[HN Gopher] What Happened to David Graeber?
___________________________________________________________________
What Happened to David Graeber?
Author : devonnull
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-01-20 21:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| "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'm sad there won't be any more from him.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| 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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > I wonder if recognition of this is why Graeber was taking a
| more stereotypical liberal perspective later in his life
|
| His ideas had gained a certain acceptance. That meant is was
| time to hone, to refine, to heap on the nuance.
|
| What better tool to use than his usual foil, status quo
| liberalism? Seems like a page out of Hegel.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| 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.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| Real enlightenment comes when you realize "Debt" was mostly
| nonsense too.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| /r/AskEconomics is a good start.
|
| _Later_
|
| 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.
| trevyn wrote:
| HN just hates reddit.
| khrbrt wrote:
| 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.
| wharvle wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| Yes it really seems like most criticism comes from people
| merely reacting to some ideas in the book.
| samth wrote:
| I recommend this seminar on the book, which contains both
| strong critiques and a lot of interesting and positive
| discussion. https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-
| graeber-debt-semina...
| barry-cotter wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-
| later/
| unmole wrote:
| 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.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the Iraq war conspiracy theory?
| unmole wrote:
| 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
| tremon wrote:
| Two years (from late 2000 till early 2003) is absolutely
| "soon" in international political timeframes.
| notahacker wrote:
| True, but Iraq making some non-dollar payments for oil is
| absolutely insignificant in international monetary flows.
| unmole wrote:
| The US invading Afghanistan less than a month after 9/11
| was _soon_. Two years is too long to even establish a
| causality chain.
|
| Again, the switch was authorized by the UN Security
| Council. The US could have simply vetoed the resolution
| if it was considered a threat.
| cma wrote:
| >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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| What is factual is old, and what is new is just wild
| speculation. Also, misunderstanding of modern economics and
| the Fed, yes.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| 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.
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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.
| floydnoel wrote:
| 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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.
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| kemotep wrote:
| 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?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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."
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > 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 Catalhoyuk, 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 Catalhoyuk 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.
|
| https://archive.is/ATyH2
| https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-
| di...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| headsupernova wrote:
| These are not about the book Debt...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| While Graeber is far from the only person to draw that
| conclusion about IVC city sites I do wonder what he and
| Wengrow would have made of Gobekli Tepe
| opo wrote:
| 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:
|
| http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-
| debt-...
|
| https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages
|
| https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-
| me...
|
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.ht
| m...
| tsunamifury wrote:
| "Bullshit jobs" was one of the poorest researched and thinly
| veiled biased judgements in a supposed academic work I had ever
| read.
|
| After reading it I couldn't take any of his work seriously at
| all as he misunderstood basic concepts of productivity.
| bhaak wrote:
| Even if you don't agree with his conclusions, you still need
| to acknowledge that the raw data is there.
|
| That is that many people consider their job useless. Draw
| your own conclusions from that.
| unmole wrote:
| What was the _data_ that Graeber used? Fan mail from people
| who didn 't like their jobs?
| Biologist123 wrote:
| 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?
| graemep wrote:
| Yes, Bullshit Jobs has a lot of interesting ideas and
| narratives. I found it worth reading for that.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| Keysh wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017021101
| 5...
| bhaak wrote:
| And here is a serious study that supports Graeber.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017023117577
| 1
|
| > 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I think there are many explanations:
|
| 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.
|
| I can go on.
| incompatible wrote:
| > 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.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| Please read the United States founding documents.
| rendall wrote:
| I suggest reading the original idea with charity. You might
| very well still disagree, but it would be informed
| disagreement.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| "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.
| unmole wrote:
| Like much of Graeber's output, it doesn't actually hold up to
| scrutiny:
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
| perrygeo wrote:
| You posted an article from 2021. Here's one from the same
| publisher in 2023 saying the opposite -
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170231175771
|
| > 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.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| If Graebar's theory was correct, the vast majority of
| people on this website would be unemployed. See his very
| uninformed opinion on bugs.
|
| I firmly wish Graebar stuck to his own lane, maybe his fans
| would as well and leave the rest of society alone.
| dappermanneke wrote:
| looks like HN isn't interested in hearing how economics
| actually works today
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| Its an awful awful book.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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).
| decasia wrote:
| 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.
| a_t48 wrote:
| COVID, according to my fiancee
| pfdietz wrote:
| COVID-induced pancreatitis, I believe.
| evbogue wrote:
| The Corona has taken so many of us for so much for so long
| now.
| veggieWHITES wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber#Death
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 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.
|
| I did see a paper he wrote in 2020:
| https://davidgraeber.org/articles/the-museum-of-care-
| reimagi...
|
| "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."
| WJW wrote:
| > 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.
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| 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.
| frozenport wrote:
| 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.
| ruined wrote:
| > 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.
| mempko wrote:
| 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.
| lsy wrote:
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| My reading is that these were examples to illustrate, and not
| arguments for, Graeber's change of heart.
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| 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.
| mypastself wrote:
| 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.
| SnazzyJeff wrote:
| > 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.
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| What is anarchist about cartels?
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| natmaka wrote:
| In such a context isn't the word 'tribe' more adequate
| than 'gang'?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| 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.
| biorach wrote:
| > cartels contesting power
|
| Drug cartels are not run along anarchist lines.
|
| I think you have a misunderstanding of the basic concepts
| here.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| One thing anarchist societies do not seem to be particularly
| effective at is war. Spain proved that they can do the rest
| though.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Orwell: _Homage to Catalonia_ ?
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| As it should be...we don't want delusional people dreaming of a
| utopian society that actually becomes lawless and violent when
| implemented.
| azaras wrote:
| 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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.
| romanhn wrote:
| I'm continuously fascinated by the caliber of people on HN. David
| Graeber had an account as well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber
| tsunamifury wrote:
| That is a wierdddddd set of comments.
| verisimi wrote:
| What a crazy exchange. Graeber comes of well though.
| ajkjk wrote:
| > 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.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| That page has some wild topics... https://reducing-
| suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature...
| verisimi wrote:
| 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?
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, most people think it's fine to initiate harm. It's
| foundational to the state. It's a choice to accept this,
| and go along with it.
| truculent wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
|
| hmmmmm
| groceryheist wrote:
| 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.
| jongjong wrote:
| The title is clickbait from a conspiracy theorist's perspective.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Can you elaborate this? It sounds interesting.
| swed420 wrote:
| You speak as if capitalism isn't overflowing with its own
| increasingly untenable contradictions.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| 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.
| WBrentWilliams wrote:
| Just a thought, based on a loose synthesis:
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| re5i5tor wrote:
| Thanks for posting -- I've been wanting an outside perspective on
| Graeber since I read and loved the Dawn of Everything.
| re5i5tor wrote:
| The review references a NY Mag profile that I also found to be
| good Graeber background.
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-o...
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
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