What Happened to David Graeber?

This is my excuse when others critique the book as well. I don’t know if it is true, but I like it. The contrast of a new story is needed to understand the limitations of the existing one.

The majority of complaints I’ve seen have been of the sort “he says X is true and doesn’t even bother to consider that Y!”

… but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint.

I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.

I recommend this seminar on the book, which contains both strong critiques and a lot of interesting and positive discussion. https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-semina...

I suspect you actually found good factual critiques, but decided to label them "quibbles".

The Fed issues the modern world's most important debt instrument, and has a structure and purpose that Graeber gets fundamentally wrong. The reason critics focus on this is that, if he's lazy and wrong about the modern world's most important debt instrument... in a book about "debt"... it's probably a good sign you can't trust the rest of the book.

A good one is the very beginning of the book, where he lambasts the economists use of the coinidence of wants as a just-so story that self-justifies the economists profession.

I chuckled, because his anthropological story of the evolution of money is also a just-so story that self-justifies anthropology though I'm inclined to believe it more.

Furthermore, throwing out the coincidence of wants model as a phenomenology is also probably misguided. I think it's hard to argue that there isn't social efficiency lost in the informal debt and repayment system, which graeber seems to have an overly high respect for, on top of which, that the social and power dynamics of social debt systems seem, in my mind, to be likely to incipiate more corruption and MORE wealth inequality, than the numismatic debt system.

Anyways it's still an incredible (in the good sense) book and everyone should read it for another perspective besides ths neoclassical.

/r/AskEconomics is a good start.

Later

Does this read snarky? I don't mean it that way; AskEconomics just doesn't seem to be a fan of Graeber, so if you're looking for critiques, that's a quick way to find some.

Graeber claims 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" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.

Graeber pretends that all of economics rests on the Myth of Barter. He ascribes moral positions to Smith that are invented whole cloth, smears all economics with his own fabrications and builds up his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments,that somehow doesn't find any references in Graeber's screed.

Then there's the bizzare Iraq war conspiracy theory, the fundamental mischaracterisation of the safest securities on the planet and a culture essentialist caricature of China.

It isn't difficult to find critiques of the book from different economists. The problems they find in the book are much more substantial than quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. For example:

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...

https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages

https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-me...

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...

What is factual is old, and what is new is just wild speculation. Also, misunderstanding of modern economics and the Fed, yes.

> Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact.

> A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”

> Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man.

> A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”? Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis. They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.

> And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.

https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...

This is a serious study of actual "raw data" that directly contradicts Graeber:

"Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this [Graeber's] theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

I think there are many explanations:

1 many people don’t understand how their jobs fit into a larger system and claim it’s BS

2 People find jobs where they don’t directly benefit from the output as bullshit (I make Something I don’t use)

3 beaucratic jobs that prevent rather than create can feel like bullshit even though systematically are needed.

4 risk forward jobs can be seems as bullshit as they are part of a spread bet a company makes to survive while any individual can feel like they failed and aren’t contributing.

I can go on.

What was the data that Graeber used? Fan mail from people who didn't like their jobs?

So, as a bit of an “anarcho-pragmatist” myself I found that the pandemic really challenged me in this regard. Ultimately, the conclusion I reached was that the ideal anarchist would mask up, stay home, and wash his or her f-ing hands, not because someone told them too, but because they had an ethical obligation to care for the weak and immunocompromised, but the state had no right to impose restrictions requiring this sort of thing or anything else. That’s tough I know, and practically presents challenges, but there’s a different between how things “are” and how they “ought” to be and the widespread terrible behavior during the pandemic was a result of poor education, selfishness, and bad manners. I tried to contextualize it with other “not necessarily illegal but rude” behavior.

Basically, “look Randy, it’s not illegal to scream racial slurs here on this public sidewalk, and the state doesn’t have the right to stop you, but you’re being an asshole and you should shut up.” We should all aspire to do the right thing, but not everyone is going to. I imagine 10-20% of any group is filled with jackasses, so trying to build society around those people neglects the other 80-90%.

> Say we also reject the notion of social control.

This is like writing a physics paper that starts with "assume humans could jump to the moon" or an international relations paper with "say we could all just get along". You can write anything you want if you start off with assumptions like that.

Most anarchists were indeed social distancing, masking etc. so I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you are mistaking somehow anarcho-capitalism for anarchism, even though it's not anarchism?

The Corona has taken so many of us for so much for so long now.

Its funny because I have the opposite problem. A lot (A LOT) of anarchist writing presupposes a very strong government, but that government gets a pass as not being "The State" because its super nice and gives you bread.

Seems like you have higher tendency to rejecting an argument because you don't like it's conclusion, which obviously irrational.

Yes, most people think it's fine to initiate harm. It's foundational to the state. It's a choice to accept this, and go along with it.

> The realization that Marxist and Anarchist philosophies are stupid leaves people wondering how they can actually help others instead of wanking over their ideology

Speak for yourself. That's a terminally online response, and lumping those two things with such a wide sweeping conclusion is meaningless. Marxism contains many parts and includes timeless methods like dialectical materialism which can be used as a framework for direct action.

> Many people from the Occupy era have come to realize that their movement was a huge waste of time because it focused all of its energy in vague directions with meaningless slogans

Nobody worth taking seriously would expect fully automated luxury space communism to unfold the second some disenfranchised people gather in a park, or by backing somebody like Bernie for president. Capital would never let itself lose its dominating power that easily. But the very acts of these gatherings and the energy it carries forward is not insignificant, and something is collectively learned at each turn for those tuned in. And as things continue to fall apart, more people tune in.

You have no idea what you are talking about, because you do indeed create anarchism through creation of mutual aid networks like for example Food Not Bombs.

That's a completely different set of authors, published in the same journal - just clarifying for others because I interpreted you as saying that the same authors had published a reversal, which sounded intriguing.

If you go deconstructionist enough you can fall back to absurdism or nihilism and just say none of it matters and it's all bullshit; that's just the way subjective topics like the meaning of society, humanity, etc works. You can also subjectively find meaning in almost any job that isn't digging and then filling back up the hole you just dug. That's why people criticize his take on work.

What stops a cartel from taking over in an anarchist society? I never understood how anarchists will prevent crime lords and military leaders from seizing power. They certainly didn't stop that from happening in the past.

How will your anarchism dictate how a cartel will be organized? Through anarchism, you can't enforce everyone to be anarchic. You will lose your independence because other people will form larger groups to increase their power and achieve their aims by coercing you.

I think they are anarchist in that they have a loose structure without formal laws. I think they inflict reputational damage to the concept of anarchy. Violent gangs are exactly what people are afraid of when they think of anarchy.

I think in reality, if there was pervasive anarchy for everyone without any overarching state, there would be more opportunities and incentives for deal-making between gangs and violence would trend towards zero.

Currently, it's illegal to make deals with gangs and they're almost 100% made up of people with criminal tendencies since honest people don't want to be associated with gangs. If every social group was a gang and there was no state, then people would have a strong incentive to join a gang for protection/support and so there would be a lot of good, honest people inside those gangs and this composition would make the gangs less violent.

If the militia had been armed properly, maybe it could have done better. But we probably need a global revolution or solidarity to take place since smaller local revolutions can be crushed by larger powers.

They seem to actually be very efficient per capita, it's mostly that anarchism never really was more popular than other "radical" ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or fascism. It was almost always less popular than those even where it was popular.