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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by dj1936@szmer.info to c/anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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.

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[-] lugal@sopuli.xyz 43 points 7 months ago

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

[-] dj1936@szmer.info 4 points 7 months ago
[-] ShareMySims@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 7 months ago
[-] lena@gregtech.eu 6 points 7 months ago

Which one should I start with?

[-] ShareMySims@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 7 months ago

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..

[-] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 24 points 7 months ago

up to what size & technological level?

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 23 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] lugal@sopuli.xyz 20 points 7 months ago

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

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 19 points 7 months ago

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".

[-] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 6 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Native American societies were quite sophisticated. Some were closer to anarchy, some weren't. A lot of what we would like to know got wiped out before any European met them; initial contact was towards the south, but disease spread northward before Europeans did. The writings we do have about their society come from Europeans, which is hardly the best source.

What we can gather from archeology is that they had cities just as big as European ones at the time, and had trade and agriculture on the same level, as well. North America was a fully anthropogenic environment--altered to be better for humans--and the common perception of "vast, untouched wilderness" comes from the fact that Europeans were visiting a century after disease had ravaged the native population.

Edit: rereading your post, what society could solve the "higher technology oppressor" problem?

[-] MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Chiapas has a lot of what it does because of Mexico. The anarchists didn’t create the sewer or power systems for example

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 6 points 7 months ago

Is there a reason why anarchists couldn't build these infrastructures?

[-] MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

The fact that this is one of the areas that anarchist communities historically struggle with?

[-] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 6 points 7 months ago

Can you give examples? I'm not aware of any historical precedents where these attempts failed.

[-] Rozauhtuno 2 points 7 months ago

"Sorry babe, can't have toilets. If a king or president doesn't sign this bill we can't invent plumbing" - A conversation that totally happened in every commune ever.

[-] MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

Exactly, please explain how anarchists would approach the problem of redoing the entire US electrical grid (this is critical from a security perspective and would increase efficiency).

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 9 points 7 months ago

Thats such a silly question that shows a deep lack of understanding what anarchism actually means.

[-] MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Why are you bothering to reply then unless your goal was to be rude to someone else? You certainly have nothing constructive to offer in your comment.

Dont bother replying. im blocking you because you clearly aren’t worth it

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[-] inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 months ago

Radicalize the workers

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

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?

[-] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I have worked in Sweden too, heavily unionised at the time being.

What do you mean it's a question for capitalism? If you can't solve it, then it will still be a problem for your syndicalism.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 7 months ago

Syndicalisim solves it by reducing hours once everyone is in a co-op. I say it's a question for capitalism because they could just do that right now, there's some good arguments that they could, but don't.

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

you can’t just hand wave away the problem and say it’s a problem in capitalism and then not tackle it. capitalism solves it with horrible living conditions: work to someone else’s standard or die

game theory exists - the system only works when everyone is honest, and every human system is going to have selfish, egotistical, and sociopathic people

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[-] novaloss@vegantheoryclub.org 15 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] Sturgist@lemmy.ca 5 points 7 months ago

ever-growing-rarely-shrinking book list.

✊ The struggle is real fam

[-] jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 12 points 7 months ago
[-] Franconian_Nomad@feddit.org 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is awesome!

[-] Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 months ago

The last 2 minutes of this talk are pure gold. Thanks for sharing!

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago

Further evidence that only the good die young. My man was too great for this world.

[-] Numberone@startrek.website 6 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] stm@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 points 7 months ago

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

[-] maevyn 1 points 7 months ago

I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.

Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago

i’d argue that slow scientific progress is morally questionable… people live longer and quality of life increases dramatically with new scientific research. to extend that time would need a pretty big offset to that to make up for it

[-] maevyn 2 points 7 months ago

I dunno, I feel like rushing forward and making hasty generalizations and doing shoddy science is also morally questionable, and also ultimately gets worse results. And I see a lot of that in the tech industry anyways.

Just a had a convo today with one my mentors about javascript framework benchmarks, and how the main ones don’t actually measure accurately at all because of the way the engine inlines and optimizes things. He went through all the trouble of building a tool to make it easier to do rigorous measurements, because engineers at the company had been doing these shoddy benchmarks, using it to justify shipping “optimizations”, getting a nice raise, and then he would come in and realize that they had really just moved the work elsewhere and it actually caused a regression here or there.

And nobody really cared in the end. They used it for a while, then it fell by the wayside.

Real scientific rigor isn’t really respected in the same way it used to be, if it ever was. It’s more about marketing, finding an angle you can sell. Because when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, everyone starts gaming it. And money and productivity have become the ultimate metric.

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[-] Numberone@startrek.website 1 points 7 months ago

Agreed on necessity. I just mean, would having such a federated society allow for that kind of thing at all, or would it put an upward limit on how far society could go? I mean it's all speculation I guess. Thanks for answering.

[-] maevyn 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I think it’s more that it would take more time and coordination to do larger things. Like, you need to get all of the people on board, you need to convince them to work on it without coercion (either force or money), so it takes a lot longer. Everybody is going to want their basic needs met and their problems dealt with first.

But when you step back and think about it, with our current level of technology, that would be fine. Like, if I went to a hundred engineers and was like “hey I wanna build a rocket, who’s with me?” And they said “sure, once I have free time, but can we figure out food/water/shelter/entertainment/comfort first?” That would be reasonable. Maybe it takes a few decades or longer to figure those things out in a sustainable way, but at scale in society it could definitely be done.

Think about electricity. It is currently functionally limitless (yes, there are limits, but we don’t treat it like that in day to day life). And to keep it that way is relatively low maintenance, once we figure out renewables (or nuclear, or both) anyways. Same with the internet, once it’s built it’s fairly easy to maintain, and we’re at the point with fiber where it’s fairly difficult to overuse it, so giving it to everyone as baseline would be easy.

Once we had a better system for the basics, one that essentially is low maintenance and ensures everyone gets everything they need (with choice and freedom too, if everyone is fed but all we have is potatoes, the next question would be “ok how do we get more variety?”), then there would be a lot more time to focus on large efforts.

Those still would take longer, because even when we have all of the basics handled, it would take much longer to make decisions, there would be long, frustrating debates, somebody might storm off, etc. It might take a lifetime. But there wouldn’t be urgency either, because we all have the basics, plus luxuries, essentially our modern lives as they are. Just without the need to produce more every second of every day.

All of this could be decentralized too. It’s not like I’m saying there would be a command economy, necessarily. In fact, it shouldn’t be centralized too much ideally, that could over concentrate power.

Where this falls apart is game theory essentially. If I choose to be less productive and focus on that basic infrastructure, and take my time, that lets other players get ahead. If that goes on long enough, those other players may have advanced enough that they can dominate the game. It’s a literal arms race in that sense, this is playing out with AI right now. For it to work, everyone would need to agree to slow down, all at once.

This is a major issue because what’s happening is we’re hitting artificial maximum’s because of this strategy. I deal with this all the time working on software infrastructure. People want to push for product non stop, and then their code turns out completely unmaintainable. Infra comes along, analyzes, figures out a better pattern, and eventually we fix it, but not before the damage is done and it takes years to fix, or we just rewrite it all. If we had taken the time to build it the right way the first time, it would have likely been a much faster process. BUT, the startup may have folded in the meantime, because someone else put together a dumpster fire, spruced it up to look real nice, and got a bunch of people to choose them instead. And now they won.

So yeah, I think about this a lot haha 😅 we are, technologically speaking, capable of being post scarcity. Why are we still acting like technological advancement is about life and death? Why do we have to race to the bottom?

Edit: Oh, speed also does matter for coordinating in emergencies, so there is an argument for “we don’t have time because the environment will fall apart or we have an asteroid incoming, etc.” but like, re: the environment, that is not only happening, but the productivity arms race is making it worse! That’s an example of an artificial maximum’s there.

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[-] fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 months ago
[-] UniversalMonk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 months ago

I didn't actually know about this guy. Reading up on him now. Thanks for posting!

[-] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 3 points 7 months ago

do you remember one or two? I'm unlikely to go get that book any time soon.

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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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