Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is David Graeber, who teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value,” “Lost People,” and “Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire.”
His new book is entitled “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and in it, Graeber indeed examines the historical significance of debt, the struggle between rich and poor, and the moral implications inherent in our ideas about credit and debt.
The U.S. Treasury Department last Friday reiterated its Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling, and urged Congress “to avoid the catastrophic economic and market con... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract
The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a wa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Part 1
David Graeber is a Reader of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s, London, and a left-wing political activist. His most recent book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, has just been published in the UK. It looks at the evolution of debt as both a moral and an economic concept, drawing on anthropological evidence from a wide range of societies, both contemporary and historical.
I met up with David to discuss some of the arguments in the book. In the first of a two-part interview, he examines how the language of morality became the language of debt, and how our basic moral and legal concepts have been profoundly shaped by a history of war and slavery.
In a recent column criticizing right-wing Republicans for being cavalier a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) If The Great Transformation will be remembered for anything a century from now, it will be as the definitive rejoinder to the great liberal myth. This is, of course, the assumption that there is something natural about what Polanyi called “self-regulating markets”, that they arise of their own accord as long as state interference doesn’t prevent them. Polanyi examined the very period when this ideology first emerged, and managed to demonstrate just how crucial government interference was in creating “the self-regulating market” to begin with—just as it has continued to be necessary to maintain it.
One need hardly point out that in the current, neoliberal age, Polanyi’s insights are more relev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Middle Ages (600 – 450 AD)
Artificial wealth comprises the things which of themselves satisfy no natural need, for example money, which is a human contrivance.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
If the Axial Age saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.
Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires. Eventually, new states formed, but in these new states, the nexus between war, bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their own sake were no longer celebrated as the end of all political life. At the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trad... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.
There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?
There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.
For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the land where “No Future for You” became the motto of a generation, and then another generation, and then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair: despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as pride or secret pleasure. It’s almost as if it’s finall... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Some people (me, for instance) put a great deal of energy into organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic power? It’s not as if other parts of a formal suit—white shirts, tailored slacks, vests, or blazers—inspire the same sort of indignation. Somehow, it feels as if tying the necktie around your neck marks a final act of closure. It’s the act that transforms all those items into a suit, with all the suit implies, whether it’s the power of the boardroom or the ceremonial formalities of weddings and funerals—that whole world of official business over which men in suits invariably preside. No doubt, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) CHAPTER 5: DIRECT ACTION, ANARCHISM, DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Since this is a book about direct action, it might be best to begin by explaining what that is.
I) WHAT IS DIRECT ACTION?
Over the years, hundreds of anarchists have tried to answer this question, in pamphlets and broadsides and speeches. Here’s a sampling:
Direct action implies one’s acting for one’s self, in a fashion in which one may weigh directly the problem with which you are confronted, and without needing the mediation of politicians or bureaucrats. If you see some bulldozers about to wreck your house, you engage in direct action to directly intervene to try to stop them. Direct action places moral conscience up against the official law… It is... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) What follows is the epilogue to “The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987”, which is a historical ethnography about a village called Betafo in central Madagascar, by me, David Graeber.
By the way: the definitions of political action which I allude to but don’t quote is: ‘political action consists of actions intended to influence people who are not present when the action is being taken’ (i.e., by being represented to others later; though this does not mean it cannot be intended to influence people who are there, too) and ‘political power is the ability to stop others from acting that way.’
If anyone gets around to reading it, I’d love to know what people think.
It might be useful ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract
Since Frazer’s time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on the subject, they need not be. This essay presents a detailed analysis of the history, myth, and ritual surrounding the Shilluk institution to propose a new set of distinctions: between “divine kingship” (by which humans can become god through arbitrary violence, reflexively defining their victims as “the people”) and “sacred kingship” (the popular domestication of such figures through ritual), and argues that kingship always represents the image of a temporary, imperfect solution to what is ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As the rolling catastrophe of what’s already being called the “chicken coup” against the Labor leadership winds down, pretty much all the commentary has focused on the personal qualities, real or imagined, of the principal players.
Yet such an approach misses out on almost everything that’s really at stake here. The real battle is not over the personality of one man, or even a couple of hundred politicians. If the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn for the past nine months has been so fierce, and so bitter, it is because his existence as head of a major political party is an assault on the very notion that politics should be primarily about the personal qualities of politicians. It’s an attempt to change the ru... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Void Network: Dear David Graeber, good afternoon from Exarchia area, Athens Greece. Here there are some questions that you might try to answer, so we can publish them in the pre b-fest Babylonia issue. So ;How can you define the antiauthoritarian,movement and attitude of today? Do you think that we are facing a major turning point that somehow is showing the limits, of ideology in contradiction with an antiauthauritarian view,free from ideological obstacles?
D.G.: If by “ideology” you mean the idea that one needs to establish a global analysis before taking action (which inevitably leads to the assumption that an intellectual vanguard must necessarily play leadership role in any popular political movement) then I think, y... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The recent defeat of gun buyers’ background check legislation in the Senate—legislation backed by an almost unimaginable 90% of the American public—has been taken as a somber day in the history of American democracy. We’ve been having a lot of such somber days of late. In fact, one can well argue we’ve not only reached the point where not only does the will of the American people has almost no bearing on governance, but most of our opinion-makers see little reason why it should have.
No one can deny there is an increasing disparity between what the American public says it wants, and what the political class feel they should even have to talk about. At the height of the health reform debate in 2009, polls... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ABSTRACT
Originally, the term ‘fetishes’ was used by European merchants to refer to objects employed in West Africa to make and enforce agreements, often between people with almost nothing in common. They thus provide an interesting window on the problem of social creativity – especially since in classic Marxist terms they were surprisingly little fetishized. Starting with an appreciation and critique of William Pietz’s classic work on the subject, and reconsidering classic cases of Tiv spheres of exchange and BaKongo sculpture, this article aims to reimagine African fetishes, and fetishes in general, as ways of creating new social relations.
KEY WORDS
BaKongo • fetishes • fetishism • ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchism:
The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Brittanica)
Basically, if you’re not a utopianist, you’re a schmuck.
Jonothon Feldman (Indigenous Planning Times)
What follows are a series of thoughts, sketche... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I’ve been in a very bad mood this last week, owing to the results of the election in the UK, and I’ve been thinking very hard about what happened and how to maintain hope.
I don’t usually use visual aids but I actually assembled them. And the thing— what I want to talk about a little bit is what seems to be happening in the world politically that we have results like what just happened in the UK, and why there is nonetheless reason for hope, which I really think there is.
In a way, this is very much a blip, but there’s a strategic lesson to be learned, I think, speaking as someone who’s been involved in attempts to transform the world (at least for the last twenty years since I was involved ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Have you noticed how there aren’t any new French intellectuals any more? There was a veritable flood in the late ’70s and early ’80s: Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has been almost no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters have been forced to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old, or turn to countries like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling meta-theory.
Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied “gift economies” like those of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. His conclusions were startling.
There are a lot of reasons for this. One has to do with politics in France itself, where there has been a concerted effort on ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I would like to make a public apology to anyone who has been hurt by their involvement with HAU.
Six years ago I helped initiate the HAU project. At the time I believed it to be a brilliant concept: an open-access journal, based on a radicalization of the grand tradition of ethnographically grounded anthropological theory. I still believe that. The problem was in its realization. From early on there were signs that something was amiss, that I realize now I should have noticed; these signs became more salient over time. After one incident of alleged physical violence at the end of 2016, some of HAU’s patrons did try to intervene, to stop power from being concentrated and abused; but we did not act firmly or consistently enough &... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of “progressives” — is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.
The first questi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.
1. In the beginning was the word
For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriar... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is a very difficult column for me to write because it’s about my mother.
A week or two after the then IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a posh New York hotel in 2011, there was another case when an Egyptian businessman was briefly arrested for a similar assault at another such New York hotel.
This first struck me as puzzling. It could hardly be a copycat crime; considering the drama surrounding the arrest and travails of DSK, it was inconceivable that anyone would see this and say: “Oh good idea, I’ll attack a chambermaid as well.”
Then it dawned on me.
The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials and... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Sometimes—not very often—a particularly cogent argument against reigning political common sense presents such a shock to the system that it becomes necessary to create an entire body of theory to refute it. Such interventions are themselves events, in the philosophical sense; that is, they reveal aspects of reality that had been largely invisi-ble but, once revealed, seem so entirely obvious that they can never be unseen. Much of the work of the intellectual Right is identifying, and heading off, such challenges.
Let us offer three examples.
In the 1680s, a Huron-Wendat statesman named Kondiaronk, who had been to Europe and was intimately familiar with French and English settler society, engaged in a series of deba... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Sometimes—not very often—a particularly cogent argument against reigning political common sense presents such a shock to the system that it becomes necessary to create an entire body of theory to refute it. Such interventions are themselves events, in the philosophical sense; that is, they reveal aspects of reality that had been largely invisi-ble but, once revealed, seem so entirely obvious that they can never be unseen. Much of the work of the intellectual Right is identifying, and heading off, such challenges.
Let us offer three examples.
In the 1680s, a Huron-Wendat statesman named Kondiaronk, who had been to Europe and was intimately familiar with French and English settler society, engaged in a series of deba... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) David Graeber had a hypothesis. The anthropologist grew up working-class in New York, and while his scholarship garnered accolades, he’s never felt at home in the world of academia. From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some confessed they actually didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week working and the rest browsing cat memes.
Graeber developed a suspicion that this was rather common and, in 2013, wrote an essay for Strike! magazine, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It was just a hypothes... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Any theoretical term is an implicit statement about human nature. Anthropologists tend to be uncomfortable with this fact but it is nonetheless true. Even if one were to make a statement as apparently innocuous as “ritual can take many forms in many places,” one is still asserting that “ritual” is a meaningful cross-cultural category, implying—as pretty much any anthropological discussion of ritual invariably does imply—that we can assume all human beings have engaged in some kind of ritual activity at some point or another, that ritual is an inherent aspect of human sociality, even if there’s no scholarly consensus whatsoever as to what, precisely, a ritual is or what it says about us that we are a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) First of all allow me to remark how touched and honored I am to be put on the same list as James Mooney, who I’ve always admired, and Edmund Leach, who may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career. Leach for me always been a model of intellectual freedom.
I hadn’t heard that Dimitra Doukas hasn’t been given a proper job and am outraged to hear it; the fact that she hasn’t it seems to me also answers the question with which the essay ends, of why US anthropology didn’t foreseen Trump, since her work is specifically about using ethnographic tools to understand right-wing populism. I was myself writing about similar issues—in Harpers, since Anthropology didn’t ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is an essay about the nature of hierarchy. In it, I want to delve into hierarchy’s most elementary forms: the way people avert their eyes or stand at attention, the sort of topics they avoid in formal conversation, what it means to treat another human being as somehow abstract, sacred, transcendent, set apart from the endless entanglements and sheer physical messiness of ordinary physical existence, and why something like that always seems to happen when some people claim to be inherently superior to others. It seems to me an investigation like this is important since it is only by beginning to ask such questions that we can begin to think about which of the qualities we ordinarily lump together in a word like “hierarchy&rd... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have traditionally classified foragers on the Pacific coast of North America into two major culture areas, characterized by strikingly different social and ethical systems. These are “California” and the adjacent “Northwest Coast.” Foragers in the northern part of California exhibit many elements of Weber’s “Protestant ethic,” such as the moral injunction for community leaders to work hard, seek spiritual purpose by introspection, and pursue monetary wealth while avoiding material excess. By contrast, the social organization of Northwest Coast foragers bears comparison with that of courtly estates in medieval Europe, where a leisured class of nobles achieved status th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) David Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics. He is the author of the classic “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years” and played an important role in the launching of Occupy Wall Street. Last year, he wrote a much-discussed essay asking what happened to society’s old promise of more leisure time for workers; for the tasks that have come to occupy the hours that were once promised to be ours, Graeber invented the delicate and slightly obscure label, “bullshit jobs.”
I wanted to know exactly what he meant by that, and so we discussed the matter over email. The following conversation has been lightly edited.
Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)