David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Okay so you might mot like this, but todays society is way more advanced, and there are some good things I can’t live without. Dental care is IMO a good example.

    Now my theory is that our society is built on egomaniacs, power hungry narcissistic people and outright sadists (used by them). They make the wheels grind, they make you work for 48h a week instead of seeing your family.

    But it also furthers society. In a wrong wretched way.

    To have anarchy, or communism, we need to do away with those people, but we also must make people get out of bed and work too, I mean in a perfect society where everything is provided, who would like to be a hard working dentist?

    And before you jump on me, Marx himself described a fenomena (I’m paraphrasing) where 1 company have normal working conditions and another with the aforementioned conditions. The second company will obviously win in the long run.

    So you can’t just make a law, or “not letting it happen” because other societies will, and then they will conquer you in some way because they are stronger or maybe just richer or have the equivalent of “dentists”.

    I’d love living in an all caring nice society, but how? Empirically it just doesn’t seem to work.

  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    every example of “monkey considering monkey stranger” was “bad monkey.” That is the forest of this article: we’re good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.

    but that’s not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.

    again I agree that we don’t think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don’t give them the level of consideration we should. we don’t live up to the golden rule all the time.

    but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.

  • lugal@sopuli.xyz
    20·
    17 hours ago

    Graeber radicalized me. Bullshit Jobs was my first book, later I read Debts and Dawn. Now I work a bullshit job and spend my working hours on lemmy and podcasts

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
      18·
      18 hours ago

      There are historical examples with tens to hundreds of tousands of inhabitants. Those are actually quite common.

      Graeber’s book “The dawn of everything” has some good examples.

    • lugal@sopuli.xyz
      13·
      17 hours ago

      The thing is there is no tipping point. You have small size hunter gatherer groups who are egalitarian and others aren’t. Same for agricultural societies and cities and on and on. There are even groups that change depending on the season. The Dawn of Everything is a very enlightening book about this topic

    • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
      15·
      18 hours ago

      In what way is the “technological level” dependant on a state?

      From the top of my head: The Neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas show that both metrics can be answered with “quite high/a lot”.

      • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.

        For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

        I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.

        • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
          3·
          12 hours ago

          For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

          I disagree. The native Americans were “technologically” quite advanced when it came to stewardship of the land. Think agriculture (food and forests), language and the like. Europeans basically enacted biological warfare on them.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
          3·
          12 hours ago

          American Indians were mostly killed by the germs that the European invaders accidentally brought. In actual battles the Europeans didn’t fair so well as they were usually vastly outnumbered and the Europeans that defected or got captured mostly preferred to stay with the Indians afterwards. And yes, never trust history written by the winners.

      • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
        3·
        17 hours ago

        Chiapas has a lot of what it does because of Mexico. The anarchists didn’t create the sewer or power systems for example

    • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
      3·
      17 hours ago

      Exactly, please explain how anarchists would approach the problem of redoing the entire US electrical grid (this is critical from a security perspective and would increase efficiency).

  • SeitanicMechanic@vegantheoryclub.orgEnglish
    8·
    16 hours ago

    I only heard about Bullshit Jobs recently. Now, knowing he’s an anarchist anthropologist, definitely putting it in my ever-growing-rarely-shrinking book list.