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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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
:D <3
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.
For those of us without the book, what sort of examples does it give?
Early agricultural societies in the fertile cescent that existed for 1000+ years and build rather large cities and more recent various meso-american ones that existed in a sort of patchwork with others, but which due to the climatic conditions and later pillaging by European invaders didn’t leave much historical records.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
and none of these big projects that we’re talking about are shoddy science. they’re highly structured, complex, peer-reviewed affairs with thousands of people involved. we could use far more money towards these things and peoples’ lives would get significantly better
Yeah, we could. But the structures of capital as they are currently running are funneling money away from that, and toward what makes profit. Look at what they’ve done to Boeing, once an engineer led giant, now a hollow shell.
I think worker collectives and more distributed decision making would slow things down at first, but in the long run would lead to more stability, more ownership, and eventually in the long term, more speedup as we build out infrastructure. I also don’t think we’ll ever get to a fully decentralized society, for a variety of reasons. But the first step in that direction would be something like more democratic company decision making and ownership (e.g. like the German model where workers elect a board member on large companies).
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.
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.
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.
ever-growing-rarely-shrinking book list.
✊ The struggle is real fam
