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- cross-posted to:
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David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
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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.
I didn’t actually know about this guy. Reading up on him now. Thanks for posting!
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
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.
Which one should I start with?
I’ve not read them all, so I can’t really rank them, but I do share Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! often, and of course there are the renowned Bullshit Jobs and Debt. I’m sure other folks can add their own suggestions…
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up to what size & technological level?
There are historical examples with tens to hundreds of tousands of inhabitants. Those are actually quite common.
Graeber’s book “The dawn of everything” has some good examples.
The thing is there is no tipping point. You have small size hunter gatherer groups who are egalitarian and others aren’t. Same for agricultural societies and cities and on and on. There are even groups that change depending on the season. The Dawn of Everything is a very enlightening book about this topic
In what way is the “technological level” dependant on a state?
From the top of my head: The Neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas show that both metrics can be answered with “quite high/a lot”.
my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.
For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.
I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.
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.
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.
Chiapas has a lot of what it does because of Mexico. The anarchists didn’t create the sewer or power systems for example
Is there a reason why anarchists couldn’t build these infrastructures?
The fact that this is one of the areas that anarchist communities historically struggle with?
Can you give examples? I’m not aware of any historical precedents where these attempts failed.
Here’s an example from Rojava
“ The village asked the Rojava government for help, but were told the authorities can’t do anything. They lack the money, expertise, and the personnel. This is a common refrain in the autonomous region of northern Syria where the Kurdish-led administration has built a quasi-state but is hemmed in by neighbours with whom relations range from frosty to openly hostile.
Rojava is, to a large extent, dependent on the benevolence of foreigners to fund and oversee big-budget projects like waste management. Officials across Rojava said they have shown representatives of European organizations the problems they face, like lack of water treatment facilities, and were given promises of help. But they have seen little results”
https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/21032019
This is by no means unique. Anarchist societies IRL frequently lack the expertise needed for these projects because the skilled people who can do them tend to work in places that compensate them better than others for their work.
This is why the Dead Kennedy’s have that line “Anarchy sounds good to me until someone says ‘who will fix the sewers?’”
This just goes to show that theory heavy anarchists and other leftists need to bring that theory to the blue collar working class who works the water treatment plants and other infrastructure. A lot of them are union jobs it shouldn’t be too hard to get people down with anarchist concepts if explained in a way that’s not theory heavy.
This is less an example of how anarchism can’t do this or that, but rather that you can’t have your insular little utopia if you’re surrounded by powerful entities whose interests directly oppose yours. There is no right life within the wrong one.
I still don’t see why a sewage system is cathegorically out of the question when the problems here are less “you can’t organise the construction of a sewage system” and more “we still live in a globalised system which is fundamentally based on competition.”
That is not exactly a credible source. To quote the wikipedia on it:
A number of international and Kurdish sources have described Rudaw as affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, particularly the current President of the Kurdistan Region Nechirvan Barzani.
Rudaw Media Network was temporarily banned in Syrian Kurdistan due to its partisan news and alleged smear campaigns against the Kurdish political parties which oppose the Kurdistan Democratic Party, a ruling political party led by the Barzani family members.
And besides, you are really arguing that a semi-functional, mostly representative organ in the middle of a civil war doesn’t have the resources to maintain sewers?
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).
Radicalize the workers
I wish it were that simple.
This is juvenile
Thats such a silly question that shows a deep lack of understanding what anarchism actually means.
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
It seems you are asking anarchism to prove itself as utopia for all.
No, I am asking a practical question about the real world and the comment they made was just insulting me. How would anarchists confront a real world technological problem that they absolutely would face in a modern society. How would a non-capitalist non-authoritarian government fix this issue.
The capitalists would incentivize this work through higher wages.
The authoritarian might force those who can fix the issue to do the same (provided they don’t have the ability to compensate someone better)
How do anarchists get the people who have these skills to do the work other than hoping that multiple people who have those skills choose to do so?
This is such a sad world view that you have.
And kinda ironic given that you are writing this on a platform developed and run by such highly qualified individuals not because they are paid for it or forced to do it, but because they think it is the right thing to do. And there are so many similar example all over the world, not only in the digital realm. And you know what? People that live somewhere tend to appreciate working water supply and sewerage systems and are willing to fix it themselves if not prevented by some government or company. It’s not that hard to do, and I have personally done it before.
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150 seems to be the number for humans.
What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You’ll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.
The article formatting is hosed because it’s so old, but this is the most important thing I’ve ever read to describe wide swaths of human behavior. Give it a shot and the world will make loads more sense.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Funny note; For all the times I’ve posted that here and on reddit, not one soul has come back and said any part of it was bullshit.
it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of “people i know well enough to fully humanize” and “all other humans.”
I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we’ve built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.
The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author’s premise.
Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.
AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are “defectors” (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.
But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.
Article says nothing of the sort, only that it’s understandable why we view things like a busload of dead kids in Iran as less tragic than our mom dying. I think you’re focusing on single trees, missing the forest.
This article isn’t wrong, but it seems to be emphasizing that we remember our limitations and think critically when dealing with complex issues. It doesn’t really match this post which seems to be promoting living in tiny, isolated, self sufficient villages. It’s occurring to me in real time that he means communes
I was answering a single comment, not the post in general.
every example of “monkey considering monkey stranger” was “bad monkey.” That is the forest of this article: we’re good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.
but that’s not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.
again I agree that we don’t think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don’t give them the level of consideration we should. we don’t live up to the golden rule all the time.
but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.
Further evidence that only the good die young. My man was too great for this world.
Here’s a fun Graeber video
This is awesome!
do you remember one or two? I’m unlikely to go get that book any time soon.
How many of those societies have undergone an industrial revolution?
… But they study those societies by their bones.
We don’t owe the future tall buildings, smog, and a persistant thread of civilizational narrative. Humans living on their own terms might just die.
