The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays

by David Graeber, Nika Dubrovsky (editor), Rebecca Solnit (foreword)

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.

There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.

During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovksy and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, History, Anthropology, Audiobook, Economics

427 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 12, 2024

About the author

David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist.

On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he held the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.

Prior to that position, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.

Graeber had a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. He was an core participant in the Occupy Movement.

He passed away in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Social Imagination 101…

Preamble:
--In my last years of undergraduate studies, I realized I still couldn’t even formulate coherent questions about the world. So, I finally took responsibility for my own education and started exploring nonfiction.
…Thus, I was motivated by distress. Graeber (RIP) brought joy into this journey.
--One of my favourite quotes (from an author I’ve yet to read, psychiatrist David Viscott) is:

The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.

…To change how others see the world in a caring, inspirational manner, now that’s a special gift.
--This collection of essays/interviews is a celebration of Graeber’s life work and gift to a world in distress, where Graeber synthesized diverse social theory and released it from academic silos through playful presentations. I’ve yet to read a more talented writer with a more important writing goal.

Highlights:

--This collection basically covers Graeber’s bibliography, with many essays being the seeds that grew into books. Given the context of this book, let’s walk through Graeber’s foundations:

1) Social Theory in Practice:
--I cannot think of a more radical author who managed to crack into mainstream Western best-sellers lists/bookstores (the other being Naomi Klein) and Graeber did this synthesizing a mountain of academic texts on challenging topics like debt/bureaucracy/bullshit jobs/anthropology!

[Rebecca Solnit writes:] Our mutual friend the writer, filmmaker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He [Graeber] texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so—I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.” […]

[Nika Dubrovsky writes:] David used to say that when writing in his mind he was talking to his mother, and if he felt that she understood him, he believed that others would, too. His texts were written to be open to discussion and further development by other people. He wanted to change our collective common sense, and this task can only be accomplished collectively.

…Another exemplar of this is Varoufakis (ex. Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails):

As a teacher of economics, I have always believed that if you are not able to explain the economy in a language young people can understand, then, quite simply, you are clueless yourself.

…I’ve found it useful to imagine communicating to my former self, retracing my steps. You know your own journey best.
--I’m also reminded of fellow social critic/anarchist Chomsky’s critique of ivory-tower social science having physics-envy. Indeed, Chomsky says a car manual (used by a mechanic without ivory-tower education) needs way more jargon because it’s actually technically complex. From the science side, Goldacre also laughs along with the Sokal hoax and cringes at the galaxy-brain texts of Deleuze and Guattari.
--Next steps: how do we reach those who do not read critical books? I think of the everyday conversations I have with gym bros who listen to Joe Rogan, who (still) think Trump is an outsider, who see Jordan Peterson as an intellectual. We have so much work to do with those around us, and we need a diverse toolbox to communicate effectively. Ex. despite being triggered by the “socialism” label, I’ve gotten some of these same bros to acknowledge that Bernie Sanders is sincere (having appeared on Rogan’s podcast).

2) Anthropology:
--Graeber is trained as an anthropologist (PhD supervisor: Marshall Sahlins). However, I now view Graeber’s direct anthropology works to be his most questionable works, as he wanders off in idealist rabbit-holes (i.e. dives into culture; ex. his final major project, in collaboration with archaeologist Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021) when there are clear materialist explanations in anthropology to start from (see later for example).
--Once we build a materialist foundation, Graeber’s idealist lens shines. Some examples:
i) process of theoretical reduction: “simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected”, ex. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss
ii) shismogenesis/culture areas: identities created through difference from others
iii) types of social domination that characterize various societies: sovereignty/bureaucracy/heroic
…As Graeber puts it:

I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane. So people write things about the origin of democratic institutions based on where they find the first written evidence for people sitting around making decisions together. And we have to pretend that before that they didn’t do that. It’s absurd. On the other hand, economists go all the way the other way. It’s all models. They don’t really care what’s there. They listen until they can have enough evidence to plug in to a model where they can show some signs that people are doing what they think they really ought to have been doing, and then they create a model saying they did that. I think anthropology is a happy medium. We can fill in the blank spaces, but we can do so based on empirical observation of what people in analogous situations actually have tended to do.

3) “Democracy”: Political Theatre vs. Direct Action:
--The first Graeber book I read was The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013), and I still find it his most accessible. Graeber contrasts:
a) Modern “democracy”:
--Voting in the political theatre, thus divisive competitions for spectatorship/divide-and-rule/scapegoating/bribery.
b) Everyday egalitarian decision-making:
--Consensus: participatory cooperation and compromise.
--Graeber focuses on revolutions in “common sense”; a useful pairing is Chomsky’s Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
--Now, Graeber has some useful historical examples (“influence debate”/“indigenous critique” on how the liberties of Native Americans influenced US democracy/European Enlightenment), but in anthropology he bypasses/critiques materialist analyses:
-ex. Suzman’s Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
-ex. Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
-ex. Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

…see comments below for rest of the review…

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Graeber was a brilliant academic archeologist, fabulously articulate anarchist, and a stand out personality of the Occupy Wall Street movement (credited by many as originating the phrase “We are the 99%”). He was the foremost interpreter of anarchism in the 21st century, using his discipline of anthropology both to examine its history and predict its direction, and his clear, reader friendly style set him apart as uniquely qualified for that role.

This collection of essays, interviews, and moderated talks is the perfect introduction to David Graeber and his thought. It spans the breadth of the topics that most interested him (and which were the basis of several of his books), while illustrating his clear, engaging, and often fun writing style. If you have not yet read him, this is a great place to start. If you are already a fan, you already want to read everything with his name attached.

(Pro tip: Jump ahead and read the essay Are You An Anarchist? first, then read the rest of the collection with this in mind.)


There Never Was A West
In which Graeber challenges the traditional idea of “the West” and the origins of democracy.

”What I am suggesting is that the very notion of the West is founded on a constant blurring of the line between textual traditions and forms of everyday practice.”


Against Economics
An interview with Graeber where he discusses his radical family background, how he originally came to anarchism, his experience with Occupy Wall Street, and the future fate of capitalism.

”Finance is just another word for other people’s debts.”


On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
Graeber breaks down the reason so many people have meaningless, unnecessary jobs.

”The answer clearly isn’t economic — it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger…And on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing is extraordinarily convenient for them.”


Against Economics
In which Graeber exposes such myths as “markets will always correct themselves,” reveals that most economics today are essentially “voodoo economics,” and that hidden behind these shams is the reality that economic systems are social engineering designed to benefit the ruling classes

”There is a logical flaw to any such theory — there’s no possible way to disprove it. The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can be tested only if one has a commonly agreed definition of when the end is. But for economists, that definition turns out to be however long it takes to reach a point where I can say the economy has returned to equilibrium. In the same way, statements like The Barbarians always win in the end, or Truth always prevails, cannot be proved wrong since in practice they just mean whenever barbarians win or truth prevails I shall declare the story over.”


Soak the Rich
A moderated exchange between Graeber and Thomas Piketty

”Our feelings of helplessness stem from the fact that for thirty years the tools of persuasion and coercion have been mobilized to wage an ideological war for capitalism rather than create conditions for capitalism to remain viable. Neoliberalism places political and ideological considerations above economic ones. The result has been a campaign of fantasy manipulation, a campaign so effective that people with dead end jobs now believe that there is no alternative.”


Culture as Creative Refusal
In which Graeber demonstrates his use of anthropology as a tool to elucidate his ideas.


Hatred Has Become A Political Taboo
Graeber examines and critiques the ideas that led to the creation of such categories as hate crimes and hate speech.
This one hasn’t aged so well, as it failed to anticipate the backlash that led to the rise of Trump and MAGA — a backlash populist political leader and movement almost entirely predicated and driven by the power of shared hatreds.


Dead Zones of the Imagination
The Anthropology of violence — Bureaucracy as violence ignored, and other forms of structural violence.

”It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the preview of bureaucratic regulations the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact, perfectly obvious to those actually running the system, that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

”Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons.”


The Bully’s Pulpit
On bullies, cowards, witnesses, and how the dynamic functions.

”In militaristic societies, like the United States, it is almost axiomatic that our enemies must be cowards, especially if the enemy can be labeled a terrorist — that is, someone wishing to create fear in us to turn us, of all people, into cowards…All attacks on U.S. citizens are by definition cowardly attacks. The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as cowardly acts the very next morning. On the face of it this is odd. There’s no lack of bad things one can say about Mohamed Atta and his confederates, but surely coward isn’t one of them. Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts.”


I Didn’t Understand How Widespread Rape Was. Then the Penny Dropped
The rapist as a subset of bully, and the system that is complicit.


On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets
Discourse about the tactics and goals of direct action, and the pushback dance of police attempting to suppress it.


Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to why.”

”Direct action is a form of resistance that in its structure is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”

”What then of puppets? Giant paper mache puppets are created by taking the most ephemeral of material — ideas, paper, wire mesh — and transforming it into something very like a monument, even if they are, at the same time, somewhat ridiculous. A giant puppet is the mockery of the idea of a monument, and of everything monuments represent.”


Are You an Anarchist?


”Anarchists are simply people who believe that human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion, but it is one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.”

”At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.”


Army of Altruists
Gaeber examines the puzzle and the power of altruism and how it impacts our culture and politics.


Caring Too Much
How working class values have been weaponized against them in the politics of austerity.

”Human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on one another. The working classes just do a disproportionate share. They are the caring classes, and always have been.”

”There is a reason the ultimate bourgeois virtue is thrift, and the ultimate working class virtue is solidarity.”


The Revolt of the Caring Classes
Working class values, the Labor Theory of Value, manipulation by the ruling classes, and how to break free.


Another Art World, Part I: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity


”The art world, for all the importance of its museums, institutes, foundations, university departments and the like, is still organized primarily around the art market. The art market in turn is driven by finance capital.”

”The case can certainly be made that contemporary art is in effect an extension of global finance, which is itself closely tied to empire.”

”Any market, of course, must necessarily operate on a principle of scarcity. In a way, the art market and the music industry face similar problems — materials are mostly cheap and talent is widespread. Therefore, for profits to be made, scarcity has to be produced. Of course, in the art world this is what the critical apparatus is largely about.”


The Museum of Care
Repurposing the buildings where the bullshit jobs happen.


What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?

”I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here — that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality — is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently passes for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.”

”What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly but as our starting point, a principal already present in all living creatures, and on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as self organizing systems.”

”What evolutionary psychologists can’t explain is why fun is fun.”

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've written lengthy reviews of Graeber's other masterpiece works so I'll spare the details here. This is a great collection of his essays that pair nicely with his other books. If you're new to Graeber, don't start here. If you've read his other stuff, you will definitely enjoy this. What an amazing critical and fresh thinker David Graeber was. His untimely death haunts me thinking of all the great works and words we will miss out on. I think he's a man ahead of his time.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays is a posthumous collection of David Graeber's essays, opinion pieces, lectures, and interviews. The longer essays were largely familiar to me from inclusion in other books, while the shorter pieces were generally new. I was impressed at how thorough a synthesis (and potential introduction) the collection provides, given how wide-ranging Graeber's writing was. Bullshit jobs, the false premises of democracy, theories of bureaucracy, giant puppets, and debt - all this and more are in here. I found it a reminder of what a terrible loss Graeber's 2020 death was. However, the introduction states the intention to publish more of his archives, which is good to see. I think The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays would make a good gift for someone who hasn't read Graeber's other books but is potentially open to radical anarchist ideas (which I think everyone ought to be in this techno-feudalist day and age). It definitely made me want to re-read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which I adored.

That said, although I generally prefer longform, ideally book-length, non-fiction writing, it was great to be reminded of how effectively Graeber formulated nuanced and original ideas in less than ten pages. I enjoyed his succinct thoughts on hatred as a political taboo, bullying as a social structure, art communism, and austerity. The book opens very strongly with 'There Never Was a West', a fifty page essay from 2007 that definitely rewards rereading. It powerfully challenges popular misconceptions about the history of Western democracy and the very concept itself:

It's precisely when one considers the problem of the modern state's monopoly of coercive force that the whole pretense of democracy dissolves into a welter of contradictions. For example: while modern elites have largely put side the earlier discourse of the 'mob' as a murderous 'great beast', the same imagery still pops back up, in almost exactly the form it had in the sixteenth century, the moment anyone proposes democratising some aspect of the apparatus of coercion. In the United States, for example, advocates of the 'fully informed jury movement,' who point out that the Constitution actually allows juries to decide on questions of law, not just of evidence, are regularly denounced in the media as wishing to go back to the days of lynchings and 'mob rule'. It's no coincidence that the United States, a country that still prides itself on its democratic spirit, has also led the world in mythologising, even deifying, its police.

It amazes me that Graeber was a professor at LSE yet retained seemingly total intellectual independence from the crushing structures of academia. The second piece in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays is a 2014 interview on the topic of debt, in which he gives a offhand yet incredibly perceptive summary of the differences between academic disciplines:

I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they do have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can't prove as if they didn't happen, which is insane. So people write things about the origin of democratic institutions based on where they find the first written evidence for people sitting around making decisions together. And we have to pretend that before that they didn't do that. It's absurd. On the other hand, economists go all the way the other way. It's all models. They don't really care what's there. They listen until they have enough evidence to plug into a model where they can show some signs that people are doing what they think they really ought to have been doing, and then they create a model saying they did that. I think anthropology is a happy medium. We can fill in the blank spaces, but we can do so based on empirical observation of what people in analogous situations actually have tended to do. That's what I think we can add.

No-one ruthlessly disassembles the idiocy of economic theory quite like Graeber did, for example in this 2019 piece for the New York Review of Books:

There is a logical flaw in any such theory [of economic equilibrium]: there's no possible way to disprove it. The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can only be tested if one has a commonly agreed definition of when the 'end' is; but for economists, that definition turns out to be, 'however long it takes to reach a point where I can say the economy has returned to equilibrium'. (In the same way, statements like 'the barbarians always win in the end' or 'truth always prevails' cannot be proved wrong, since in practise they just mean 'whenever barbarians win, or truth prevails, I shall declare the story over.')

Graeber spans economics, politics, culture, and society in his writing, yet never descends into over-generalisation or muddle. I was pleased to be reminded of his ideas around police, spies, and detectives being culturally situated as the charismatic heroes of otherwise faceless bureaucracy. On the other hand, I hadn't previously come across a grand and fascinating theory of American politics published in Harpers magazine back in 2007. It still appears insightful and relevant:

PROPOSITION I: Neither egotism nor altruism are natural urges; they in fact arise in relation to each other and neither would be conceivable without the market.

PROPOSITION II: The political right has always tried to enhance this division, and thus claim to be champions of egotism and altruism simultaneously. The left has tried to efface it.

PROPOSITION III: The real problem of the American left is that while it does try in certain ways to efface the division between egotism and altruism, value and values, it largely does so for its own children. This has allowed the right to paradoxically represent itself as the champions of the working class.

Another of Graeber's strongest topics is work. I read out the paragraph below to a friend who complained of feeling useless due to unemployment:

We are constantly bombarded by propaganda insisting society is besieged by those who want something for nothing, that the poor (typically conceived in racist terms) are largely poor because they lack the will and discipline to work, that only those who do or have worked harder than they'd like to at something they would rather not be doing, preferably under a harsh taskmaster, deserve respect from and consideration from their fellow citizens. As a result, the sadomasochistic element in work, which many remark becomes ever more pronounced the more the work itself is bereft of purpose and meaning, rather than being an ugly, if predictable side effect to top-down chains of command in the workplace, has actually become central to what validates work itself. Suffering has become a badge of economic citizenship, in much the same way as having a home address. Without it, you have no right to make any other claim.

I'm not sure how comforting that was, but hope it reminded my friend that our culture is constantly reinforcing the moral necessity of doing paid work that you do not like. The best that can be reasonably hoped for is a job you don't hate, that doesn't make you fantasise about murdering your colleagues/customers/students, that pays you enough to live comfortably, and that doesn't take up every single bit of your energy. I count myself very lucky to have found such a job, yet getting up for work is still dismal and difficult every single morning. The collection ends with an essay titled, 'What's the point if we can't have fun?', an extremely good question. Graeber's writing is full of mind-expanding questions and encouragement to think of new answers. I highly recommend this collection as a welcome into his uniquely diverse and invigorating bibliography.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays by the late David Graeber. He was a radical anthropologist, anarchist and activist. His books "Debt", "The Utopia of Rules", " Bullshit Jobs" and "The Dawn of Everything" were all driven by a conviction that our current society was contingent. There were different ways it could have turned out and there are different possible futures.

Graeber was not a systematic thinker. His approach was to look at alternatives that could have happened. He was committed to pointing out that the current reality was not the only possible reality.

This collection is something of a grab bag. Some of the essays are about his work in the anti-globalist demonstrations in Washington D.C .and New York. There is an essay on the surprising effectiveness of giant puppets. There are some essays on anarchist political tactics. He argues that hatred has a legitimate function in politics. He says, "Hatred of injustice can be a form of virtue."

"Dead Zones of the Imagination" is the central essay in the collection. Graeber explores the situations where rules and state power allow actors to simply not recognize that they are dealing with humans. He uses the example of mindless bureaucracies. He argues that it is the threat of state violence which empowers those institutions, and that the violence is inherently stupid. "Violence is so often the preferred method of the stupid. Indeed, one might say it is one of the tragedies of human existence that this is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response."

This collection is full of sentences, ideas and examples that forced me to stop, digest and reflect. What more can you ask for?

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you even reading this review if you do not know who Graeber is? If so, you have made a weird choice.

This book is a posthumous collection of Graeber's work: mostly essays and articles but one interview. While there is some thematic grouping, the essays vary in tone, topic, and density.

The ideological consanguinity between Graeber and myself is small but non-zero. I do generally like his writing. His writing is often flip, but it also has more internal structure to it than many of the more throbbingly sentimental arguments of the contemporary right and left: it is easy to disagree with because he is articulating a position with coherent statements rather than scoring points. He has a bad habit of begging the question, to the point it is a sort of PBS pledge drive for the question, complete with petitio principii mug and tote bag, and deserves its own drinking game or unit of measurement. It is fun. It is not without meaning that some of the articles include discussing the nature of play ("What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?") or trying to understand the violitile effect of playfulness in protest. ("Dead Zones of Imagination").

The best article here is "Culture as a Creative Refusal," an investigation of how socities structure themselves by looking at what they don't choose, and how that might be reflected in the history of the Malgasy. "There Never was a West" is good, but meanders.

I do not have a least favorite, but some of the material aged poorly. The request for more political hate from 2015 feels monkey's finger curls inward, and I was surprised to learn that inflation no longer exists. The achronological grouping of the articles, particularly in the way that some of them are the sort of precursors to later, more developed work where he did not end up where he started.

The joke at the beginning of this review has some teeth to it. If you do not like Graeber, this book will not change your opinion, and if you do not know Graeber, this is a bad introduction. Or just read the first and last essays and skip the rest, because there is no real logic to this grouping.

I can imagine the two or one star version of this review, where I savage his pointedly off-balance logic and in writing this review I kept wondering why it is that I like his writing, even when and especially because I disagree with so many of his conclusions. And I think that it is because he knows how to ask the right questions. He has a core philosophical stance about how much of the world operates as assumption not fact, and I think that leads him to see where the real joints are in the whole system of everything. That is useful, and has application far in excess of his political intent.

My thanks, and condolences, to Nika Dubrovsky, for this work and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

“The ruling class has found out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to approximated in the 60s).”

These essays explore many wide, ranging issues from anarchy, economics, bureaucracy, feminism, colonialism, bullying, structural violence and various anti-globalization movements as well as many other topics. Some of the stuff on anthropology was a little dull and dry but when he focuses his attention elsewhere, he proves to be really engaging.

“If even one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests,” but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with Tasers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent.”

In reference to one former LAPD officer’s conclusion that rarely do police officers beat up people who have actually committed a crime, Graeber concludes that, “If you want to cause a policeman to be violent, the surest way is to challenge their right to define the situation.”

In 2007-08 GM none of their profits came from selling cars, but instead from lending people the money to buy their cars. He further adds that the likes of GM were once taxed between 60 to 70%, with executives taxed at around 90%.

“They were producing enormous profits, and most of their profits went to the government, which in turn used that money to build roads and highways and infrastructure for the cars, so it became a virtuous circle. And then all sorts of bribes and kickback money circulated in the contracting process.”

“Fast forward fifty years, and companies like that are paying no taxes. They are getting all their money from the financial sector…They charge people interest, and use that money to bribe politicians to change laws that regulate them to be able to extract even more. And that’s basically how the American system works, and that’s why Wall Street and the government become almost indistinguishable.”

“While abusing authority may be bad, openly pointing out that someone is abusing authority is much worse-and merits the severest punishment.”

Thomas Piketty makes a great point, when saying,

“When Western governments want to send a million soldiers to Kuwait to prevent Kuwaiti oil from being seized by Iraq, they do it. Let’s be serious: If they are not afraid of an Iraq, they have no reason to fear the Bahamas or New Jersey. Levying progressive taxes on wealth and capital poses no technical problems. It is a matter of political will.”

Graeber insists that most people in developed economies have internalized the morality of work, so that “Anyone not labouring harder than they would like to at something they do not much enjoy, preferably under the supervision of a hard taskmaster of some kind, is not really a full moral person, and probably does not deserve support of his or her community.”

“We are constantly bombarded by propaganda insisting society is being besieged by those who want something for nothing, that poor (particularly conceived in racist terms) are largely poor because they lack the will and discipline to work, that only those who do or have worked harder than they’d like to at something they would rather not be doing, preferably under a harsh taskmaster, deserve respect and consideration from their fellow citizens.”

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicht alle Aufsätze sind herausragend, aber alle sind gut und zeigen einmal mehr, welch Verlust der frühe Tod des grandiosen Theoretikers und politischen Organisators Graeber ist, der hier zu Anfang ein paar biografische Details aus seiner Familiengeschichte zum Besten gibt.

Der erste Paukenschlag ist dann die "Wutrede über die Arbeit", in der es um Bullshit- Jobs geht. Zugespitzter als in seinem Buch wird die These formuliert, dass man weniger verdient, wenn die Arbeit anderen Menschen nützt und damit sinnvoll ist. Höhere Verdienste sind dort üblich, wo man mit Geld über die Sinnlosigkeit des Hin- und Hertragens von Akten hinweggetröstet werden muss. Eine These, die später weiter ausgebaut wird, u.a. durch das Postulat, dass die Staatsbürokratie mit den Unternehmensbürokratien so verschmolzen ist (weil nicht der Markt, sondern politische Macht die Wirtschaft regelt), dass genau dies Politikern immer wieder ermöglicht, sich als Gegner eines "starken Staates" aufzuspielen und in schöner Regelmäßigkeit "Bürokratieabbau" zu fordern, der natürlich nie passiert, weil eben die Verquickung der Bürokratien und die massenhafte Verstrickung der gut bezahlten Bürokraten in Lug und Betrug zur Basis des Machterhalts der ausbeutenden Klasse und ihrer willigen Helfer (der Bürokraten aller Ebenen) geworden ist. (Vgl. S. 73 f.)

In dem Text "Gegen die Wirtschaftswissenschaft" stehen Thesen, die heterodoxen Ökonomen zwar vertraut sind, die aber selten in solcher Schäre und Zuspitzung formuliert werden. Graeber ist sich ganz sicher: Finanzwirtschaft ist nur ein anderer Name für Schuldenwirtschaft und das Versilbern von Schulden letztlich das, was man heute "Kapitalismus" nennt. Klar, des einen Schulden sind des anderen Gewinn - vor allem auch, wenn es um Staatsschulden geht. So oder so muss der arme Mann vom Ertrag seiner Arbeit immer größere Teile abgeben, um die Renditeforderungen der Reichen zu erfüllen. (S. 51) Er versteht es nur nicht.

Nach einem anthropologischen Aufsatz über Schismogenese am Beispiel Madagaskars knüpft "Über Gewalt, Bürokratie und Interpretationsarbeit" wieder an Obiges an. Darin geht es um "strukturelle Gewalt". Graeber postuliert, dass Bürokratie nicht an sich sinnlos ist, aber sinnlos wird in dem Augenblick, in dem sie "soziale Situationen" handhaben muss, "die bereits unsinnig sind, weil sie auf struktureller Gewalt fußen." (S.150) Wer an die Verwaltung von Arbeitslosigkeit oder Bürgergeld usw. denkt, weiß, was gemeint ist. Dabei ist "Gewalt" freilich das Argument der Dummen, womit Graeber aber Probleme hat, da "strukturelle Gewalt" offensichtlich intelligent gebaut und effektiv ist. In "Die Bühne des Schlägers" beschäftigt er sich daher erneut mit der grundlegenden "Struktur von Herrschaft" und der Aufsatz ist verstörend originell: Obwohl wir intellektuell vielleicht für Frieden sind und Desertation begrüßen, verabscheuen wir doch "Feigheit (vor dem Feind)", weshalb es dazu kommen kann, dass afghanische, syrische oder ukrainische Männer mit dem Vorwurf leben müssen, nicht zur "Verteidigung ihrer Familien" bereit gewesen zu sein. Das eigentlich verstörende an diesem Ansatz ist aber, dass Graeber die Gründe dafür aus "Trieben" herleitet, die er bei Kindern beobachtet, weshalb er "Grund(schul)strukturen" für das anhaltende Phänomen der "Herrschaft" verantwortlich macht. Die "Raufereien" auf dem Schulhof, die (fast) immer ein Publikum, das Feiglinge verachtet, zur Voraussetzung hat, enden dort fast immer vor einem Schulleiter, dem es egal ist, wer angefangen hat. Damit werden Aggressor und Opfer (man denke auch an viele Kommentare zur Ukraine im gegenwärtigen Krieg) auf eine Stufe gestellt, was immer dem Aggressor zugute kommt, der genau das ab der Grundschule lernt. Aggressivität zahlt sich aus und Probleme bekommt der, der sich entweder nicht oder gezwungenermaßen endlich doch wehrt Resultat wie Bedingung des Ganzen ist "Die Grausamkeit der Menge" (S. 183), die Graeber auch mit Blick auf Vergewaltigungen als männliche Dominanzstrategie beobachtet. Auch hier kommt meist das Opfer schlecht weg, während sich der Täter in seinem "Ruhm" sonnen kann.

Hier wird das Problem "struktureller Gewalt" anschaulich als Problem eines Machtgefälles, in dem die Opfer gezwungen sind, sich in ihre Peiniger hineinzuversetzen. Das erzeugt oft Verständnis (Frauen finden dann auch, nicht an bestimmte Orte gehen zu dürfen) für die Peiniger, während die sich kaum Gedanken um ihre Opfer machen und deren Gefühle auch nicht kennen wollen. (Es hat ihr ja doch Spaß gemacht!) Dito im Verhältnis zwischen Politiker und Wähler oder Firmenchef und Arbeiter. Dabei ist das Verständnis der Arbeiter für die "Nöte" ihrer Herren das Problem, aus dem heraus sich "strukturelle Gewalt" immer wieder erneuert. Man denke an Gewerkschaften und ihre Bestrebungen, die Verwertungsbedingungen von Kapital zu verbessern, damit Arbeitsplätze erhalten bleiben. Konklusio: Wir sollten uns selbst ernst nehmen und das, was wir unseren Kindern erzählen, endlich selbst auch glauben und durchsetzen- zum Beispiel, dass Teilen und anderen Menschen helfen glücklich macht und Handlungen, die das Gegenteil bewirken (Konkurrenz!) von Übel sind. (S. 270f.)

In dem Aufsatz "Zu viel Fürsorge. Das ist der Fluch der Arbeiterklasse" geht es wiederum sehr einsichtsvoll um das Phänomen der Identifikation mit "denen da oben". Fürsorge wird positiv bewertet, aber der Fürsorgeempfänger (Schwächling) verachtet. So kommt es dann, dass sich sogar Reiche und Politiker wundern, warum die Leute nach einem Sozialkahlschlag nicht massenhaft auf die Straßen gehen, und Graeber gibt den Subtext: "Schließlich schreien wir [die reichen- F.S.] Zeter und Mordio, wenn jemand unsere Steuerschlupflöcher auch nur bedroht..." (S. 291) Aber daran rüttelt niemand von den Arbeitenden, die sich stattdessen fragen, ob Sozialämter oder Tafeln wohl legitim seien. Vor allem die Bullshitter fragen sich das nicht, weil sie längst korrumpiert sind und internalisiert haben, dass ihre vergleichsweise hohen Einkommen gerechtfertigt seien, weil sie schließlich Tag für Tag der Sinnlosigkeit ins Auge sehen müssen, während die Altenpflegerin täglich sieht, wozu ihre Arbeit gut ist. Soll sie also froh sein und dafür nicht auch noch gut bezahlt werden wollen!

Für mich spannend waren Graebers Überlegungen zur modernen Kunst. In der Tat geht das Paradigma der Kreativität von der Romantik aus, in deren Folge sich die Idee entwickelt, jeder Mensch sei eigentlich Künstler (siehe Beuys). Da aber nicht jeder über die dazu früher notwendigen Fertigkeiten verfügt, folgt daraus zwingend eine Ausweitung des Kunstbegriffs (Installationen, Collagen etc.). Man könnte nun denken, das sei die eigentliche Demokratisierung der sonst elitären Kunst aus Museen und Galerien (und im Falle von Breakdance, Hip Hop und allgemein der Infragestellung des Gegensatzes von "seriöser" und Pop-Kultur scheint das ja auch so zu sein), aber weit gefehlt: Kunst verkörpere zwar nach wie vor alternative Werte zur materiellen Stuss- Sphäre, aber gerade dadurch, dass sie von den Reichen und Bürokraten okkupiert wird, spiele sie eine "Schlüsselrolle bei der Reproduktion der umfassenderen Struktur gesellschaftlicher Beziehungen, die dafür sorgen, dass Kraftfahrern, Dienstmädchen, Bergleuten und Telefonwerbern weiterhin erzählt wird, ihre Leben und Sorgen seien uninteressant und unwichtig, und diejenigen ästhetischen und kulturellen Ausdrucksformen, die diese Menschen ansprechen, in die Zweit- und Drittklassigkeit verweisen." (S. 330) Das ist perfekt zugespitzt und großartig konkret gedacht!

Den Abschluss der Aufsatzsammlung bilden Überlegungen, die Thesen des Anarchisten Kropotkin mit dem Darwinismus konfrontieren und den Schluss nahe legen, dass "fit" nicht ist, wer sich im Überlebenskampf durchsetzt, sondern wer am effektivsten zur Erhaltung seiner Art mit anderen kooperiert. Daraus leitet Graeber den Schluss ab, dass die Menschheit in der Tat die Spezies sei, die es in der Kooperation am weitesten gebracht hat. Unser Glück liege also nicht im "Kampf" aller gegen alle um knappe Ressourcen etc., sondern im Ausbau von Kooperation und Solidarität. Interessanterweise sieht der Anarchist Graeber nicht in der Dienstleistungsklasse den Kern einer sich womöglich wieder formierenden "Arbeiterklasse", sondern er postuliert, es sei die Gruppe der Menschen, die Care- Arbeit leisten, die zur neuen "Sorgearbeiterklasse" werde und die in ihrem Selbstbewusstsein von links so gestärkt werden müsse, dass sie aus der Sinnhaftigkeit und Unverzichtbarkeit ihrer Arbeit auch den Anspruch auf einen höheren gesellschaftlichen Stellenwert und also mindestens bessere Bezahlung ableiten kann. Von dort ist es bis zur Einsicht, dass wir auf Banken, Finanzdienstleister, Megayachten und Reichenpartys, kurz auf die Reichen an sich, verzichten könnten. Wenn eine Köchin fehlt, gibt es nichts zu essen, wenn ein Reicher fehlt, fehlt nichts (und man sage nicht, sein Geld für Investitionen: Wenn er sein Geld zugunsten der Allgemeinheit verliert, ist ein Betroffener nur noch als Mitglied der Gesellschaft, nicht aber als "Reicher" wichtig).

Was sagen? Man sollte mehr von diesem Anarchisten lesen, denn "Anarchismus" ist nicht - wie man uns immer wieder einreden will - Chaos, sondern entspringt aus dem Glauben an die Selbstregulierungsmacht von Gesellschaften, glaubt an Menschen, die nicht durch Verbote oder die Polizei zu vernünftigem Denken und Handeln gebracht werden müssen, sondern einfach durch Verhältnisse, die es ihnen ermöglichen, so zu sein, wie es ihnen ihre Eltern als Kinder vorgestellt haben. Kinder an die Macht? Ja, so ähnlich! Ein Buch, das man lesen sollte.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Graeber is a leader*, despite his death.

In his song “Friends,” Jesse Welles sings

I looked up and to my left and saw
A canopy of greed
I do not need to be unburdened
I just need someone to lead
And if it looks a bit familiar
Like it did the other time
They say that history don't repeat itself
No, history just rhymes

The river's deep
The river's wide
And there ain't no way across it 'cept to swim or sink and die
The way is long
The path is mеan
I ain't got none of my friends left, thеy all vanished in the stream

If you listen to that song and you know what he means in your guts, to your dismay!, then pick up this book.

*I must insist you know how I landed on the word leader, although you might think it’s silly. I added (prophetic) + (enduringly relatable) and since the relatability diminished the strange light of the prophetic, I accidentally discovered my own personal definition of “leader."

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are an adventure into Graeber's thought and preoccupations. From bullying to big puppets, from anarchism to action as play, there is a positive definition of freedom presented in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World ....

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not have the capacity to do this justice right now.

Here, read his essay: Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! and I'll be back!

30/31 reads in January.

[Taighe · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Graeber is always a perfect antidote to cynicism

[Dan P · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've wrestled with the title of this posthumous essay collection. It's part of a quote from Graeber, one that gets to the core of so much of his writing: "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." Taken as a whole it's fabulous and true, and contextually rich. But using just the first half as the title of this book feels a little clickbaity lol

That said, it does nail what's so great about his writing: the goal isn't to impart specific knowledge but to encourage new ways of thinking. You go into a book on debt thinking you'll come out with a stronger understanding of the history of money and the social utility of financial barriers. And you do! But you also come out questioning the efficacy of the (so-called) Western legal order, and how to approach the concepts of ownership and worthiness.

We make the world with every action we take. Even and especially in such dark times we have to remember how powerful we are, and to think and create and have fun as much as possible.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich war neugierig auf dieses Buch, weil ich „Bullshit Jobs“ von Graeber geliebt habe.
Dieses hier ist allerdings etwas anders: Es handelt sich um eine Sammlung von Essays und Vorträgen, die nach seinem Tod veröffentlicht wurden.

Inhaltlich geht es um Graebers große Kernthemen:Macht, Arbeit, Bürokratie, Schulden und vor allem die Idee, dass unsere gesellschaftlichen Strukturen nicht naturgegeben, sondern von Menschen gemacht sind und daher auch anders gestaltet werden könnten.

Kein durchgehendes Argument wie bei Bullshit Jobs, sondern viele kluge, manchmal provokante Gedanken, die zum Hinterfragen von Selbstverständlichkeiten einladen.

[Ellison Moorehead]

Ha sido algo amargo leer este libro después de la muerte de Graeber, y también en un momento mío de baja militancia, porque me provocó bastante nostalgia y tristeza recordar a la ellison con 30 años que imprimía sus artículos en el curro e iba al gimnasio y se hacía su media hora en la bici estática leyéndolo e inspirándose y luego al sindi.

Esa ya no soy yo y ya tengo más lecturas y más vida y veo fisuras y problemas y cuestiono un poco.

Aun así, su entusiasmo e inteligencia e imaginación siguen dando ganas y sigue siendo un compañero fiel y releí a todos felizmente. Lo echo de menos, su risa de niño travieso y su soberbia de niño listo y su capacidad de hacer lo complicado fácil.

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty good collection of essays and interviews. Because this is just a posthumous collection of Graeber’s unpublished/lesser known works, there isn’t a real tight theme. Despite the range of them, a good number of them were very interesting to me.

[Henning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ganz interessant, aber nichts neues und die Kapitel sind Recht wirr zusammengesetzt

[Uvrón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graeber is a source of beauty and sanity. Whenever I read him, I feel relief that someone is finally taking apart the bricks of violent orthodoxies, turning them over to show how irrational they are, how cruel and how badly stacked. In his clarity and kindness he reminds me of Oliver Sacks, another academic who didn’t lose sight of what matters.

Closing Graeber, I am left with sadness that the world is so far away from any kind of rational society—I don’t mean a society based on cold logic, but just a society that functions as pretty much everyone agrees a society should function, instead of coercing us into our own torment. But if Graeber is right, and we can inhabit that perspective and grow it, then political struggle doesn’t have to be a battle to defeat the other half of the population. No one wants bullshit jobs, bureaucracy, debt peonage; everyone wants to feel that their life was spent helping someone. That’s a lot of solidarity to start with.

Thank you for the gift Jan <3
===

Misc quotes and notes to help me reference in future:

Solnit’s Foreword:
-It does not have to be this way
-Despair is often seen as sophisticated, worldly-wise, and hopefulness is seen as naive, when the opposite is not infrequently true
-David’s superpower was being an outsider

Dubrovsky’s introduction:
-All human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other.
-a woman who introduced herself as a nanny in a nursing home asked ‘Why don’t people like me have access to decision-making?” David replied “Our society is organized in such a way that access to power is conditioned on access to violence… do we really want to live in a society organized around the ideals of such people?”
-the ultimate truth belongs to all of us and it is this: we are free to change it as we see fit

There Never Was a West
-Islamicization was and continues to be a form of Westernization; those who lived in the barbarian kingdoms of the European Middle Ages came to resemble what we now call ‘the West’ only when they themselves became more like Islam
-origin of democracy in aristocratic, competitive, coercive societies
-ubiquity of self-governance and collective decision-making outside of state democracy

Fianance is just another word for other people’s debts
-anthropologists ‘a happy medium’ between historians’ refusal to talk about anything lacking concrete evidence, and economists caring only about models and no evidence at all

next essays covering bullshit jobs, origin of modern economic consensus BS on microeconomics and rational actors, Piketty questioning whether debt abolition is really all that radical or if it is coopted by big banks

Culture as creative refusal — great summary of Madagascar history, related to schismogenesis, heterogeneity

Hatred has become a political taboo
-hate as motivation opposes ‘rational self-interest’ motivation
-small, intimate communities are full of rivalry and hate, but manage to function anyway, collectively; “this overcoming of communal hatred is the concrete manifestation of collective love”

Dead Zones of the imagination — very very good essay on bureaucracy, violence
-compare to feminist theory: women always must know more about men than vice versa; bureaucracts [incl. police] are free to know less
-don’t mistake the most interesting aspect of violence (what it communicates about social relations) with the most *important* aspect (that it is the only action someone can take to achieve a predictable reaction without understanding anything at all of the other person)

bully’s pulpit—why we dislike the victim as much as the bully; why deserters are despised instead of celebrated

i didn’t understand how widespread rape was, and then the penny dropped
-the effect of patriarchal violence on his mother
-“in endless ways, the violence of powerful men plays havoc on our souls”

phenomenology of giant puppets—very thorough essay on why police hate puppets, getting into competing worldviews and symbology of police and activists; a fight over imagination

The Revolt of the Caring Classes — a section of essays on care <3, how it’s most of the economy, most of what people want to do with their lives [incl. on the right, where this desire is redirected to the imagined nobility of serving in the military].

what’s the point if we can’t have fun? — on biologists’ and philosophers’ denial of fun, play, freedom as possible fundamental drivers of reality, rather than selfish gene and microscopic automata. Also museum of care essay

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Graeberin ja David Wengrown Alussa oli.. oli kiinnostava uusi avaus yhteiskunta- ja kulttuurihistoriaan, joten tämä Graeberin Perimmäinen salattu totuus -kokoelma nousi lukulistalleni salaliittomaisesta otsikostaan huolimatta. Graeber ei ollut minulle erityisen tuttu, mutta ilmeisesti hän oli kuuluisa kansalaisdemokratian ja anarkismin kannattaja. Hän oli aktiivisesti mukana monissa suoran demokratian hankkeissa, kuten Occupy Wall Street -liikkeessä, ja hänen hevonpaskaduunejaan käsittelevä Bullshit jobs -kirjansa oli kansainvälinen hitti. Näkyvä hahmo ja aktiivinen toimija siis.

Perimmäinen salattu totuus sisältää valikoiman Graeberin tekstejä, joiden aiheina on taloustiede, valta ja hoiva. Vaikka Rebekka Solnit kehuu esipuheessaan Graeberin selkeää tyyliä, hänen oma esipuheensa oli ainoa selkeä osuus tässä kokoelmassa. Päinvastoin Graeberin tyyli on minusta hyvin akateemista ja koukeroista, mikä teki lukemisesta ja ymmärtämisestä haastavaa. Aiheiden käsittely oli myös erikoisesti sekä uuvuttavan perusteellista että ylimalkaista. Graeber aloitti teemojen käsittelyn usein käymällä ensin tarkkaan läpi vanhentuneita teorioita, joiden jälkeen hän vasta siirtyi kertomaan omista tai nykyään hyväksytyistä käsityksistä. Tämä paitsi teki teksteistä todella pitkiä, oli myös karhunpalvelus ihmiselle, joka yleensä muistaa parhaiten ensin lukemansa, ei niinkään jälkikäteen tehtyjä korjauksia. Tällainen käsittelytapa sopii asiantuntijoiden keskinäiseen debattiin, mutta huonommin populaariin tietokirjaan.

Lisäksi Graeberin omat ajatukset olivat usein harmillisen epämääräisiä ja hahmottomia. Teoriat paremmasta demokratiasta ja talousjärjestelmistä tuntuivat nojaavan siihen, että kunhan nämä vanhat järjestelmät ajetaan alas ja hänet jalot periaatteensa otetaan käyttöön, käytännön ongelmat ratkeavat omalla painollaan. Käytännön ratkaisut siis loistivat poissaolollaan. Hiukan tekstejä himmensi myös niiden ikä. Suurin osa oli kirjoitettu 10-20 vuotta sitten, jolloin ajat olivat aivan toiset. Ei ollut Trumpia, ei Venäjän hyökkäyssotaa, laitaoikeiston nousukautta jne. Tämä teki monista Graeberin visioista naiivin oloisia. Esimerkiksi EU:n ihanne päätöksenteosta yksimielisyyteen pyrkien on nykytilanteessa halvaannuttanut monet tärkeät päätökset. Pyrkimys konsensukseen voi toimia vain, jos keinot ja tavoitteet edes etäisesti samansuuntaisia..

Kaikesta kritiikistä huolimatta luin kirjan loppuun, eli jotain vetoavaa Graeberin konstikkaissa lauseissa on täytynyt olla. Ainakaan se ei muistuta lainkaan tyypillisiä unettavia taloustiedettä käsitteleviä teoksia (yksi tällainen on viettänyt jo viikkoja pöydälläni, eikä etene mihinkään). Kenties Graeberin lennokkaiden lauseiden vahvuus onkin siinä, että ne herättävät ajattelemaan, eivät niinkään anna vastauksia.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graeber is always worth the read. It seems like Graeber turned almost all the essays in this posthumously published collection into books, where his arguments got much more detailed and developed. So, this can be seen as a nice little introduction to his work, but it also makes sense that he never published these essays because his books are ultimately way better versions of the arguments.
Reading his essays on work and what he terms the “caring class” of laborers made me especially sad that he died a couple years ago, because it occurred to me that he would probably have some really useful and thoughtful things to say about the rise and spread of AI. RIP to a legend.

[Danieliukas Dunduliukas · Rating 5 out of 5]

God I miss David Graeber. Of this collection of essays, my favourites were:
- There Never Was a West
- Finance is Just Another Word for Other People's Debts
- Hatred Has Become a Political Taboo
- Dead Zones of the Imagination
- The Bully's Pulpit
- I Didn't Understand How Widespread Rape Was. Then the Penny Dropped
- The Revolt of the Caring Classes

[Derrick Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graeber reads like a prophet. Some of clearest contemporary articulations of the possibilities of a better world. RIP to one of the great thinkers of the 21st Century

S/O to Collin for the great b-day present

[Marco G · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not smart enough to appreciate his writing. I loved the essays on debt and finance and anarchists . Rest of the book was too big to wrap my mind around. He's brilliant, and I need to read more of his writing. This was an effort to stretch my world view , and I am glad I learned about him.

[counter-hegemonicon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A summary of the work of DG and all of his greatest essays. A piercing, current insight into the world and the history of how we got here from one of the greatest political philosophers and cultural critics we’ve ever seen

[Zander Mapes · Rating 5 out of 5]

If knowing Graeber is an anarchist doesn't preconceive your opinion, you should read this.

This collection finishes with 'What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun' -- at the very least, I implore you to read this one essay.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A posthumous collection of articles and essays. Several of these were the basis for full books. It’s a great was to get a sampling Graeber’s work to see if you’d like his other offerings.

[Janneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Вцілому сподобалося, але "приклади" з підрадянської України (наприкінці книги) з кожним новим словом віддалялися від реальності

[Grant Peters · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very dense, couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it contains some very important thoughts, but reading it was a struggle.

[Twain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and touching intro and foreward to the book.

A collection of essays by the late great Dave Graeber about the world and how to remake it. The general thrust is that the world does not change without first changing people’s minds. The essays in this book set out to change people’s minds about the west, the state, neoclassical economics, anarchism, the nature of money, bullshit jobs, art, society, etc.

I’m always fascinated by how much Davey focuses feminism in his writing. He makes a claim in the book that marxists get mad at him for not centering Marxism more in his writing, and his defense to that is largely that he takes Marxism for granted and that should be apparent in his writing. Feminism, on the other hand, is much more frequently explicitly called back to, and that’s something I really do respect and appreciate out of him.

Always nice to spend some time with Dave and his ideas. I really loved the first two thirds of the book. From the essay about puppets on some of the essays went a little off the rails (or maybe more accurately outside of my wheelhouse) but those essays were fun and interesting in their own ways, just not quite as scintillating from my perspective as There Never Was a West which was like so aggressively my shit.

There Never Was a West is a fascinating essay and a great way to open the book. He gets into the relative incoherence of the idea of “the west” and how tracing Greece to Rome to modern day Europe and America. Looks at what “the west” is, an idea of democracy, individualism, human rights, equality, liberty, blah blah blah. It’s incredibly vague and arbitrary, and not true. He goes after the idea of “western tradition” which is mostly fake and non-linear, and tends to be equally as true of other societies in ways we just ignore. If the western tradition is uniquely “pluralistic” or “secular” why does that not apply to different Asian cultures of different times? If western tradition is about fusing Abrahamic religions with Greek philosophy, legalism, scientific rationalism, expansionist capitalism, missionary impulse, institutions, courtly love, etc. these are all things that spread to Europe from the Middle East. So does western tradition come from being influenced by the Middle East? And does that make them the true heirs to Greece and Rome? If “the west” is a collection of literature and shared ideas, then can’t anyone who has simply read those books and ideas be western? What of the westerners who haven’t? What the modern conception of the west is at best is a North American world system with endless fusion of European, African, Native American, and middle eastern ideals, started in North America and brutally conquering the globe. Gets into how the idea of the west inventing democracy is totally fake, and the western democratic ideal vs the use of democracy in other times and places. Democracy can both be direct, or representative, and “the west” has had neither for most of its existence. John Adams defended the constitution as a that of a Roman republic, a kind of balancing of powers between a king (president), aristocracy (senate) and public (house of representatives). In the late 1700s most “democrats” were suspicious of parliaments, popular political parties, secret ballots and women’s suffrage, and also pro-slavery, which is very different than what it means today. Democracy did not really catch on until in the 1800s, and at that point a lot of “western” thinkers conceived of Athens as a mob rule society for their democracy, and it got re-evaluated. The idea of “the west” really started in the 1890s, with Europeans starting to see Americans as their equals, and wasn’t really expounded upon until post World War I, when German thinkers were questioning if they were a part of the west. Around the time “the west” started to become representative democracies, a lot of countries (especially Britain) started really pushing support for reactionary dictators overseas to support their global interests. A lot of these dictators relied on British support to rule (sounds like America). It’s at this point “orientalist” theories start popping up in the west that this is somehow the natural order of things in Asia and only the west is naturally capable of democracy. The west was actively choosing allies that didn’t share its “western values” and anytime a national liberation movement popped up that shared some of those “western values”the west was incredibly hostile to it and moved to crush it.

There has been a lot of debate about (namely the Iroquois league’s) the influence of Native American society on the founding of America. While there is obvious reason to believe that Native American society influenced American society, old Davey thinks we have the correlation backwards. Adams, Madison, Jefferson and Locke saw native Americans often had tremendous amounts of liberty, democratic principles, and a lack of state coercion, all undergirded by their shared property and lack of private property. Given that the US was built by wealthy land owners, these ideas were an absolute non-starter for them. However, on the frontier “frontier societies that were essentially, as Calloway puts it, ‘amalgams’. The colonists who came to America, in fact, found themselves in a unique situation: having largely fled the hierarchy and conformism of Europe, they found themselves confronted with an indigenous population far more dedicated to principles of equality and individualism than they had hitherto been able to imagine; and then proceeded to largely exterminate them, even while adopting many of their customs, habits and attitudes” (p36). This passage kinda drew me back to The Dawn of Everything where he talks about Native American influence on the Enlightenment, and the “shatter zones” between two major cultural areas where people lived in amorphous cultural spaces that shared ideas between the two major zones they were living between. But these amorphous spheres, outside the purview of the state, are typically where new and innovative forms of living come from (and typically democracy, because without a state people have to figure out how to get along). He talks how for much of history you either had democracy (everyone gets a say in how things are run) or sovereignty (a state that can enforce violence throughout its borders, and this is typically centralized with little input from the populace) and “the west” was and saw itself very much as the latter until the colonies and the frontier started to change that because of the people’s relative freedom from centralized government relative to Europe. These zones of freedom and experimentation are eventually what put popular pressure on the state to adopt representative democracy, and that’s why we see it first among western countries in the US and Great Britain and France (Great Britain and France were the two European countries with the biggest colonial holdings in America). Other influences for what became “the west” come from other places. Hobbes’s idea of society looks strangely like west African trading cities where Europeans and Africans lived together. The European idea of government: elites ruling uniform populations, speaking the same language, studied in the language’s classic books, uniform law and administration looks a lot more like China at the time these ideas were developed than anything in the history of the west. So in some way maybe the idea of “the west” is Native American freedom, West African social contracts, and Chinese administration of a nation-state.

He uses a modern day example of this in the Zapatistas. They are an anarchist group who are based on Mayan ideas of local control and group decision making. They operate in a zone with little state oversight and are experimenting with new forms of organizing society. There have been a number of anarchist and indigenous groups who popped up after the zapatistas with similar ideas. Here again we see people living in experimental ways and those ways being adopted by like minded people across the globe (vastly sped up by the internet) but it’s a good example of what Davey was getting at in the previous sections. Ends the first essay on musings that democracy and the state are incompatible because self-governance can never truly be rectified with the coercive nature of the state. In Dave’s view the state is basically a way of organizing violence and in order to protect and horde wealth you need a way to coerce and keep down the hordes (an argument advanced by the American Federalists).

There is a really great part where Graeber points out a different criteria. If “the west” is based on geographic expansion, science, industrialism, bureaucracy, nationalism, racial theories, etc. then isn’t Nazi Germany the pinnacle of the west? (He says this in jest to prove a rhetorical point about the vague notions of the west but I kinda think he’s cooking here)

There Never Was a West harkened me back to an idea of Ha-Joon Chang’s in Bad Samaratins that it’s convenient to look at where you are now, and create a revisionist version of the past based around that to say this is where it was always heading or always was or whatever. He is referring to free trade, and how western countries were significantly protectionist until they developed global multinationals, and at that point protectionism became bad and always was bad and never made sense or worked. You can sense a similar thing at play with what Graeber is describing with western tradition. You take where you are now and try to map it onto history to give you some form of historical tradition, that this is the logical endpoint to the path we have always been on, and this is an ideal we have always had and followed enshrined in history despite it not really holding up to any scrutiny.

Finance is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts was an incredibly charming interview with Davey. His family history is insane, his dad being anarchist-sympathetic and being an ambulance driver in Spain during the civil war and calling Homage to Catalonia mostly biased bullshit was not something I expected but is a very measured position.

The original Bullshit Jobs essay is always charming.

Against Economics was an awesome read. Delves into some of the shortcomings in the theory of economics and the nature of money. Debunks quantity of money theory and efficient market hypothesis and ideas that markets are filled with rational actors with good information trying to maximize utility, basically everything that undergirds the neoliberal Mount Pelerin Society school of thought. Gets into how economics is not a real science, but rather treats itself as a fixed philosophy on ever changing societal conditions. A lot of bubbles and market failures have not been caught or predicted by these economists because they fundamentally think the price is always right (which would make speculation impossible but that’s another issue) but if you think the price is always right because rational market actors are behaving rationally then who are you to even identify a bubble. If you bow down at the alter of the market and treat it as an infallible god then you won’t see the issues until it’s much too late, at which point you sweep them under the rug and continue with the same school of thought that landed us in the mess to begin with.

Davey and Picketty conversation was fine I did leave kind of annoyed with both of them tbh.

Culture as Creative Refusal delves into the idea that very few cultures exist in isolation, and most exist with neighbors and in relation to those neighbors. What they choose to accept and reject from their neighbors, what they do similarly and differently is a conscious political and societal decision. The bones of The Dawn of Everything are everywhere in this essay, Dave even hits us with schizmogenesis, one of my all time favorite words. He focuses on potlach societies in the hinterlands of Bronze Age civilizations, often with warrior aristocracies, decentralized, game like competition, theatrical, boastful, anti-commerce, anti-writing, etc. often born out of a rejection of the city-states they live near and do business with. On the other end of the spectrum is Daveys own study of the Malagasy people, who it seems at different points had different warrior kings create petty kingdoms on their island that were quickly overthrown. The Malagasy people treat these warrior aristocratic tales as foolish, egotistical and ridiculous (and even portray god in a joking deprecating way). The only people who held sway in society were elders, who used it to stop headstrong individuals. A lot of decision was made through concensus, boasting, lying and self-aggrandizement were looked down upon, and literacy and commerce rates upon the populace were very high. Here we find two opposite cultures, often created out of their material relation to the other.

Dead Zones of Imagination is a part of the Utopia of Rules, but a great re-read. It underlies Davey’s thesis that “it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence” (p158). It’s a great essay about the struggles with bureaucracy during the death of his mother, and why anthropologists are not drawn to concepts like structural violence or paperwork the way they are other social rituals.

The Bully Pulpit delves into domination, cowardice, portrayals of enemies and oneself in relation to those enemies, structures of domination, who is deserving of what emotional response and how all of that is linked to bullying (particularly schoolyard bullying). All of this is centered around the role of the audience and authority and the equation of the bully and the bullied in a very interesting way.

The essay on rape and power was very short but incredibly powerful.

In the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets was an interesting look at left wing and anarchist peaceful organizing around the WTO Seattle and similar events. It looks at the anarchist organizing techniques and ideas, the media and the violent police response (and response to multiple protests moving forward, including ones where police would arrest 600 protestors claiming they were making Molotov cocktails, only to walk back the claim later). The lies repeatedly made media rounds and later would only be redacted after much protest. The consistent lying of the cops was never remarked upon by the media however. The media also tried to keep the protests motives vague, they did not want the protests to be able to use the media to get their argument across (they had no issue giving the arguments of the other side though). Davey being a prefigurative politics guy is so on brand for him I would have loved to see what he thought of Bevins’s book detailing its limitations and failings. He also makes a quick point of something else in the Bevins book that a lot of organizing is done in the negative space, ie against something instead of for something (you can gather a lot of protestors with a lot of different solutions for a protest against something no one likes).

Are you an anarchist is a goofy little essay about the principles of anarchism it was whatever.

There’s a banger in Army of Altruists “One might say that the conservative approach always has been to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offering themselves up as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they themselves have released” (p255-256). The essay itself is good, it focuses on the dialectic of ego and altruism, and the relation between the great religions and the market. There is an interesting point Davey makes in this essay too about working-class republicans. The point he makes is they are way more likely to resent the intelligentsia more than the rich because they are more likely to imagine themselves striking rich than ever being accepted as a member of the intelligentsia. Between the cost of school and the financial sacrifice one has to often make for these limited jobs, the jobs of the intelligentsia have been largely reserved for the children of the rich, making it appear more likely to you that you will hit the lottery or have good fortune that makes you rich in the future rather than be able to make the personal sacrifices required to become some type of culture writer or political activist and catch up on all the intellectual arguments and studies. And this structure of exclusion turns a lot of uneducated people to the right.

Revolt of the caring classes was an interesting look into the labor of the caring classes, the market logic of it, and a different conception of production than lefties are used to talking about (human production).

The essays on fun were an interesting and unique perspective but something I would label way outside of my wheelhouse.

[Sarah Blank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting takes on social issues. Several times while reading, I found myself wondering what he would have to say about world events in 2025.