It's good, folks. Just started it, but strong "hiding my power level" vibes to be more lib friendly.
We need more hidden power level stuff to wean normies off a lifetime of capitalist propaganda. Graeber was really good at this.
Normies are not going to read a book called The State and Revolution written by a guy they've been told all their lives was an evil Hitleresque dictator. But they might read "A sustainable future, how disrupting government can end poverty" written by a contemporary writer.
I thought this book was going to way closer to Malcolm Gladwell or Freakonomics, something that points to an absurd thing but doesn't ever mention Capitalism.
Happily surprised
Graeber is an anarchist who coined “we are the 99%”
He will be greatly missed.
Debt: The First 5000 Years is a really stunning grand theory from Graeber. The chapters mostly work as their own essays, especially the one about breaking the myth's of Adam Smith's "pre-capitalist barter system."
i'm not an anarchist so his views and mine would never have been the same on many things, but i will always cherish him for the absolute annihilation of the myth of a barter economy that he gave us in that book. holy shit just remembering reading it as a little lib and being astonished at how wrong all this shit is and how impractical it would have been. just shows you how propagandized we are growing up without even realizing it
I love the sequence where he just quotes intro to history/economics books who are all parroting the same thing. "Imagine a shoe-maker wanted carrots, but the carrot farmer didn't want shoes." I realized how many times I had heard that example without questioning it.
For those who don't have the time to read, essentially the idea that "before money, people bartered their goods ineffeciently" is bullshit. In all of anthropology and history, there are exactly zero recorded examples of pre-monetary societies using "bartering" as the basis of good exchange. In societies without money, they generally distribute goods on an egalitarian-like basis. This is done through "gift exchange" and debt. Unlike capitalist debt which has interest payments to incentivize the lender, pre-monetary lending was done with the knowledge that you live in same village as this person so they will eventually get you back. So for the shoe-maker example who wants carrots, the carrot farmer would "lend" the shoe-maker a dozen carrots. The carrot farmer knows that one day when his son needs new shoes, he can go over to the shoe-maker and expect to get paid back. Debt, before money, was an extension of trust. Only in societies where money is the norm and then that money is abrubtly removed do we see bartering for profit, because they are trying to compensate for lack of money.
And it gets even better when he gets to market economies, how they are propped up and created ONLY because of a state enforcing its will on people. How the state then creates an army, and pays them in a wage of coin, then requires the coin to paid for taxes, creating a subservient class of people all employed to the wage earners of the state.
something very much related to this topic is that the modern concept of the Westphalian State was a direct result of the Thirty Years War which was one of the most brutal wars ever waged on European soil (Wikipedia article for one of the worst massacres of the war just to give you a taste. the city of Magdeburg was almost entirely depopulated.). when we learned about it in school it really struck me that the "reasons" we're given for wars are almost always bullshit and put in place to coerce the populace to fight for the interests of their rulers.
This is a great introductory summary! I would just add that Graeber describes the non-monetary economies in somewhat less idyllic terms.
In societies without money, they generally distribute goods on an egalitarian-like basis. This is done through “gift exchange” and debt.
Some societies used egalitarian/needs-based distribution, e.g. the Iroquois with their Longhouses. But most were based on various personal relationships rather than an overarching moral system. (The gift economies were infamously competitive and could lead to mutual ruination.) So the neighbors lending each other things on trust was more about pursuing private interest under the existing social conditions rather than collective good as such - you would still have the rich and poor. But the result was communities based on trust, interdependence, and traditional autonomy, which was a "primitive", but peaceful and viable way to live. Even when neighbors were deeply indebted to each other, they'd still have to treat each other as equals, take each other's needs into consideration, and in general negotiate terms based on ability to pay rather than "you owe me 6% interest because the paper says so, motherfucker".
Graber's great thesis is that money and debt expressed in terms of money changed everything, because they made rational and coldly mathematical the relationships that had once been warm and human. They helped reduce persons to private property stripped of rights. But this same rationality also gave rise to philosophy, which eventually brought about the radical ideas about the abolition of slavery, money, markets, and individualism...
So there's a great dialectic in the historical vision he paints. Over and over in history money sows the seeds of its own destruction, but is recreated again by state actors seeking control only to blow up in everyone's faces again. It's not simply 'primitive communism good, capitalism bad'.
Again, your summary is great. I just want to rave about how much more awesome there is in Graeber's Debt book.
Just started Debt last week. The way he dunks on capitalist preconceptions of economics is majestic
you're missing out on one of the best (recently) living radical theorists. get on the debt book, utopia of rules, possibilities, fragments of an anarchist anthropology, and browse through his essays a bit if you feel like it
https://youtu.be/cuBpOXGLn_o
Good interview of him by Brian Eno, who admits that when he was 14 he was selling anarchist newspapers on the streets of his hometown.
Two heroes.
Graeber is greatly missed. Though thankfully we have a treasure trove from him.
OWS forever!
This is absolutely correct, and it's why outlets like Jacobin or Current Affairs are so valuable -- shortcomings and all. You can send that to someone who thinks capitalism is a pretty good idea and not scare them off before they read it.
Been thinking about this book all goddamn day today. Fuck middle management, fuck "engineering" which is just making graphs that tell people they aren't working fast enough, fuck all the jargon corporate speak zombies insisting my job has value, it has no value. I feel like a parasite.
Steal from your employee and consider your salary corporate funding of a dual power network. IMO, any leftist with even some disposable income needs to be funding the revolution/revolutionaries. A professional class of organizers. A vanguard, if you will
i teach, so it's hard to 'steal' anything other than books, which are just as accessible online for the most part.
but i love the idea of stealing from work.
Steal time. Teach Zinn instead of APUSH. Teach test taking skills instead of test material and spend the rest of the time teaching what you want. Organize on your planning time. Refuse to send kids to the disciplinarian. Take attendance and then offer a hall pass to anyone who wants to cut class. Don't fail anyone demographically likely to drop or fail out. Cover the security camera in your room with a hanging poster. Encourage adversarial readings of garbage like lord of the flies. Bring activists into your classroom as guest speakers.
Those are all great but I should have been more specific. I teach esl, so most of my work involves taking it Mad easy on mostly chill immigrants. We don’t ever fail anyone, and the attendance and participation policy of late has been top tier lax. The school treats the students very well (cash cow). The teachers however...
Anyways, at least for when I did the upper levels, I tried to get more into the weeds about shitty American /global politics but ive also been chastised for wanting to talk about the black panthers.
Love this thread, we should all post a thread when we finish reading some theory and explain what we liked about it and do a short AMA about it.
Together, with our powers combined, we will read a book.
Just need to get 5 more comrades to also contribute 50 pages together, like Voltron, and we're up to 1 book.
The appetizer: Office Space
The main course: Bullshit Jobs
Bullshit jobs saved me when I had nothing to do in my intership in an useless position and I needed to kill time
I have no idea how i got it, the interviewer just asked if i liked soccer and i said “kinda”. Apply to a lot of places and look up common interview questions.
Im now trying to get my first job halp
Nobody is reserching shit in my neck of the woods. I want to clean the test tubes.
I lent it to my centrist dad and he loved it. It's really a great tool to move the needle for people. Recommend it to literally everybody.
Haven't gotten to anything I'd call theory yet. Seems more like a categorization book. More "Look at all these different types of finches; I will name and map their habitats" and less "Here are the systemic forces of nature/life that cause there to be dozens of different finches."
Calls out essential workers getting fucked and middle managers getting vaccinated, in not so many words, tho
it's really an interesting idea stretched out to book length and his, uh, "methodology" doesnt exactly hold up (when i read that section all i could think was my old statistics teacher yelling "ASKING YOUR FRIENDS IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE POLLING") but i believe he acknowledges this and says that it should only be viewed as a stepping stone for an actual scientific study. i also feel like i put my mom into an existential crisis because i gifted her this book for christmas and now she keeps saying that she has a bullshit job and it seems to me like she doesnt know what to do about it because its a job shes been doing for 30+ years and she doesnt know what else to do
sometimes I feel like I need to ask permission to radicalize libs, the ones that have a good life and that the system has rewarded.
"hey, so... your whole life is a lie and knowing what I'm about to tell you might ruin literaly everything for you. that ok?"
Counterpoint: I didn't really enjoy this book. The premise is great, but I think Graeber took a wildly successful article he wrote (entitled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant) and needlessly turned it into an overly long and repetitive book. Love the guy, and really enjoy his other work, but this book just didn't do it for me. Read the article and you're golden.
Yeah, if you agree with him and/or already know this from experience, it's a lot of the same point with examples. My lib friend couldn't even get thru the essay without arguing the basic premise, tho. They definitely need just lots of examples and time to process the main point: markets are not rationale, despite what you've been told your entire life.
Fair point, yeah I think this book just wasn't made for me. I'm not the target audience at all, since I already agree with the premise. Glad he wrote it though since it's definitely good agitprop for libs!
I definitely agree. I was disappointed because I've really enjoyed some of his other writings but it gets bogged down in too many anecdotes without fully developing an analysis of the phenomenon. I really hope someone else can come along and develop what Graeber started.
The longer book version is good if you want to really drive the point home but the main points are in the shorter article version
I recommend the article to all my lib/libertarian friends when they complain about work
ive read utopia of rules twice and i still cant figure out what his overall point was, can you perhaps help me out?
Well. it's a collection of essays, so the point is less clear than Bullshit Jobs, but it's largely about bureaucracy, how public and private bureaucracies are basically indistinguishable, and how they maintain a facade of respectability over situations that are, in his words, already stupid, because of factors of inequality and arbitrary authority and the like.
it’s a collection of essays, so the point is less clear than Bullshit Jobs,
i think thats what gave me the most trouble
I'll be honest, a part of me was disappointed in the subject matter. I kinda thought it was going to be about the modern tendency in society to make new rules or laws in reaction to singular events, and how the mentality behind that is basically that, with the right set of rules on the books, you would have a Utopia (hence the name, I thought). It's not about that, and it's good for what it is, but I'd still like to read something about that other topic.
I think the overall point of Rules was to highlight the stupid absurdity of bureaucracy and that in large part it only becomes what it is because of the underlying promise of state violence. I'll add that I read Rules at almost the same time that I read Capitalist Realism, and I think the lasting value of the former lies in its ability to pick at the inherent contradictions of liberal bureaucracies in a way that doesn't scare the shit out of libs. Graeber tends to be above all relatively accessible. There's a lot of talk in this thread about hiding his power level, and I'm sure there's some of that, but I don't think he did that here really. Bureaucracy is dumb and everyone hates it; you don't have to want to start a vanguard party to take a sledgehammer to civil society.
I enjoyed the last bits of Capitalist Realism especially the chapter titles, Marxist Supernanny and Market Stalinism both made me laugh out loud the first time I read them.
I love this book, and it really is a great introduction to the idea of 'work' in a capitalist society.
It really helped to articulate and explain this massive problem no one really talks about.
I am real tempted to leave a copy of this in the bathroom at work.
get some malcolm gladwell and "Deep Work" and pretend its self-help/lib nonsense. say it was gifted and you haven't read it if you get caught
Extremely good book! And absolutely palatable for libs, recommend it to all your lib friends, folks.
This book was a nice easy read. I also found the audio version of it to be ultra sassy.
One of the big pluses of this book is that most libraries have it. Hiding your book's power level does have its perks.
