Read on Twitter
Absolutely heartbroken to hear that David Graeber has died. As a thousand people have said before me he was one of the most prolific and brilliant theorists of our generation. I'll get to his work later but I wanted to talk about David the person,
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
because that part isn't going to make it into the accounts and I think people should know. Anyone who knew him can back me up when I say that he was, above all, a really kind person, someone who'd help just random people when they were going
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
through a rough time. I have a comrade who was being held in Canada for their activism and David was the one who got them legal support when the rest of the left wouldn't touch it. He also, and I think this is really important, self-consciously
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
rejected the status people tried to thrust on him as some kind of vanguard intellectual. He was completely resolute on that and absolutely refused (in a way a lot of scholars wouldn't) to take credit for anything that was actually done by a group.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Probably the most famous example of this is the way that every time he got interviewed and someone said that he'd created the 99% slogan he'd immediately launch into an explanation of how no that was a working group it was a collective effort ect
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
And that's who he was as a person, he never saw himself as someone outside the movement dictating theory to it, he saw himself as just another organizer, no different from anyone else. The @dsa_lsc had an event with him a few months ago and I
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
remember afterwards he was really sad that he couldn't stick around and just talk and get to know everyone better. And I think a big part of that is that he was a prolific organizer. He's most famous for being one of the people who started Occupy
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
but a decade before that he was in the New York Direct Action Network and part of the Global Justice movement. This is someone who's been tear gassed on 4 continents and took it well enough that even unsympathetic French anarchists during the
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Gilets Jaunes were impressed. One thing I realized pretty quickly in college is that you can tell almost immediately who's been on the wrong side of a police line by how they talk about power and you can see which side he was on in Utopia of Rules
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
I'm starting with Utopia of Rules in particular because the link between bureaucracy, knowledge, and violence is at the core of his understanding of the current world. It's one born of the experience of fighting the rented armies of the IMF's
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
bureaucrats in the streets. I've long insisted that the best theory has an ethnographic quality to it, it's the theory produced on the barricades by people throwing bricks (or in David's case probably paint bombs) at cops. Now a lot of theory is
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
written like this, and much of it isn't very good. What made David Graeber a brilliant theorist was his ability to see beyond the immediate struggle, to see its global impacts in ways that were invisible to everyone else.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-shock-of-victory
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-shock-of-victory
The Shock of Victory is probably the best example of this, it completely re-frames the struggles of the 2000's in a way I don't think anyone else could have. I'm picking out The Shock of Victory for another reason though,
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-shock-of-victory
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-shock-of-victory
which is that the sheer amount of stuff he wrote caused a lot of his best stuff to go almost completely unnoticed. I'm going to close off the thread by trying, in a small way, to fix that by going through my favorite of his non-mainline texts.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
I'm going to start with There Never Was a West, which I consider to be, even if I don't fully agree with it, the single best defense of democracy to come out of the anarchist tradition, a stunning attempt to save democracy
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west
from "The West" and the constraints imposed on it by people who stubbornly insist on identifying it solely with Athens and the US. But it also contains, basically as parenthetical asides, some of the most interesting analysis of anthropology and
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
faux objectivity in Western philosophy I've ever seen. This kind of digression is typical of his writing, he sort of bounces from topic to topic and then finds some way to cobble them all together again in a way that makes sense.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
How to Change the Course of Human History is another of my favorites, written alongside David Wendgrow. It's an incredibly powerful argument that the popular conception of history, that people at first lived in small,
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers and then developed agriculture and became sedentary and hierarchical as agriculture caused society to become more complex, is just indescribably wrong and is a product of Rousseau, not history.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
I also want to talk about Turning Modes of Production Inside Out, or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery, which is essentially what it sounds like. But it also highlights on of his real skills as a writer: his
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://libcom.org/library/turning-modes-production-inside-out-or-why-capitalism-transformation-slavery
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://libcom.org/library/turning-modes-production-inside-out-or-why-capitalism-transformation-slavery
ability to break down notoriously complicated debates (lord knows Modes of Production debates are indescribably arcane) into chunks that are actually understandable and maybe more importantly to show what's actually at stake in the positions
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
people take. He also does something very few scholars bother with, which is taking the time to explain concepts instead of just assuming people know what things are, which makes his work INFINITELY more accessible than like 99% of academic writing
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
I think this is still true in his pure academic writing too, even when it is more difficult. One great example of this is Radical Alterity is Just Another Way of Saying "Reality", which helped me understand what the
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau5.2.003
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau5.2.003
"ontological turn" really was in a way that 4 years of learning about it in classes didn't because he, get this, ACTUALLY FUCKING DEFINES ONTOLOGY AND TALKS ABOUT HOW ITS USAGE CHANGED, while also explicitly laying out the stakes of the argument.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Going to close out with what I think might be his single most interesting idea (from It is value that brings universes into being), one that I've never seen anyone discuss anywhere else and explains a lot of the behavior
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.2.012
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.2.012
we see in the world (and on this site for that matter). The rest of the text is difficult but worth reading in its own right, it's an analysis of the nature of value that combines a esoteric reading of Marx with a lot of the anthropological work
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
on value (expanded in vastly more detail in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value) that's complicated enough that I'm not even going to attempt to explain it here. But about half way through it breaks of into an entirely different direction.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
In a section somewhat confusingly named Cosmologies, games, and the anti-ontological approach, he launches into what seems like a digression on games and the Stanford Prison Experiment, which note that when people are playing a game, there's a
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
distinct set of players and rules, as well as goals and "legal" and "illegal" actions. Everyone involved knows that the situation is imaginary, and that everything in it is make believe (the students knew they were students and not guards and
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
prisoners) but once the rules of a game are established the game adopts the basic form of a narrative. Once the narrative form is adopted, everyone behaves as if every part of the narrative is coherent (even if it makes no sense). This has the
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
effect of making people essentially ignore the question of whether the narrative actually makes sense "If we care whether Great Britain or Spain win the contest over Gibraltar, we don’t really ask whether “Great Britain” or “Spain” actually exist;
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
if one cares which middle-aged male lawyer prevails in some hotly contested legislative contest over budget cuts, one doesn’t question why legislators always seem to be middle-aged male lawyers, or even whether the budget actually needs to be cut"
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
But the key here is that when you enter a game or a narrative you still know that that it's a game and that the parts of it don't necessary make sense (show me a state, I will not be killed by an abstraction), you just don't care.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Now the important thing about these games or narratives or universes is that they all have their own set of values which people pursue. Pursuing that value might be something as simple as putting a ball in a net during a soccer game. The important
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
part is that the action only has meaning inside the game. Putting a ball in a goal after or before the game is meaningless, and it's meaningless because the value you're chasing by putting a ball in a net only exists if the game is going on. The
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
soccer game, and perhaps more importantly the people in and around it, are the arena (literally in this case) in which value is realized. With out that arena the value is meaningless. This is because value is created and given meaning (realized)
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
in the specific social field that created it. This is a kind of abstract and silly example so let's take another one. In capitalism, money is the universal store of value, it is the thing that assigns value to everything. But if you take a dollar
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
bill to for example a Mayan village in the 1400's that dollar contains no value whatsoever because it's been brought outside of the social field in which its value was created and in which that value can be realized. Now there are innumerable
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
social fields with different values (thing of every subculture that exists and what they value just as a starting point) and we move between them all the time. What Graeber's point is is that when we're trying to pursue value in a given field we
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
go along with the rules even if we think they're absurd. This is how anti-capitalists function under capitalism for example, while you're working you act as if the value that capitalism assigns is the true and proper value and you don't ask your
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
boss questions about it. But it's also true of things like online arguments. Everyone on here has at one time or another defended something they don't actually believe in (Marxists defending social democracy against conservatives for example)
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
because it's what's demanded of them in that particular social field. The important part is that what people believe is ultimately irrelevant to how they behave when they're chasing value in a specific social field or society.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Ok I've rambled on long enough trying to process his loss, all I can really say is rest in power David, you'll be missed. The world was a better place with you in it, and we owe it to him and each other to make it a better one than this.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
