#David Graeber

[1000rh]

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

– David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021)

[river-taxbird]

The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.

In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.

People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.

This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.

If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.

People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.

[civanticism]

[alicearmageddon]

"The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.

Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think you’re subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, it’s absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If you’re a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."

-David Graeber, Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank

[eelhound]

"The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche's fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other's bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer — an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche's analysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society — then, yes, once we begin to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt."

- David Graeber, from Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Adventures of Mary Darling

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Science fiction great Pat Murphy has written some classics – including books that were viciously suppressed by the heirs of JRR Tolkien! – but with The Adventures of Mary Darling, she's outdone even her own impressive self:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-adventures-of-mary-darling/

The titular Mary Darling here is the mother of Wendy, John and and Michael Darling, the three children who are taken by Peter Pan to Neverland in JM Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird, which later became Peter Pan. If you recall your Barrie, you'll remember that it ends with the revelation that Wendy, John and Michael weren't the first Darlings to go to Neverland: when Mary Darling was a girl, she, too, made the journey.

Murphy's novel opens with Mary Darling and her husband George coming home from a dinner party to discover their three children missing, the window open, and their nanny, a dog called Nana, barking frantically in the yard. John is frightened, but Mary is practically petrified, inconsolable and rigid with fear.

Soon, Mary's beloved uncle, John Watson, is summoned to the house, along with his famous roommate, the detective Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes on the case, surely the children will be found?

Of course not. Holmes is incapable of understanding where the Darling children have gone, because to do so would be to admit the existence of the irrational and fantastic, and, more importantly, to accept the testimony of women, lower-class people, and pirates. Holmes has all the confidence of the greatest detective alive, which means he is of no help at all.

Neither is George Darling, who, as a kind of act of penance for letting his children be stolen away, takes to Nana's doghouse, and insists that he will not emerge from it until the children are returned. He takes his meals in the doghouse, and is carried in it to and from the taxis that bring him to work and home again.

Only Mary can rescue her children. John Watson discovers her consorting with Sam, a one-legged Pacific Islander who is a known fence and the finest rat-leather glovemaker in London, these being much prized by London's worst criminal gangs. Horrified that Mary is keeping such ill company, Watson confronts her and Sam (and Sam's parrot, who screeches nonstop piratical nonsense), only to be told that Mary knows what she is doing, and that she is determined to see her children home safe.

Mary, meanwhile, is boning up on her swordplay and self-defense (taught by a Suffragist swordmaster in a room above an Aerated Bread Company tearoom, these being the only public place in Victorian London where a respectable woman can enjoy herself without a male escort). She's acquiring nautical maps. She's going to Neverland.

What follows is a very rough guide to fairyland. It's a story that recovers the dark asides from Barrie's original Pan stories, which were soaked with blood, cruelty and death. The mermaids want to laugh as you drown. The fairies hate you and want you to die. And Peter Pan doesn't care how many starveling, poorly trained Lost Boys die in his sorties against pirates, because he knows where there are plenty more Lost Boys to be found in the alienated nurseries of Victorian London, an ocean away.

More importantly, it's a story that revolves around the women in Barrie's world, who are otherwise confined to the edges and shadows of the action. In Barrie's Pan, Wendy is a "mother," Tiger Lily is a "princess," and Mary is a barely-there adult whose main role is to smile wistfully at the memory of when she was a girl and got to serve as Peter's "mother."

And Holmes? Apart from one love interest and a stalwart housekeeper, Holmes has very little time or regard for women. This is so central to the Holmes cannon that the Arthur Conan Doyle estate actually sued over Netflix's Enola Holmes movie, arguing that Enola displayed basic respect for women, a feature that doesn't appear until the very end of the Holmes canon, and – the estate argued – those final stories were still in copyright:

https://www.cbr.com/why-enola-holmes-has-nice-version-sherlock/

Murphy's woman's-eye-view of Peter Pan, Neverland and the Lost Boys dilates the narrow aperture through which Peter Pan plays out, revealing a great deal of exciting, fun, frightening stuff that was always off in the wings. She gives flesh and substance to characters like Tiger Lily, by giving her the semi-fictionalized identity of one of the many American First Nations people who toured Europe and Africa, putting on Wild West shows that won eternal fame and cultural currency for the "American Indian," even as the USA was seeking to exterminate them and their memory.

Likewise, Murphy's pirates are grounded in the reality of pirate ships: democratic, anarchic, and far more fun than Robert Louis Stevenson would have you believe. While Murphy's pirates are about a century too late (as are Barrie's), they are in other regards pretty rigorous, which makes them extraordinarily great literary figures.

If you read David Graeber's posthumous Pirate Enlightenment, you'll know about the Zana-Malata of Madagascar, the descendants of anarchist pirates and matriarchal Malagasy women, who pranked and hoaxed British merchant sailors for generations, deliberately creating a mythology of south seas pirate kings:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia

This hybrid culture of bold, fierce matriarchal Malagasy women and their anarchist pirate husbands play a central role in the book's resolution, and Murphy's pirate utopia is so well drawn and homely that I found myself wanting to move there.

This is a profoundly political book, but it's such a romp, too! Murphy has a real flair for this kind of thing. Back in 1999, she published the brilliant There and Back Again, an all-female retelling of The Hobbit (in spaaaaace!) that was widely celebrated…right up to the moment that Christopher Tolkien used baseless copyright threats to get the book withdrawn from sale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_and_Back_Again_(novel)

Billionaire failsons of long-dead writers notwithstanding, you can still read There and Back Again by borrowing a copy of the book from the Internet Archive's Open Library:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15436385W/There_and_back_again

Murphy's mashup of Holmes, Pan, South Seas pirate anarchists, and other salutary and exciting personages, milieux, furniture and tropes of the Victorian adventure story is an unmissable triumph, a romp, a delight.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

[wavecorewave]

Most people today believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow

[nocturnescipher]

"A person looking into a mirror is split into active and passive, observer and observed. The very perception of one's own image implies the existence of an unseen agent who is seeing it."

- David Graeber, "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value"

[wholesomeobsessive]

Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, "Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?" And I duly loked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

[1000rh]

So we are faced with a dilemma. The revolutionary Future appears increasingly implausible to most of us, but it cannot be abolished. As a result, it begins to collapse into the present. Hence, for instance, the insistence that communism has already arrived, if only we knew how to see it. The Future has become a kind of hidden dimension of reality, an immanent present lying behind the mundane surface of the world, with a constant potential to break out but only in tiny, imperfect flashes. In this sense we are forced to live with two very different futures: that which we suspect will actually come to pass – perhaps humdrum, perhaps catastrophic, certainly not in any sense redemptive – and The Future in the old revolutionary, apocalyptic sense of the term: the fulfillment of time, the unraveling of contradictions. Genuine knowledge of this Future is impossible, but it is only from the perspective of this unknowable Outside that any real knowledge of the present is possible. The Future has become our Dreamtime.

– David Graeber, "The Sadness of Post-Workerism" (2008) Link

[eezdalf]

Individual houses were typically in use for between fifty and 100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astounding, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.... as individual houses built up histories, they also appear to have acquired a degree of cumulative prestige. This is reflected in a certain density of hunting trophies, burial platforms and obsidian - a dark volcanic glass, obtained from sources in the highlands of Cappadocia, some 125 miles north. The authority of long-lived houses seems consistent with the idea that elders, and perhaps elder women in particular, held positions of influence. But the more prestigious households are distributed among the less, and do not appear to coalesce into elite neighborhoods.

a description of Çatalhöyük, a neolithic city from 7,400 bc. from the dawn of everything, by davids: graeber and wengrow.

this city remained settled for 1,500 years - "roughly the same period of time that separates us from amalafrida, queen of the vandals in .. ad 523"

[alpaca-clouds]

The Inner Contradition of Capitalism

Okay, let me talk about something that I took away from several books I have read during the last few months: Capitalism is shitty.

"No shit," you might say. "You needed to read a book for that?"

No, of course I knew that before. I knew before that capitalism is shitty for about 90% of people who have to live under it - and of course for the environment as well. There is a reason I am an anarcho communist and Solarpunk.

However, there is another thing about this: Capitalism is shitty, even for those who are "winning it". While there is very little resaerch on the mental health of the super rich, because most of them obviously do not want to participate in this research, there were some very, very few of them allowed research to happen. And here is the thing: There is some evidence that if you acquire riches to a certain point you might actually get better. You are gonna be a bit less stressed and worried until you reach that point.

But "that point" is actually fairly low - from modern capitalism's point of view. While the few papers existing on it might disagree, but generally speaking it is somewhere between 1 and 3 million. Basically it is the kind of money, where you actually can live just from the money you already have, as long as you do not live in abundance and just relax into a normal lifestyle, rahter than getting a villa and yacht.

But here is the thing: As soon as you are richer than that, research suggests, you will actually get more and more miserable.

Now, again, we just have very little in terms of multimillionaires, yet alone billionaires, who will allow for psychologists and neurologists to actually do studies on this. So we have very few data points from where to extrapolate.

But what we have greatly suggests that the more money they get, the more unhappy and more angry they become.

Additionally there is quite a lot of research that suggests that there is indeed a particular personality profile, that will get into those positions. And that personality profile actually has probably also to do a lot with previous abuse.

Don't get me wrong: I absolutely deteste billionaires. I think they are the source for a lot of the ills in our world. They are horrible humans with so much blood on their fingers. However... In some regards I also pity them. Because if you look at them, you do know that... they are not actually happy, are they?

Will they try to tell you they are? Absolutely. But they are not. They are unhappy, and more than anything they are driven by the fear to lose the stuff they have. Because they know how easy that is - and fear how miserable they could be.

And sure, they will claim how much they work and how great they are for it - because we have this idea of meritocracy in our heads. But... That is also bullshit, and they do kinda know it.

As I wrote about yesterday, I have recently read the non-fiction book "The Dawn of Everything", and within the book there are actually quite a few examples of people, who during earlier times of colonization and the conflicts between indigenous people and colonizers, had been kidnapped and taken as hostage by the indigenous. And... a lot of them were freed, only to return and realize, that the life of the indigenous people was just a whole lot better. And quite a few of these hostages decided on their own will to return living with the indigenous people who had taken them hostage.

And yes, in one case this included one of the superrich at the time.

And this to me is the thing: Capitalism as it is, does not make anyone happy. There really are no winners here. There are only losers. No matter who, everyone is worse of because of it. There is nobody here, who might be profiting. Even those who seem to be profiting are actually for the most part miserable.

I honestly do wonder a lot, why this even could happen. It is a question that the book poses a lot, it never finds an answer. Because technically humans were always more intelligent than this. We were more intelligent than creating society in a way that most of us were so darn unhappy.

We talk so much about the "winners" of capitalism. But the truth is, that they do not exist. Because from what little data we have, there is actually good indication, that those who "won capitalism" and truly gave away most of that money (rather than just putting it into a self-controlled trust), were the only ones who became happy.

[thammit]

[anarchistin]

[A] great embarrassing fact ... haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

[shrinkrants]

The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to- GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argu- ment on a spreadsheet error. The premise behind the cuts turns out to be faulty. There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession. Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes and poor students to forgo college, all on the basis of a mistake? It seems unlikely. After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality. We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement. True, it’s never been particularly clear exactly what the original sin was: some combination, perhaps, of tax avoidance, laziness, benefit fraud and the election of irresponsible leaders. But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy. The morality of debt has proved spectacularly good politics. It appears to work just as well whatever form it takes: fiscal sadism (Dutch and German voters really do believe that Greek, Spanish and Irish citizens are all, collectively, as they put it, “debt sinners”, and vow support for politicians willing to punish them) or fiscal masochism (middle-class Britons really will dutifully vote for candidates who tell them that government has been on a binge, that they must tighten their belts, it’ll be hard, but it’s something we can all do for the sake of our grandchildren). Politicians locate economic theories that provide flashy equations to justify the politics; their authors, like Rogoff, are celebrated as oracles; no one bothers to check if the numbers actually add up. If ever proof was required that the theory is selected to suit the politics, one need only con- sider the reaction politicians have to economists who dare suggest this moralistic framework is unnecessary; or that there might be solutions that don’t involve widespread human suffering.

[drumlincountry]

One thing that's sooooooo satisfying about reading David Graeber is how pissy he is abt academics from other disciplines wandering into anthropology & going "of course WE ALL know must recognise the UNIVERSAL REALITY of [unquestioned cultural bias of the researcher]".