David Graeber birthday
David Graeber birthday
David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Graeber radicalized me. Bullshit Jobs was my first book, later I read Debts and Dawn. Now I work a bullshit job and spend my working hours on lemmy and podcasts
:D <3
Which one should I start with?
I've not read them all, so I can't really rank them, but I do share Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! often, and of course there are the renowned Bullshit Jobs and Debt. I'm sure other folks can add their own suggestions..
up to what size & technological level?
The thing is there is no tipping point. You have small size hunter gatherer groups who are egalitarian and others aren't. Same for agricultural societies and cities and on and on. There are even groups that change depending on the season. The Dawn of Everything is a very enlightening book about this topic
In what way is the "technological level" dependant on a state?
From the top of my head: The Neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas show that both metrics can be answered with "quite high/a lot".
my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more "free form" social organization.
For example, I'd argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.
I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution...), probably in ways we can't imagine. But I don't think they can solve the "higher technology oppressor" problem.
150 seems to be the number for humans.
What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.
The article formatting is hosed because it's so old, but this is the most important thing I've ever read to describe wide swaths of human behavior. Give it a shot and the world will make loads more sense.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Funny note; For all the times I've posted that here and on reddit, not one soul has come back and said any part of it was bullshit.
it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of "people i know well enough to fully humanize" and "all other humans."
I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we've built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.
The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author's premise.
Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we're not all assholes to monkey strangers.
AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are "defectors" (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.
This article isn't wrong, but it seems to be emphasizing that we remember our limitations and think critically when dealing with complex issues. It doesn't really match this post which seems to be promoting living in tiny, isolated, self sufficient villages. It's occurring to me in real time that he means communes
Exactly, please explain how anarchists would approach the problem of redoing the entire US electrical grid (this is critical from a security perspective and would increase efficiency).
Okay so you might mot like this, but todays society is way more advanced, and there are some good things I can't live without. Dental care is IMO a good example.
Now my theory is that our society is built on egomaniacs, power hungry narcissistic people and outright sadists (used by them). They make the wheels grind, they make you work for 48h a week instead of seeing your family.
But it also furthers society. In a wrong wretched way.
To have anarchy, or communism, we need to do away with those people, but we also must make people get out of bed and work too, I mean in a perfect society where everything is provided, who would like to be a hard working dentist?
And before you jump on me, Marx himself described a fenomena (I'm paraphrasing) where 1 company have normal working conditions and another with the aforementioned conditions. The second company will obviously win in the long run.
So you can't just make a law, or "not letting it happen" because other societies will, and then they will conquer you in some way because they are stronger or maybe just richer or have the equivalent of "dentists".
I'd love living in an all caring nice society, but how? Empirically it just doesn't seem to work.
The syndicalist answer is to get the whole working class into unions. Those unions take over their companies and become worker-owned co-operatives. They preference working directly with other companies doing the same. At some point, this reaches critical mass. The state then becomes unnecessary because the co-operatives handle everything between themselves.
Don't forget, too, that a lot of "work" being done in a modern office takes, perhaps, 10 hours a week. People aren't doing real work for 40 hours. That suggests that a company can be just as successful as any other while substantially reducing hours.
I know about that idea, but it doesn't adress the problem posed, at all?
Those people will just take over unions. I live in France were the unions are strong, and I can tell you the yes, it's way better than no unions but no it isn't lala land either and the battle of the egos is all over the place.
I also know that most office hours are totally wasted, but how come no one seems to have successfully made a job where you only do those effective hours possible?
I only heard about Bullshit Jobs recently. Now, knowing he's an anarchist anthropologist, definitely putting it in my ever-growing-rarely-shrinking book list.
ever-growing-rarely-shrinking book list.
✊ The struggle is real fam
Here's a fun Graeber video
This is awesome!
The last 2 minutes of this talk are pure gold. Thanks for sharing!
Further evidence that only the good die young. My man was too great for this world.
Question from someone uninformed on anarchism. How would an anarchist society do something huge, like for example get to the moon. It seems like that requires an intense pooling of resources and a level of coordination accross multiple industries, scientific disciplines, manufacturing techniques, etc.
Free associations of workers would work on that, if they want to do it, if there is a need for it. Tbh I don't see much need for going to the moon in this moment.
i just don’t see that happening for fundamental science… these are big things that don’t mean a whole lot to the average person: going to the moon, discovering the higgs boson, ITER
you could convince scientists and engineers to work toward that goal pretty easily because they understand the necessary of pushing boundaries even when you’re not sure what you’ll gain from it, but i’m not sure you’d be able to convince people more removed from the academic world
the type of projects we did in the past to advance our knowledge of the universe were relatively simple compared to our modern science and engineering… we have grown to the point that no single person would be able to rebuilt the tools required to complete modern science from scratch, let alone how to use those tools
i’m not saying it can’t work, but i think that modern science is hugely complex, and the mechanism by which we manage that complexity is via government. i don’t see loosely connected groups being able to solve that issue
Turns out you can get stuff done without a huge mega corp or government robbing everyone to pay themselves and justify it as being for everyone's own good. Just listen to the absurdity of the argument that you need a state: "Hey, I'm going to forcibly take 30% of everything you produce, but don't worry, after I pay myself and my staff, I'll build you a poorly maintained road and send someone to the moon. You'd like that wouldn't you?"
What would the opposite of that be?
do you remember one or two? I'm unlikely to go get that book any time soon.
every example of "monkey considering monkey stranger" was "bad monkey." That is the forest of this article: we're good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.
but that's not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.
again I agree that we don't think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don't give them the level of consideration we should. we don't live up to the golden rule all the time.
but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.
How many of those societies have undergone an industrial revolution?
... But they study those societies by their bones.