I am sorry to hear this. He cut against the academic grain. He tried his best to increase class awareness in the species, as well as many other things. This is certainly a loss.

I've had his books on my reading list for some time. I'm particularly interested in The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs.

Among the last things he wrote was an introduction, with Andrej Grubačić, to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. It can be read, in full, here. — StreetlightX

Interesting potted intellectual history, though I'm not sure I find it convincing. I'm curious as to what they're referring to here:

Sometimes it seems as if the academic Left has ended up as a result gradually internalizing and reproducing all the most distressing aspects of the neoliberal economism it claims to oppose, to the point where, reading many such analyses (we’re going to be nice and not mention any names), one finds oneself asking, how different all of this really is from the sociobiological hypothesis that our behavior is governed by “selfish genes!”

I wish they'd named names. Does anyone know what kind of academic analyses they're talking about? @StreetlightX @fdrake

I wish they'd named names. Does anyone know what kind of academic analyses they're talking about? StreetlightX @fdrake — jamalrob

I can take a guess at the Left trope Graeber's aiming at? There's a thing we do where we treat capital like an agent; capital does this, neoliberalism does that, capital makes people do blah. It's quite reductive and goes against Graeber's anthropological focus on the every day. Maybe one way to bring out the tension pointed to in the criticism is contrasting Street's OP quote from Graeber:

"Communism is not an abstract, distant ideal, impossible to maintain, but a lived practical reality we all engage in daily, to different degrees, and that even factories could not operate without it—even if much of it operates on the sly, between the cracks, or shifts, or informally, or in what’s not said, or entirely subversively. It’s become fashionable lately to say that capitalism has entered a new phase in which it has become parasitical of forms of creative cooperation, largely on the internet. This is nonsense. It has always been so". — StreetlightX

To the concept of totality (originally from Lukacs? Dunno the history):

IT is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of capitalism. Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.

If People = Capitalist (or neoliberal) subjectivity for all practical purposes, why tf is it that people behave in a community caring-creating manner all the time? Construing people as undifferentiated capital replicators ("selfish genes") vs looking at how people behave in a richer social/anthropological context.

I have no idea on the names Graeber would like to name but won't though!

Maybe one way to bring out the tension pointed to in the criticism is contrasting Street's OP quote from Graeber ... To the concept of totality — fdrake

Yeah, there's certainly a tension there!

They could mean something like that, but it seems too vague to pin down.

Does anyone know what kind of academic analyses they're talking about? — jamalrob

I'm curious as well, actually. My sense is that the sentence before gives the target of the critique:

But if all you’re willing to talk about is that which you claim to stand against, if all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it?

Given that this prefaces a book on mutual aid - which is something to 'stand for', rather than against, as it were - I suspect the critique slings at all those analyses of capitalism and the present that show, again and again, what the problem(s) are, without offering models or enactable principles for a resolution to them. Less standing against, more standing for. Probably pretty much 90% of left academic writing falls under this rubric tbh.

Yes it does look like that. But it was the phrase "internalizing and reproducing all the most distressing aspects of the neoliberal economism" that particularly caught my eye, because that seemed like it could point to something more than simply the negative approach of Leftist analyses.

@Maw probably has a good idea of what's going on.

Given that this prefaces a book on mutual aid - which is something to 'stand for', rather than against, as it were - I suspect the critique slings at all those analyses of capitalism and the present that show, again and again, what the problem(s) are, without offering models or enactable principles for a resolution to them. Less standing against, more standing for. Probably pretty much 90% of left academic writing falls under this rubric tbh. — StreetlightX

I think there's an interplay between the two ideas. The more of your conception of humanity you throw into the circuit of capital for analytic purposes - in its extreme form only the analysis of capitalist totality has revolutionary potency since only it is of critical relevance - the less vision of humanity you have as being already outside of capital. That exterior is simultaneously a positive vision of humanity ("we do this too!" community, mutualism, reciprocity blah blah) and a thing to fight for - "gaps" in totality as politically relevant.

There is what appears to be an irreconcilable difference between the interest of the individual, and the interest of the community. However, it is really reconcilable, through understanding the particular day to day interactions between different people in specific situations. This is what I think the op expresses, a community is built upon particular interactions, rather than indoctrinated ideology. This is morality in its basic, real existence, learning the habits of respect for others. It is not a case of learning some principles of good.

Yes it does look like that. But it was the phrase "internalizing and reproducing all the most distressing aspects of the neoliberal economism" that particularly caught my eye, because that seemed like it could point to something more than simply the negative approach of Leftist analyses. — jamalrob

My instinct is to read it as an aversion to a kind of academic "war of all against all" so that the 'winner' is the Darwinist ubermensch who can provide the most comprehensive critique to the shame of the other losers who can't ("but have you considered this? What about that? - betchya didn't!"). I dunno. It's a reach. To read it this way is to think the comment is about the form of left academic discourse rather than it's content. I think there's definitely 'content' that the comment is pitched at, but its hard to make out.

:up:

I think David Graeber is conflating Communism with morality but that, oddly, doesn't surprise me. May the place he's left and the place he's going to, both, benefit from his wisdom.

Whenever I've read or watched Graeber (a book, a few essays and lectures), I'm left with an impression that some way I had previously conceived of the world was entirely pointless, wrongheaded and useless. Reading the Fragments essay @StreetlightX posted has, reliably, had that effect again:

Excerpt from essay:

In fact, the world is under no obligation to live up to our expectations, and insofar as “reality” refers to anything, it refers to precisely that which can never be entirely encompassed by our imaginative constructions. Totalities, in particular, are always creatures of the imagination. Nations, societies, ideologies, closed systems... none of these really exist. Reality is always infinitely messier than that—even if the belief that they exist is an undeniable social force. For one thing, the habit of thought which defines the world, or society, as a totalizing system (in which every element takes on its significance only in relation to the others) tends to lead almost inevitably to a view of revolutions as cataclysmic ruptures. Since, after all, how else could one totalizing system be replaced by a completely different one than by a cataclysmic rupture? Human history thus becomes a series of revolutions: the Neolithic revolution, the Industrial revolution, the Information revolution, etc., and the political dream becomes to somehow take control of the process; to get to the point where we can cause a rupture of this sort, a momentous breakthrough that will not just happen but result directly from some kind of collective will. “The revolution,” properly speaking. — Graeber

Effect: Welp, guess all that time spent learning about the Theory concept of "the event" was fucking useless - somewhere between a Leninist fantasy and a blindness to historical continuity in the middle of all that "historical materialist" theory.

I'm going to miss the guy. :worry:

the Theory concept of "the event" — fdrake

The Deleuze entry of the wiki article made me twitch a bit.

But yeah - Graeber was a singular mind. He wrote works that challenged the order of things in a way that was accessible and even aspirational - he made you want to see the world like he did, to know the things he'd come to know, and occupy the perspectives that he offered on things. As regards the event:

There is a well-known parable about the Kingdom of the Messiah that Walter Benjamin (who heard it from Gershom Scholem) recounted one evening to Ernst Bloch, who in tum transcribed it in Spuren: "A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come." Benjamin's version of the story goes like this: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

(Agamben, Halos)

:up:

We could have an argument about event as a process of semiotic restructuring and precisely how much material stuff "needs to change/go" for that semiotic restructuring to take place - there's a certain uneasiness with propagating systemic discrimination/hierarchy generating mechanisms into semiotic processes (like racialisation, gendering...) and then thinking "not much needs to change".

Like drawing a few extra lines to make an aspect shift on what's already there, emphasising the two shapes (totalities).




vs interpreting the extra lines as improvisational repurposing of the shape that's already there - emphasising the arrow between them. Discontinuous change showing up only in retrospect (so practically useless). "how to make the event?" vs "how am I/we embodying the "post evental" world now?"

But that's probably a thread that'll take us away from Graeber.

@jamalrob @StreetlightX

Been reading Graeber more intensively since I found out he died, I've got a better idea of where he was directing the remark based on it.

Graeber's "Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value" looks to show what the comment regarding the "selfish gene" is rooted in. There's an extended argument against some themes of structuralism inspired critical theory at the start of the book, and some of the "totality" comments also show up in the Fragments essay. As I see it there are three aspects to it, the first two aspects are given a rich context in the history of anthropology and neoliberalisation since the 1960's, which I won't try and replicate here. The third largely speaks for itself and gives a critical focus to the others.

(1) Part of it does seem to be the idea of totality as I conjectured - seeing all individual desires and intentions as largely irrelevant subjective detail compared to the individual's function in a society. He references Bourdieu's analysis of gift giving in the Kabyle, alleging (paraphrasing with my interpretive mutilation) that gifts function to elicit gifts of higher value through social customs, so they're individual maximising behaviours relative to a form of social ("symbolic") capital. Graeber wonders why the community forming-maintaining aspects of it (and other behaviours) are under-emphasised - if individual maximising behaviour is everywhere, then so are other oriented desire complexes -. He places that pointed question in the context of a theoretical negligence regarding desire's role in community-society maintaining mechanisms; the desires people have and the concrete behaviours they do and institutions they form to work toward them. He calls the trope being suspicions of mere "subjectivism" (he puts quotes around it in text) in analysing society. A conception of a society as a moral project; what are we striving for together? What ought we want?; is inarticulable under this conception - what we ought to want and what we are striving for are given in the structure of the society.

(2) Linked to (1), the trope that individual acts are given their meaning with reference to some whole of interpretation; be that a structuralist signifying system that distributes meaning through negation, a societal mechanism of homeostasis or reproduction; when over emphasised results in a stultifying vision of expressive behaviour. If individual acts are only ever given meaning/significance/value by the totality which they serve a signifying/reproductive/homeostatic role in, how can anything new be made?

(3) The third aspect concerns the structure of the academic discourse of critical theory- an infinitely meta comment. A condemnation in the form of an analogy of two caricatures, which I'll quote verbatim:

1. We now live in a Postmodern Age. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result of our postmodern condition is that schemes to change the world or human society through collective political action are no longer viable. Everything is broken up and fragmented; anyway, such schemes will inevitably either prove impossible, or produce totalitarian nightmares.

3. While this might seem to leave little room for human agency in history, one need not despair completely. Legitimate political action can take place, provided it is on a personal level: through the fashioning of subversive identities, forms of creative consumption and the like. Such action is itself political and potentially liberatory.

It's a broad caricature, with elements pointed in the direction of Lyotard (incommensurable narrative binds/incompossible conditions of articulation), Deleuze (the project of writing self help to create fresh desires under capitalism), Foucault (the relativisation of all knowledge to an episteme, the genealogy of the individual) - the overall picture is of a person as a moth being buffeted around narrative planes with their own internal logics, mutually irreconcilable but inter-related, where not even the animating spirits of people or planes can ever hope to make sense on their own terms. The kind of picture of humanity that led Rick Roderick to title his courses on postmodernity and its progenitors as: "The Masters of Suspicion" (on progenitors) and "The Self Under Siege" (on theorists of postmodernity).

To the extent capital plays a coordinating role on the logic (and genesis) of those planes, people will be seen as undifferentiated capital replicators - the abstract structure and internal logic of context will "do all the work" an agent does and for different reasons. For reasons are properties of those internal logics, and not the agents or collectives that merely participate in them.

Graeber compares those theses of postmodernity to three characteristic themes regarding globalisation - largely a neoliberal vision of it. I will quote them verbatim.

1. We now live in the age of the Global Market. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result is that schemes aiming to change society through collective political action are no longer viable. Dreams of revolution have been proven impossible or, worse, bound to produce totalitarian nightmares; even any idea of changing society through electoral politics must now be abandoneed in the name of "competitiveness".

3. If this might seem to leave little room for democracy, one need not despair: market behaviour, and particularly individual consumption decisions are democracy; indeed, they are all the democracy we'll ever really need.

The contrast between the two positions largely turns on a moral judgement; is the totality a good thing? A theorist of postmodernity is frightened of its possibilities - how it will hollow out and subjugate people to structurally binding roles. An advocate of the market believes it sets the subject free of restraint-freedom and hollowness falling along the lines of the moral judgement, and for the same reasons.

Both of these lists treat (1) as a premise, "we now live in the age of ... ", and Graeber's theoretical posture is to doubt this - have we ever really been modern? Did we ever need to do away with collective desire - the vision of a collective as a moral project (grasping for how things ought to be) in the face of an only allegedly discontinuous rupture between modernity and postmodernity?

And that interfaces with the anarchist maxim - building a new society in the shell of the old, growing elements of it through activism. A role anthropology can play is providing visions of alternate societies and their means of organisation as strategic+imaginative input for collective projects - especially when it emphasises society as a collective moral project; what do we want out of our collectives? Not just what to negate ("critique"), but what we're aiming for.

That's it! :up:

I did suspect he was getting at something like identity politics as the flipside of neoliberalism.

From later in the book:

Behind the imagery of most postmodernism is really nothing but the ideology of the market: not even the reality of the market, since actually existing markets are always regulated in the interests of the powerful, but the way market ideologists would like us to imagine the marketplace should work.

"We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history— many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that just have existed before 500 BCE.

... It’s for this reason the new global movement has begun by reinventing the very meaning of democracy. To do so ultimately means, once again, coming to terms with the fact that “we”—whether as “the West” (whatever that means), as the “modern world,” or anything else—are not really as special as we like to think we are; that we’re not the only people ever to have practiced democracy; that in fact, rather than disseminating democracy around the world, “Western” governments have been spending at least as much time inserting themselves into the lives of people who have been practicing democracy for thousands of years, and in one way or another, telling them to cut it out." (Fragments)

"Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form.

Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn’t care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. ...If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don’t need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there’s something they can do about it. ... Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway." (Revolutions in Reverse)

"This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately." (Fragments)

---

"One of the most insidious of the “hidden injuries of class” in North American society was the denial of the right to do good, to be noble, to pursue any form of value other than money – or, at least, to do it and to gain any financial security or rewards for having done. The passionate hatred of the “liberal elite” among right-wing populists came down, in practice, to the utterly justified resentment towards a class that had sequestered, for its own children, every opportunity to pursue love, truth, beauty, honor, decency, and to be afforded the means to exist while doing so.

The endless identification with soldiers (“support our troops!) – that is, with individuals who have, over the years, been reduced to little more than high tech mercenaries enforcing of a global regime of financial capital – lay in the fact that these are almost the only individuals of working class origin in the US who have figured out a way to get paid for pursuing some kind of higher ideal, or at least being able to imagine that’s what they’re doing. Obviously most would prefer to pursue higher ideals in way that did not involve the risk of having their legs blown off. The sense of rage, in fact, stems above all from the knowledge that all such jobs are taken by children of the rich". (Revolutions in Reverse)

Damn WTF this sucks, how did I not hear about this. Cool dude, really made me think.

Last quote (for now):

"Financial elites, having shown the world they were utterly incompetent at the one activity they had claimed they were best able to do – the measurement of value – have responded by joining with their political cronies in a violent attack on anything that even looks like it might possibly provide an alternative way to think about value, from public welfare to the contemplation of art or philosophy (or at least, the contemplation of art or philosophy for any other reason than the purpose of making money). For the moment, at least, capitalism is no longer even thinking about its long-term viability. It is disturbing to know that one is facing a suicidal enemy, but at least it helps us understand what we are fighting for. At the moment: everything". (Revolutions in Reverse)

All the more pertinent with respect to the totally disjunct behaviour between the financial and real markets during Covid.

Graeber on the 'Extreme Centre'.

Couldn't be more relevant.