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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

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Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#81

Post by socialdemocrat »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #70
JasonCannon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend Debt the first 5000 years as well as The Democracy Project. Both of which were absolutely fascinating to me. Solidarity forever and rest in power Graeber.

I've seen quite a bit of criticism of the Debt book of basically being a giant exercise in cherry-picking and sort of a politically motivated narrative. However, history and economics are topics where neutrality and objectivity of authors are hardly the norm.

Sure, but it is like that with a lot of stuff you read. I read the economist weekly and they constantly cherry pick whatever makes capitalism and deregulation look great. Still the economist is high quality journalism and has many insights worth reading.

Graeber also obviously has an angle but three are still many interesting insights and angles. I don’t think anyone is ever going to give e complete unbiased version of anything. Better to read different perspectives with an open mind and a healthy does of scepticism.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#82

Post by ocschwar »

allworknoplay wrote: post #67
ocschwar wrote: post #32

David Graeber had a wonderful talent for finding innovative and fascinating ways to be wrong about something. That will always make his writings worth reading and rereading. But before thinking he's right, remember he's guy behind the Occupy movement's rules of order, which is why the meetings took so torturously long. I remain a little irked by it, because a whole cohort of 18 year old activists sat at Occupy meetin…

Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you. You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?

My point: Occupy had two goals that I kept hearing when I went: 1. the bailout and recovery from the crash of 2008 should help the victims of the crash, and not the perpetrators. And 2. "it's not about the policy, it's about the process." That is to say, the people camping out at Occupy were trying to evangelize the GA model for decision making to the world at large.

Both failed miserably. And I blame the process.

Now, if you want to set up an anarchist space for yourself and some friends and live in it or just have it as a clubhouse for some endeavors, yeah, go for it. I really do look forward to see the first dead mall in my area that's taken over by anarchist squatters.

But the GA process 1. took too damned long. 2. was dominated by people who loved the sound of their own voice, 3. resolved conflicting interest by sheer attrition, by which faction would be last to drop out of the meeting, and worst of all, 4. encouraged people to reinforce their cognitive bubbles before social media came around to do the same thing. The worst of those bubbles was the one that wrapped around each and every Occupy camp and made them unable to understand how they were seen by people 30' away.

All this is on the process. And on Graeber.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#83

Post by jessaustin »

goatlover wrote: post #52
JasonCannon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Anarchists are left wing. AnCaps aren't anarchists. Anarchism is inherently socialist.

Why is anarchism necessarily socialist? If it’s just about the lack of hierarchal centralized power, then laissez faire capitalism can fit with decentralized communities who don’t restrict economic activity. I’m not saying it’s good, only questioning a certain definition.

This anarchist is very supportive of non-authoritarian voluntary socialism. I hope that my support and those of many others will eventually bring it into existence. I value that workers be free, more than that they be organized. In many cases the former will depend somewhat on the latter, but that is contingent not essential.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#84

Post by jessaustin »

ocschwar wrote: post #82
allworknoplay wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you. You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?

My point: Occupy had two goals that I kept hearing when I went: 1. the bailout and recovery from the crash of 2008 should help the victims of the crash, and not the perpetrators. And 2. "it's not about the policy, it's about the process." That is to say, the people camping out at Occupy were trying to evangelize the GA model for decision making to the world at large. Both failed miserably. And I blame the process. No…

As for 1., I would blame the lack of democracy in USA more than the norms of discussion within certain short-lived public meetings.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#85

Post by unmole »

jmcmichael wrote: post #27
cynicalkane wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to add to the above comment. Graeber's lack of integrity and disregard for facts should cast a shadow of mistrust over his other work, not to mention his explosive reaction on being called out for it. If you can't trust someone's writings on facts you know about, why trust them on facts you don't know about? One of the essential things to understand when taking in information is to first understand: is this in…

I’m going to assume that you’re basing your opinion of Graeber on Brad DeLong’s unhinged attacks on his work and character. There are no factual mistakes in “Debt” that impact the solidity of Graeber’s conclusions or historical narratives, most inaccuracies were minor and corrected in subsequent editions without changing the character of the book or the arguments within. Many if not most of DeLong’s attacks of inaccu…

> There are no factual mistakes in “Debt” that impact the solidity of Graeber’s conclusions or historical narratives, most inaccuracies were minor and corrected in subsequent editions without changing the character of the book or the arguments within.

It's been a while since I read Debt but I distinctly remember Graber's disingenuous take on Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Graber argues that this is wrong because English (Or was it Scottish?) shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence.

I don't know about you but to me that is complete batshit.

The book also makes a way too big of deal about The Myth of Barter. While that is interesting from an anthropological perspective, Graber makes it sound like the bulk of modern economics is somehow based on this myth.

I get why the book is popular. It posits to tackle big questions and contains the usual tropes against the state, big business, banks etc. that a left leaning audience will be more than willing to eat up. But I don't think it provides any new perspectives on economics that bear any resemblance to the real world.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#86

Post by thoughtstheseus »

cynicalkane wrote: post #63
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't making an argument about the behavior of the Fed. You stated that Graeber had told "an essential lie" in claiming that the Fed was privately controlled. I quoted from the St. Louis Fed. their own text which (a) confirms that it is not part of the government (b) it's complicated. I don't really give a damn about the argument on whether the Fed is or is not part of the government; what I care about is people c…

The point is issuance of American debt, and the Fed's role in it, is not privately controlled, neither in fact or in essence. Saying otherwise is an obvious lie in both senses.

Just a financial plumbing nitpick. The TREASURY issues debt, not the Federal Reserve. Everyone agrees the Treasury is part of the federal government.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#87

Post by socialdemocrat »

skybrian wrote: post #36
agumonkey wrote: post #23

How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ? physical labour -> boston dynamics office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7) it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of ta…

The disappearance of work seems greatly exaggerated. Education and healthcare are a big chunk of the economy and nowhere near automated. Also consider that we’ve been talking about driverless cars for over a decade, and this is something that should be well under way by now, but it’s slow going.

I used to think this as well until I read Bullshit Jobs. The point Graeber makes very well is that as jobs have gotten automated a way they have been replaced by a huge number of meaningless office jobs. And this isn’t based on him judging particular jobs as pointless but rather a huge number of people writing to him and explaining just how pointless their jobs are.

So why don’t these people quit their jobs? Because a lot of nonsense jobs pay well and people don’t want to be unemployed because society is not setup to pay people to not work. Yet society is ironically happy to pay people to do nonsense.

Economists have a hard time believing this can be true. Things like efficient market theory suggests that companies want to be as efficient as possible. Yet they fail to see the tribal nature of humans. That is partly what Graeber exposes: How many CEOs will keep around people they don’t need because what is the point of being a boss of you got nobody to boss around?

CEOs are a bit like kings of old. Importance is shown through the number of retainers you have.

And often it is just self preservation. When management realize their whole division is full of people with no useful tasks to do they realize that they themselves risk getting fired. Why have managers and VPs if there are nobody to manage?

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#88

Post by ashtonkem »

culi wrote: post #76
Robotbeat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize three of these paradigm shifts?

Lol this sounds like a class assignment. E.g. the origins of agriculture. It's going from the idea of having a single point of origin to multiple (~15-20) points of origins around the world. Another major shift in thinking about agriculture is realizing it wasn't so much of a technological advancement (indeed agricultural people had radically reduced lifespans, less leisure time, more disease, etc) as something peopl…

> We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations.

For those that are unaware, this is basically the core of anarchist political theory; hierarchies aren't merely natural consequences of human society, but were in fact created via force.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#89

Post by [deleted] »

hacksnewer wrote: post #37
paulpauper wrote: post #18

He epitomized, embodied how and what public intellectuals should be, should aspire to: the a willingness to ask hard questions, to challenge conventional preconceived notions. It seems like academia these days is more about maintaining the status quo. If your ideas are engineering debate, it means you're doing your job.

This is a very HN way of looking at academia. The vast majority of academics aren't looking to be "public", they quietly do great work for decades, passing their knowledge down to their students. You don't hear about them because their main job is to educate not bloviate. Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entir…

[deleted]

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#90

Post by ocschwar »

jessaustin wrote: post #84
ocschwar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point: Occupy had two goals that I kept hearing when I went: 1. the bailout and recovery from the crash of 2008 should help the victims of the crash, and not the perpetrators. And 2. "it's not about the policy, it's about the process." That is to say, the people camping out at Occupy were trying to evangelize the GA model for decision making to the world at large. Both failed miserably. And I blame the process. No…

As for 1., I would blame the lack of democracy in USA more than the norms of discussion within certain short-lived public meetings. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Part of the lack of democracy in the USA is the "Bowling Alone" problem: too much of the citizenry has no experience interacting with a democratic process. And part of THAT is the experience of losing a committee vote and moving on.
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