#title What Happened to David Graeber? #author Crispin Sartwell #date January 20, 2024 #source <[[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-happened-to-david-graeber/][lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-happened-to-david-graeber/]]> #lang en #pubdate 2024-04-11T17:12:37 #topics book review I BOW TO few in my admiration for the anthropologist, economist, radical leader, and delightful prose stylist David Graeber, who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59. Since I read his little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in 2004, I’ve been telling anyone who seemed inclined to listen that he was the most important anarchist thinker since Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921. His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future. Graeber studied at the University of Chicago under Marshall Sahlins and did his anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar in the early 1990s. When he returned, he published the still-neglected Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001), a work of high theory whose ambitions constituted a throwback to the eras of Marcel Mauss or Claude Lévi-Strauss, though its positions were strikingly fresh. On the strength of his early work, he got a job at Yale and at the same time became active in the “anti-globalization” movement (Graeber hated that term), with its demonstrations and actions against such organizations as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. When he didn’t get tenure at Yale, he believed it was because of his politics. By [[https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2017/10/11/academic-politics-of-silencing/#david-graeber][his own account]] politically unemployable in American academia, he claimed that, though the academy of that era sheltered myriad “authoritarian Marxists,” anarchism was considered beyond the pale, as I can confirm from personal experience. But with his remarkable energy and productivity, he landed on his feet in London, eventually scoring a richly deserved professorship at the London School of Economics. Debt continued his work at the juncture of anthropology and economics that had begun with Theory of Value. The two disciplines overlap, after all, in being concerned with the nature of exchange, the origin of money, and in describing structures of inequality, among other matters. The book had a remarkable reception; never before has an anarchist been enthusiastically blurbed by the editor of the classic capitalist organ Financial Times. Indeed, that book, and a lot of the best Graeber, has an “undeniable” quality: even if you write for Bloomberg Businessweek, it turns out, you are very unlikely to think the same things about money, debt, and value after you read it as before. You may well start to think you are seeing these matters clearly and nonideologically for the first time, as Graeber traverses the world’s cultures and history to see how forms of money and forms of peonage emerge. He shows that there have been many alternative possibilities for systems of exchange and value—Mauss’s “gift economies,” for example. All of this in loose yet precise and swashbuckling prose, and all of it well documented by a serious scholar. Debt, the book, had for many a dramatic “head-flipping” quality, and it helped make sense of what Occupy, emerging at that moment, was saying and what it wanted. The book yielded insights into many things but was compelling above all in giving a real history of economic hierarchy and domination, culminating in the structural and ideological predicaments of neoliberal capitalism, as each consumer blamed herself for undertaking the debt she carried throughout her life, and as the whole human world became, as though by an invisible hand, a completely unaccountable vertical power structure. People came to Occupy, for one thing, because they realized suddenly that the burden of debt they were lugging around was a structural strategy centuries in the making, not an individual failing.
[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table. Debating inequality allows one to tinker with numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (“Can you imagine? The richest 1 percent of the world’s population own 44 percent of the world’s wealth!”)Here, he appears almost to be ridiculing himself and the Occupy movement (if also Thomas Piketty), or Graeber and Wengrow appear to be ridiculing earlier Graeber. Do I hear a touch of Friedrich Hayek? What was once a fundamental critique of the world economic hierarchy, insisting that it has created an absurd and ever-increasing degree of differential access to resources, has become “technocratic tinkering,” and it is not exactly clear why. That some questions about inequality are obscure or ill-framed does not indicate that inequality of wealth is not a fundamental social problem. To make sure you don’t miss the centrality of this stunning turnabout, Graeber and Wengrow return to their critique of egalitarianism in their conclusion, and also to their critique of the concept of the state. Of the concept, mind you, not the thing.
almost always assume that “the state” is just one thing, and that in speaking of the origins of the state one is necessarily also speaking of the origins of urbanization, written literature, law, exploitation, bureaucracy, science, and almost anything else of enduring importance that happened between the dawn of agriculture and the Renaissance, aside, perhaps, from the rise of world religions.This is a mistake, he says, because “‘[t]he state’ would better be seen as an amalgam of heterogeneous elements often of entirely separate origins that happened to have come together in certain times and places, and now appear to be in the process of drifting apart.” But this “simplistic” conception of the state is also the conception that fuels or articulates the anarchist critique of the state, from William Godwin to Mikhail Bakunin to Emma Goldman. As I argue in my book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (2008), state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state. In late Graeber, this looks simplistic and nonempirical. “The state” is a concept that falls apart under analysis and should be abandoned. Of course, that makes anti-statism just as senseless, for what is an anti-statist fighting against, really? “It is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state,” write Graeber and Wengrow, somewhat puzzlingly, and “it’s equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state.” So, “what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a ‘state’ and another isn’t? Are there not more interesting and important questions we could be asking?” Well, certainly there are other questions. But this one takes Graeber well beyond—or well before—his previous anarchism.
[O]ur own intellectual traditions oblige us to use what is, in effect, imperial language […] and the language already implies an explanation, even a justification, for much of what we are really trying to account for here. That is why, in the course of this book, we sometimes felt the need to develop our own, more neutral (dare we say scientific?) list of baseline human freedoms and forms of domination.I don’t think this is in keeping even with the vast panoply of political and economic arrangements that the authors themselves have just surveyed, but I agree that the book makes use of an “imperial” vocabulary, delineating the putatively objective, irresistible political truths that all rational persons will arrive at in the end. As to the idea that the freedoms and forms of domination that Graeber and Wengrow delineate are “scientific”: Rousseau and Turgot said the same, but I wouldn’t have thought that I’d hear the claim from Graeber, especially as there is no consideration in the book of other contenders for fundamental freedoms and no attempt to give foundational justifications for these specific freedoms, or even to sort them out in relation to one another. It’s not that I think we should routinely violate one another’s freedom to disobey, though that is going to require some elucidation. It’s that I’m somewhat surprised to see this sort of universalism emerging from this sort of anthropology, which supports it thinly at best and is widely and wildly in tension with it at worst. Graeber was never a relativist, exactly, but casually applying the same three concepts to every culture that has ever existed seems incompatible with his previous vast respect for human differences, not to mention many of his own earlier political positions. The persistent “threeness” of the distinctions hints at a line of a priori reasoning that is anything but empirical.