continue to fall apart, more people tune in.
You have no idea what you are talking about, because you do indeed create anarchism through creation of mutual aid networks like for example Food Not Bombs.
As the article mentions folks like Max Weber who saw and had to deal with these new things called "states" found them all to real.
Yeah "has no origin and is a meaningless term" is not a particularly useful position, and mostly exists because he expanded the scope of the state beyond its claimed dominion. For example, certain state attempt to demarcate themselves from individuals (aka individual liberties etc). A history of their violations of their own positions does not make their stated efforts in any way obviously invalid.
"Bullshit Jobs" is still pound for pound the most impactful concept I ever learned that explained viscerally to me why modern work makes so many people miserable.
I looked it up, having not read it before. It's the idea that many modern jobs seem pointless, even to those doing them. They feel unnecessary or redundant, leading to stress and a sense of worthlessness. Graeber argues employment is being valued for its own sake, rather than for meaningful contributions to society. He feels productive ones, like teaching or healthcare, have clear and positive impact. Lots of stuff about how culture and beliefs about work might be encouraging the existence of these unfulfilling jobs.
Mostly, but not exactly. Graeber would have probably identified a number of jobs in both Healthcare and teaching as BS jobs (e.g. pulmonologists who largely treat smokers who don't have good addiction support as duct tapers, or assistant principals in bureaucratic schools as task masters).
Except that teaching and healthcare are some of the least productive sectors in the economy, which is why they're seeing steadily increasing costs over time. Suggesting that no rent-seeking or socially wasteful effort is occurring in these areas is quite ludicrous.
> Contrary to previous studies, it thus finds robust support for Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. At the same time, it also confirms existing evidence on the effects of various other factors, including alienation. Work perceived as socially useless is therefore a multifaceted issue that must be addressed from different angles.
That's a completely different set of authors, published in the same journal - just clarifying for others because I interpreted you as saying that the same authors had published a reversal, which sounded intriguing.
A contrary opinion in the same journal from different authors is just as intriguing, if not more so. It clearly indicates that the topic is still up for vigorous debate - in stark contrast to the OP's all-encompassing and easily-falsifiable claim that Graeber's work "doesn't hold up to scrutiny".
What? Most of this website LOVES that book lol. Every single thread is full of people basically using it to confirm their biais, even if as the other commenter said it hasn't held up to scrutiny.
It's also full of people debunking it (or trying). So why single out the people who like it, as if there is no opposition?
Also, people posted studies that are both positive and negative towards Bullshit Jobs. How do you reconsile this? Personally I think it means his theories are not outright madness and have merit, and it's hard to reason about just like with other social studies.
Communist and anarchist LARPers are never honest, that is why they live in capitalist societies and not their desired form of society wherever they exist.
Another reminder, its never about equality as they claim, its about power, it always is.
Some people do still live in actual "primitive" tribes or bands. It's been a successful model of human organization for thousands of years, and perhaps the closest wrt. real-world feasibility to what one could call anarchism.
This is subject to all of the usual caveats of survey-based self reporting. There are a lot of reasons people will not want to admit their jobs are bullshit until you get to know them personally. But among most of the people I know who did disclose that to me, Graeber's generalization and categorization tracks pretty well. It helps me understand why these people feel that way in a common rubric, and give them better advice than just indulging their wild fantasies to go throw everything away that they worked for and become a surfing instructor or teach in a ghetto school after 4 weeks training.
It's not like I work as a paid workplace psychology consultant or policy maker.
If you go deconstructionist enough you can fall back to absurdism or nihilism and just say none of it matters and it's all bullshit; that's just the way subjective topics like the meaning of society, humanity, etc works. You can also subjectively find meaning in almost any job that isn't digging and then filling back up the hole you just dug. That's why people criticize his take on work.
> But this “simplistic” conception of the state is also the conception that fuels or articulates the anarchist critique of the state, from William Godwin to Mikhail Bakunin to Emma Goldman. As I argue in my book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (2008), state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state. In late Graeber, this looks simplistic and nonempirical. “The state” is a concept that falls apart under analysis and should be abandoned. Of course, that makes anti-statism just as senseless, for what is an anti-statist fighting against, really?
i can't say i follow this reading. conceptually dismantling the state doesn't put "anti-statists" out in the cold - rather it makes the "archists" all the more absurd
i found graber's writing to remain quite compatible with modern anarchist theory, which has not stood still since the 19th century, but has synthesized nihilism and anthropology with those historical traditions of communal libertarianism and insurrection.
and then the article mentions the corbyn thing and then just kind of... ends? i expected more.
the labour association was certainly disappointing for many folks but only a purist would believe it immediately implies some kind of fundamental conversion. and historically it is not unusual for anarchists to have some encounter with "politics" especially for some tactical reason.
he also supported the ypg, which is an armed organization dedicated to establishing a "monopoly on violence" over significant territory in their three-front war against turkey, isis, and the syrian arab army. certainly not quite comparable to an opposition party that isn't making policy or commanding british soldiers, but i've never seen anyone count the ypg against him as an anarchist, by reference to the dictionary.
This review is enlightening in describing Graeber's break from conventional anarchism in the Dawn of Everything. Early Graeber tries to make the best possible case for critiques of power structures that characterize our modern world or underpin its legitimacy --- critiques derived from or harmonious with those in conventional anarchist thought. I disagree with the author's interpretation of The Dawn of Everything as evidence of Graeber shifting toward liberalism.
The Dawn of Everything is actually a significant contribution to anarchist thought (though it may be fair to call it post-anarchism) because anarchism struggles to theorize and build alternative institutions that can sustain and protect an anarchist society from domination by external powers. Graeber's earlier idea of prefigurative politics provides a partial solution because one can experiment with anarchistic institutions within a capitalistic / statist society.
The Dawn of Everything implicitly addresses the limitations of prefigurative politics, which are obvious in practice. Prefigurative institutions that are not short-lived or small-scale are rare and typically grow their own ideosyncratic power structures e.g., the tyranny of structurlessness or Wikipedia. Although not approaching a "state" such structures make anarchists uncomfortable especially when they reproduce hierarchies from the broader society.
The Dawn of Everything teaches us not to equate domination with the state or necessarily with hierarchies either. The posted review takes issue with how late Graeber rejects the concept of the state. But this rejection in no way lets the state off the hook. The Dawn of Everything is unequivocally critical of the state and seeks to understand how the state stabilized and persisted as a world-dominating organizational mode. It pursues this ambitious, (and I think unaccomplished) goal by describing a wide range of early societies and demonstrating that some were violently coercive without state-like institutions (e.g., north american slavers) and that others were peaceful and egalitarian but had institutions that other work associates with violent coercion or state emergence (e.g., cities or agriculture). Then, by analyzing the stability of these societies and how they worked it tries to piece together a theory of decomposed types of coercive power. As the reviewer points out, this decomposition isn't that theoretically satisfying. There could be other ways than the three types of power, and some of the arguments around this part of the book in particular seem to stretch the evidence.
That said, it is useful for anarchists to recognize that just because a power structure or hierarchy emerge within a political project or organization that it is a failure. Opposition to the state and domination more broadly doesn't require commitment to design principles like leaderlessness or flat organizing structures. The book's most important contribution is to show that human societies have already explored a vast design space of political institutions in our history.
Anarchism has always been a "liberal" philosophy --- indeed the most extreme form of liberalism. Any state-socialist or communist will say this. It opposes the state because the state extended the scale and reach of coercive structures like conscription, taxation, and private property far beyond their pre-modern limits.
Yet the state is losing power to international governmental organizations on one hand and international corporations on another and so it is incredibly useful to think about ranges of better possible futures instead of doubling down on tried and tired commitments to ideological purity with a movement that was most significant and non-academic 130 years ago when the modern state was still contested in much of the world. Anarchism is stale but post-anarchism, like the Dawn of Everything, is essential.
It is the same with Chomsky, both are anarchists but they know that the change cannot be from neoliberalism to anarchism, you have to pass for more social regimes.
There needs to be a lot of education and preparation for such a revolution. We are not there yet. Chomsky has said about anarchism that it's an ideal to strive towards. He is not opposed to smaller changes which might be a stepping stone towards anarchism.
I can attest to the fact that anarchists are probably the most discriminated group in existence. Even a faint whiff of anarchism or the idea of reducing or decentralizing state or corporate power is a very bad career move.
Ya it leads to a lot of power struggle and killing, of course it has stigma. This was news back when Hobbes published Leviathan. There’s a reason the US is a safe place for the majority of its citizens for hundreds of years and not for the parts where there’s gangs or in Mexico where there’s cartels contesting power.
What stops a cartel from taking over in an anarchist society? I never understood how anarchists will prevent crime lords and military leaders from seizing power. They certainly didn't stop that from happening in the past.
How will your anarchism dictate how a cartel will be organized? Through anarchism, you can't enforce everyone to be anarchic. You will lose your independence because other people will form larger groups to increase their power and achieve their aims by coercing you.
I think they are anarchist in that they have a loose structure without formal laws. I think they inflict reputational damage to the concept of anarchy. Violent gangs are exactly what people are afraid of when they think of anarchy.
I think in reality, if there was pervasive anarchy for everyone without any overarching state, there would be more opportunities and incentives for deal-making between gangs and violence would trend towards zero.
Currently, it's illegal to make deals with gangs and they're almost 100% made up of people with criminal tendencies since honest people don't want to be associated with gangs. If every social group was a gang and there was no state, then people would have a strong incentive to join a gang for protection/support and so there would be a lot of good, honest people inside those gangs and this composition would make the gangs less violent.
A cartel or gang that manages to hold power while dispensing with the routine use of violence (or "trend towards zero" to use your term) is just... a state. Of course it's a state in its most primitive and tyrannical form, since it has no institutional history of self-regulating its own use of power like most modern states do.
Good point. Though when people think of a state, they tend to expect clear geographical boundaries. I guess when we're advocating for anarchy, we're advocating for multiple voluntary, competing, potentially geographically overlapping states.
I guess with this terminology, it sounds a lot more appealing than 'gangs' so I'm fully in favor.
The problem with geographically overlapping states is that they will always be incented to be violent towards each other, to some extent. At least, that's what we see in practice in gang dynamics. You can have overlapping organizations, perhaps politically connoted in some sense, whithin the context of some minimal "night watchman" state that regulates the use of violence and provides shared security against outside threats - and to some extent, our modern societies look a bit like that.
1. Cartels have strong hierarchies, imposed by violence, a system which would be roundly opposed by most anarchists.
2. But more importantly, most anarchists are not just against hierarchies. They are positively for society or the group to have features likes mutual aid, worker rights, democratic or consensus based decision making, etc. All of these are missing from cartels.
The Anarchist rebellion in Spain for instance was not only instantly crushed by all sides (Fascist, communists, liberal democracies) but it has been written out of history too. You hardly ever learn about it, except if you read Anarchist books.
The anarchist rebellion was the only anti-Franco side that managed to win some battles, it's demise happened because liberals and Stalinists preferred to betray anarchists and then get steamrolled by Franco.
If the militia had been armed properly, maybe it could have done better. But we probably need a global revolution or solidarity to take place since smaller local revolutions can be crushed by larger powers.
They seem to actually be very efficient per capita, it's mostly that anarchism never really was more popular than other "radical" ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or fascism. It was almost always less popular than those even where it was popular.
Graeber has always been terrible, 'Debt' was not brilliant. It was a bit of cherypicked history with overdone imterpretation added, while ignoring lots of other history. His true passion seems to be to scream 'all economists ever in historywhere horrible shills of capitalism'. But what the book proves instead is that he hasn't read much economic history or history of economic thoght.
He goes on and on about how great antroplogy is, and doesnt want to hear that 'political economists' had talked about these ideas long before antropology was even a profession.
When people told him and suggested some books, he just insulted them. His books are that, cherry picked bad histroy with lots of liberal interpretation and opinion.
> They enumerate three basic liberties: namely, “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relations.”
This doesn't seem like a practical basis for society. It would seem to permit somebody to wander around, raping and killing, freely disobeying any social prohibitions. On the other hand, it doesn't guarantee any access to the resources that you'd need to survive, not even a bit of land for growing your own food and building a shelter.
