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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?
There are historical examples with tens to hundreds of tousands of inhabitants. Those are actually quite common.
Graeber's book "The dawn of everything" has some good examples.
For those of us without the book, what sort of examples does it give?
Early agricultural societies in the fertile cescent that existed for 1000+ years and build rather large cities and more recent various meso-american ones that existed in a sort of patchwork with others, but which due to the climatic conditions and later pillaging by European invaders didn't leave much historical records.
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.
American Indians were mostly killed by the germs that the European invaders accidentally brought. In actual battles the Europeans didn't fair so well as they were usually vastly outnumbered and the Europeans that defected or got captured mostly preferred to stay with the Indians afterwards. And yes, never trust history written by the winners.
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 disagree. The native Americans were "technologically" quite advanced when it came to stewardship of the land. Think agriculture (food and forests), language and the like. Europeans basically enacted biological warfare on them.
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
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?
Unions alone are necessary, but not sufficient. They have to actually take over their companies for this to work. The number of workers in a co-operative in France is about 5%.
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?
That's a very good question for capitalism.
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
Yes, science is complex, infrastructure is complex.
i don’t see loosely connected groups being able to solve that issue
these are not "loosely connected groups", it's not a group of friends doing a party, it's a complete industry.
thing is to change relations in production and to work according to needs and with solidarity towards each other and other communities. try to look at it as complete system, not just pinhole view at just scientists interested in particles or whatever scifi there is. that federated system would have to solve food, housing, medicine, education and through solving that and enabling others to work in fields they are interested in would in the end enable space travel, or whatever scifi other there is.
i would say that within that system it would be easier to develop science and more pleasant and beneficial to society than in current capitalist one
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?
I didn't actually know about this guy. Reading up on him now. Thanks for posting!
do you remember one or two? I'm unlikely to go get that book any time soon.