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What Happened to David Graeber?
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago"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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eightysixfour 3y agoI 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoPrecisely 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 3y agoReal enlightenment comes when you realize “Debt” was mostly nonsense too.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoI 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 3y ago/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.
- wharvle 3y agoThe 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.
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- tsunamifury 3y ago“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 3y agoEven 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 3y agoWhat was the data that Graeber used? Fan mail from people who didn't like their jobs?
- Biologist123 3y agoPeople 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 3y agoYes, Bullshit Jobs has a lot of interesting ideas and narratives. I found it worth reading for that.
- immibis 3y agoMy 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 3y agoThis 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/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
- incompatible 3y ago> 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 3y agoPlease read the United States founding documents.
- rendall 3y agoI suggest reading the original idea with charity. You might very well still disagree, but it would be informed disagreement.
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoOne 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 3y ago"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 3y agoLike much of Graeber's output, it doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
- perrygeo 3y agoYou 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 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 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dappermanneke 3y agolooks like HN isn’t interested in hearing how economics actually works today
- mardifoufs 3y agoWhat? 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.
- decasia 3y agoI 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 3y agoCOVID, according to my fiancee
- veggieWHITES 3y agoGraeber 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber#Death
- thinkingemote 3y agoDid 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-reimagining-the-world-after-pandemic/ 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."
- frozenport 3y agoAs 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 3y ago> 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.
- corinroyal 3y ago[flagged]
- wahnfrieden 3y agoRidiculous tone policing. Respond to the worthwhile content
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- mempko 3y agoI 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 3y agoI’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 3y agoMy reading is that these were examples to illustrate, and not arguments for, Graeber's change of heart.
- camillomiller 3y agoI 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 3y agoDogmatism 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 3y agoMoreover, 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.
- jongjong 3y agoI 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 3y agoYa 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 3y agoWhat is anarchist about cartels?
- jongjong 3y agoI 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 3y agoA 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.
- azaras 3y agoIt 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 3y agoThere 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 3y agoI'm continuously fascinated by the caliber of people on HN. David Graeber had an account as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber
- verisimi 3y agoWhat a crazy exchange. Graeber comes of well though.
- tsunamifury 3y agoThat is a wierdddddd set of comments.
- ajkjk 3y ago> 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 3y agoAgreed. 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/ https://reducing-suffering.org/ . But they definitely don't come at it from such a half baked angle.
- EasyMark 3y agoThat page has some wild topics... https://reducing-suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature/ https://reducing-suffering.org/should-we-intervene-in-nature...
- verisimi 3y agoIt'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?
- groceryheist 3y agoThis 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 3y agoThe title is clickbait from a conspiracy theorist's perspective.
- zeroCalories 3y agoMany 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 3y agoCan you elaborate this? It sounds interesting.
- swed420 3y agoYou speak as if capitalism isn't overflowing with its own increasingly untenable contradictions.
- zeroCalories 3y agoNo 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.
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoYou have no idea what you are talking about, because you do indeed create anarchism through creation of mutual aid networks like for example Food Not Bombs.
- panick21_ 3y ago> you do indeed create anarchism through creation of mutual aid networks #Theoretically
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- WBrentWilliams 3y agoJust 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 3y ago> 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.
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoDunbar number is bullshit.
- re5i5tor 3y agoThanks for posting — I’ve been wanting an outside perspective on Graeber since I read and loved the Dawn of Everything.
- re5i5tor 3y agoThe review references a NY Mag profile that I also found to be good Graeber background. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-o...
- panick21_ 3y agoGraeber 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.
- davidgerard 3y agoThis article attempts to abstract a deathbed renunciation from thin evidence.
- muzamil2002 3y ago[dead]