I was wondering if there's anything like what our :large-adult-son: did for DoE? I've been enjoying the book, but I'd love for more directed and structural turns than what Graeber gives. Not that arguments for "spiritual warfare" against capitalist hell aren't useful (they are, individually, I'm sure!) - but I'd love for interventions from the ML side on the argument. Especially because he also occasionally uses old 20th century AES as comparison and critique of neoliberalism.

Currently on Chapter 5, thinking it might be a good read for my undergrads in my rhetoric classes, but I want to pair it with some other material (gonna include some :citations-needed: pods, among other things).

Anyway, also just a general place for comrades to converse about it/Graeber. Personally, I like him more than :large-adult-son: did, but I definitely recognize the limits of his anarchist approach to things.

Let's try to be :left-unity-4: in this too - I'm not trying to start a struggle session! I just want to know how to incorporate Graeber's ideas into a more statist framework (because I'm a :sicko-pig: like that).

  • ButtBidet [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I do mostly agree with you. I can see how Graeber focuses on a more privileged portion of the labour force. You gotta be careful with labeling white collar workers as "labor aristocracy", as most are in a pretty precarious state already. The actual bosses and owners have no qualms about fucking off to drink or play golf during the day, and they don't need to deal with any of the bullshit.

    So I teach upper Secondary, which is thankfully not a bullshit job. But the levels of bullshit has visibly increased in the last twenty years. I spend less of time in teaching, planning, and marking, and more on documents and fucking meetings.

    but when I think of a strata that have it so bad that their particular form of oppression deserves its own book, I think of sex workers or prison laborers or undocumented migrant workers, not white-collar workers who have a sense of ennui because they stare at Excel spreadsheets all day.

    I definitely agree with this, btw. I think the reason this resonates with people from the West, is um, we're often in this group. The economies of the West have become so fucked, that most real work is done overseas.