I’ve been asked to respond to the review of Utopia of Rules by Anastasia Piliavsky, but I must confess I find myself rather at a loss for how to do so.
The book is a collection of essays (I had originally wanted to call it “Three Essays on Bureaucracy”) which I had hoped might spark a debate about what I call the present “age of total bureaucratization.” In the introduction, I argue that since the 1970s, we have seen a kind of synthesis of public and private bureaucracies in a way that has made administrative procedures such a constant fixture of our everyday existence that we no longer even notice them, and that, what is more, the accompanying fusion of private and public power has become the main means... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Take an ethnographer. She has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne studying witchcraft. ‘How exciting, how thrilling, how extraordinary...! Tell us all about the witches’, she is asked again and again when she gets back to the city. Just as one might say: tell us tales about ogres and wolves, about Little Red Riding Hood. Frighten us, but make it clear that it’s only a story; or that they are just peasants: credulous, backward and marginal. Or alternatively: confirm that out there there are some people who can bend the laws of causality and morality, who can kill by magic and not be punished; but remember to end by saying that they do not really have that power....
Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly words... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conflict between political ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination)
“All power to the imagination.” “Be realistic, demand the impossible...” Anyone involved in radical politics has heard these expressions a thousand times. Usually they charm and excite the first time one encounters them, then eventually become so familiar as to seem hackneyed, or just disappear into the ambient background noise of radical life. Rarely if ever are they the object of serious theoretical reflection.
It seems to me that at the current historical juncture, some such reflection wouldn’t be a bad idea. We are at a moment, after all, when received definitions ha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Roy Bhaskar, who has died aged 70 of heart failure, turned to philosophy only after becoming an economics lecturer at Oxford University in the late 1960s. Feeling that economic science had virtually nothing useful to say about real-world issues of global wealth and poverty, he embarked on research that led to the foundation of the philosophical school known as critical realism.
The Oxford curriculum for PPE – philosophy, politics and economics – provided a training for would-be politicians and civil servants who were more likely to contain or even reinforce society’s problems than resolve them. Roy wanted to provide the tools for understanding society’s problems in a deeper, structural sense that might allow w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On the 19th of January, several of the heavyweights of Italian post-Workerist theory — Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel — appeared at the Tate Modern to talk about art. This is a review.
Or, it is a review in a certain sense. I want to give an account of what happened. But I also want to talk about why I think what happened was interesting and important. For me at least, this means addressing not only what was said but just as much, perhaps, what wasn’t; and asking questions like “why immaterial labor ?”, and “why did it make sense to all concerned to bring a group of revolutionary theorists over from Italy to talk about art history in the first place?”
As... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatizing their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.
“If you look at America, there were all sorts of scams like that back in the 19th century with railroads and the like,” I remember one cheerful, bespectacled Russian twentysomething explaining to me. “We are still in the savage stage. It al... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.
I want to suggest an alter... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This exchange is from a conversation in Paris between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. It was held at the École Normale Supérieure; moderated by Joseph Confavreux and Jade Lindgaard; edited by Edwy Plenel; first published by the French magazine Mediapart last October; and translated from the French for The Baffler by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Moderators: You both appear to think that the prevailing economic and financial system has run its course, and cannot endure much longer in its present form. I would like to ask each of you to explain why.
Thomas Piketty: I am not sure that we are on the eve of a collapse of the system, a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There is a certain type of joy only felt the first time one makes history, and you can’t really describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Yesterday about 10,000 young people from across the country discovered what it’s like.
19 November 2014, the date of the Free Education march, will surely be remembered as the start of a new student movement. Without the support of any major party or institution, abandoned even by their own National Union of Students, organizers nonetheless managed to mobilize thousands, including teenage college students and schoolchildren, supported by a smattering of veterans from the mobilizations of 2010.
Still, unlike the occupiers in 2010, this was not a defensive action, not a c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I.
Let me clarify one thing from the start: Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight Rises really is a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda. Nolan, the director, claims the script was written before the movement even started, and that the famous scenes of the occupation of New York (“Gotham”) were really inspired by Dickens’ account of the French Revolution.
This is probably true, but it’s disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually being rewritten while movies are in production, and that when it comes to messaging, even details like where a scene is shot (“I know, let’s have the cops face off with Bane’s followers right in front of the New York Stock Exchange!&r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract
Terms such as ‘fate’ and ‘luck’ are ways of talking about the ambiguities and antinomies of temporal existence that all humans, even social theorists, have to confront in one form or another. Concepts that include mana, s´akti, baraka, and orenda might best be considered as grappling with the exact same paradoxes. Nor should we assume that social scientific approaches are necessarily more sophisticated. Current discourse on ‘performativity’, for instance, seems in certain ways rather crude when compared to the Malagasy concept of hasina (usually trans- lated as ‘sacred power’), which takes on the same dilemma—what I call the ‘paradox of performativity’&m... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) DAVID GRAEBER: I was in Syria once. I was in southern Turkey. I was in Iraq. I was in a variety of different areas within the Kurdish territories that are experimenting with direct democracy.
Interviewer: Can you tell me about what brought you there, and certainly from the very beginning?
DAVID GRAEBER: It was less that I found them than they found me. There’s people involved in the Kurdish Freedom Movement that … it started … it emerged from the PKK, which is a rather conventional, Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group in its origins. But something about its history took it in this radically new direction, and a lot of it was internal processes of women guerrillas sort of asserting themselves, and introducing f... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) What follows emerges largely from my own experience of the alternative globalization movement, where issues of democracy have been very much at the center of debate. Anarchists in Europe or North America and indigenous organizations in the Global South have found themselves locked in remarkably similar arguments. Is “democracy” an inherently Western concept? Does it refer a form of governance (a mode of communal self-organization), or a form of govern ment (one particular way of organizing a state apparatus) ? Does democracy necessarily imply majority rule? Is representative democracy really democracy at all? Is the word permanently tainted by its origins in Athens, a militaristic, slave-owning society founded on the systematic ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Everyone already knows how much of Theresa May’s platform, policies and even rhetoric are directly stolen from Ukip. Nigel Farage himself publicly pointed it out this Sunday: not only had May taken Ukip’s major policy issues (immigration, grammar schools, bashing EU bureaucrats), he said, “She is using exactly the same words and phrases that I have been using for 20 years.” The general line from Ukip about its recent electoral wipeout is that if the Conservatives beat Ukip, it’s only because the ruling party now effectively is Ukip. So perhaps their work is done.
Less remarked on is the fact that May is playing the exact same game with the Labor left. Corbyn insiders note with dismay how they regularly s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to-GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argument on a spreadsheet error. The premise behind the cuts turns out to be faulty. There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession.
Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Payment Due
For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery. By the same token, for the past five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. In the throes of the recent economic crisis, with the very defining institutions of capitalism crum... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Our society is addicted to work. If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person. As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time.
Much of this work is entirely pointless. Whole industries (think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity) whole lines of work (middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines) exist primarily... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A Few Words by Way of Introduction
When I originally set out to write this book, the goals I had in mind were relatively modest. I was interested, first of all, in making a contribution to anthropological theories of value.
Many anthropologists have long felt we really should have a theory of value: that is, one that seeks to move from understanding how different cultures define the world in radically different ways (which anthropologists have always been good at describing) to how, at the same time, they define what is beautiful, or worthwhile, or important about it. To see how meaning, one might say, turns into desire. To be able to do so promises to resolve a lot of notoriously thorny problems not only in anthropology but also in soc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) – A question many keep asking themselves, — how did it happen that Americans elected Donald Trump after all?
– As you know, most Americans are suspicious of their elites and believe elites to be corrupt, not representative of people’s interests and indifferent to them. Perhaps, Hillary Clinton – is the only candidate in the history of US elections who positioned herself as a consolidated elites representative.
Clinton actively insisted on maintaining the status-quo and presented herself as a conservative candidate, while Trump positioned himself as a radical one. No wonder, she wasn’t elected. It seems as all the way Trump could have equally well convinced citizens to vote against him. He in... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy”, coauthored by three economists from the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract: Marxist theory has by now largely abandoned the (seriously flawed) notion of the ‘mode of production’, but doing so has only encouraged a trend to abandon much of what was radical about it and naturalize capitalist categories. This article argues a better conceived notion of a mode of production – one that recognizes the primacy of human production, and hence a more sophisticated notion of materialism – might still have something to show us: notably, that capitalism, or at least industrial capitalism, has far more in common with, and is historically more closely linked with, chattel slavery than most of us had ever imagined.
What follows is really just the summary of a much longer argument I hope to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it’s almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction. But (rather like the idea of progress itself, to which it’s obviously connected), it seems much easier to renounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought. Vanguardist, even, sectarian attitudes have become deeply ingrained in academic radicalism it’s hard to say what it would mean to think outside them.
The d... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigor or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfill somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such d... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction: The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization
Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere. There were sociological tomes with grandiose titles like A General Theory of Bureaucracy [1], The Politics of Bureaucracy [2], or even The Bureaucratization of the World [3], and popular paperback screeds with titles like Parkinson’s Law [4], The Peter Principle,[5] or Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them.[6]
There were Kafkaesque novels, and satirical films. Everyone seemed to feel that the foibles and absurdities of bureaucratic life and bureaucratic procedures were one of the defining features... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction: The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization
Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere. There were sociological tomes with grandiose titles like A General Theory of Bureaucracy [1], The Politics of Bureaucracy [2], or even The Bureaucratization of the World [3], and popular paperback screeds with titles like Parkinson’s Law [4], The Peter Principle,[5] or Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them.[6]
There were Kafkaesque novels, and satirical films. Everyone seemed to feel that the foibles and absurdities of bureaucratic life and bureaucratic procedures were one of the definin... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract:
The theory of value presented in the next essay was developed in the 1980s (largely by anthropologists in the University of Chicago) and ‘90s (largely by myself) so it occurred to me, this being a new millennium and all, it might be helpful to the reader to provide something of an update. Something to demonstrate how this rather abstract theory can be useful for something. Since I am writing from America (just barely: I’m writing from New York, which is a little like America, but also a little like the world) shortly after the quite possibly legitimate reelection of George W. Bush, this seemed an obvious topic for reflection. How on earth could this have happened? All over the world, and certainly across the Ame... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Abstract
This article examines the role of values in the political discourse of the last decade in the US. It embarks from what many observers had described as a puzzle: the fact that significant parts of the American working class voted against their economic interests but in line with what they perceived to be their values. As a result, a president had been reelected who cut taxes for the rich while waging an expensive war in Iraq and increasing public debt to historically unprecedented levels. It is argued that large sectors of the white American working class were disappointed with liberal politicians because they associated them with a cultural elite that occupied positions in society that allowed them to pursue careers of intri... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Economics might be said to have begun largely as a series of reflections on the origin and nature of value in human society. But those days are long since past. Nowadays, economists tend to limit themselves to producing mathematical models of how economic actors allocate scarce resources in pursuit of profit, or how consumers rank their preferences; they do not ask what those actors are ultimately trying to achieve in life or why consumers want to consume the things they do. The latter sorts of questions, questions of value, have been largely abandoned to anthropologists, sociologists or philosophers.
It is not entirely clear, however, whether an anthropological theory of value actually exists. Anthropologists often talk as if one do... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)