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e5b8125
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Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitali..
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anarchy
anticapitalist
property
revolution
destruction
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David Graeber |
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c2b5fb3
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if one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.
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David Graeber |
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0522754
|
Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.
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stupidity
structural-violence
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David Graeber |
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54f1dac
|
A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.
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David Graeber |
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3601f72
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Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it's better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafes arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends' complex polyamorous love affairs.
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joy
time-allocation
productivity
society
purpose
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David Graeber |
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06aa9f3
|
One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local teahouse, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. "Do you have quail eggs?" asked the king. "I'm sure I can find some," answered Nasruddin. The king ordered an omelet of a dozen quail eggs, and Nasruddin hurried out to look for them. After the king and his party had eaten, he charged them a hundred gold pieces. The king was puzzled. "Are quail..
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David Graeber |
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f6196f4
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If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place.
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David Graeber |
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9d06f09
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Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they're doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated a..
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work
inspirational
consumerism
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David Graeber |
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858460d
|
For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is tha..
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David Graeber |
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717933c
|
While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.
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violence
political
gandhi
protests
democracy
resistance
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David Graeber |
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07a0f1c
|
About the only policies that can't be referred to as "deregulation" are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled "deregulation," which means it's important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled "deregulation" first."
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david graeber |
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eeb4e97
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The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what's in front of them.
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bureaucrats
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David Graeber |
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b882bee
|
The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called 'the people.' But how did 'the people' actually grant legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. So what gives the police the rig..
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violence
politics
society
rights
democracy
police
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David Graeber |
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0f23521
|
So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience.
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politics
protests
society
revolution
democracy
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David Graeber |
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48d17e1
|
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.
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David Graeber |
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4f27c39
|
Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money--or,
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David Graeber |
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54f1dc6
|
After all, as we're constantly reminded, the Internet has unleashed all sorts of creative vision and collaborative ingenuity. What it has really brought about is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends and means, where creativity is marshaled to the service of administration rather than the other way around.
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David Graeber |
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6f184b6
|
How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on t..
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hope
militarization
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David Graeber |
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27e73f7
|
the real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That,
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David Graeber |
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4140b0e
|
Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood: There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Som..
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David Graeber |
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a4effff
|
Tally sticks were quite explicitly IOUs: both parties to a transaction would take a hazelwood twig, notch it to indicate the amount owed, and then split it in half. The creditor would keep one half, called "the stock" (hence the origin of the term "stock holder") and the debtor kept the other, called "the stub" (hence the origin of the term "ticket stub.)"
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iou
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David Graeber |
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881b82c
|
This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to "kick them upstairs": promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else's problem."
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David Graeber |
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4ee6aca
|
Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money"--mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be."
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David Graeber |
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4797f4d
|
The "public" does not work--a sentence like "most of the American public works in the service industry" would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work:"
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David Graeber |
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d866407
|
Insofar as we have freedoms, it's not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It's because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms--by doing exactly what we're doing here--before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.
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David Graeber |
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2c22a87
|
Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.
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profit
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David Graeber |
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3a9ef49
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Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn't just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn't really work.
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David Graeber |
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56cb3cf
|
The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point--and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue--and regularly do--t..
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David Graeber |
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fe38bb7
|
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
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nonsense
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David Graeber |
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3d4cb2f
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The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."
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David Graeber |
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3f6078d
|
if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.
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david graeber |
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6b97a72
|
When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the fo..
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David Graeber |
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4a51599
|
Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.
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David Graeber |
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72acdce
|
one of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation--of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state.
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David Graeber |
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dc22cbf
|
The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector--and these techniques were assumed to be required, when operating on a large scale, because they were more efficient than the networks of personal or informal connections that had dominated a world of small family firms.
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David Graeber |
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4d90c2e
|
But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even ..
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David Graeber |
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1afb2d4
|
As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.
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David Graeber |
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c2de8ed
|
If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world.
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David Graeber |
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9474c6f
|
The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.
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common-sense
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David Graeber |
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fa18d82
|
What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating."
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David Graeber |
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89bfa0e
|
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like." In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition be..
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David Graeber |
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7c9a0ab
|
Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind ("cross this line and I will shoot you," "one more word out of any of you and you're going to jail"). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid."
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David Graeber |
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3bca823
|
All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them.
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David Graeber |
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e85af89
|
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have? This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it's the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don't think a lot about what being f..
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David Graeber |