baseline communism
Baseline Communism (aug 2025) by Richard Seymour.. about david graeber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(21st-century_writer):
via bsky post [bsky doesn’t have link option?] of ayça çubukçu:
Richard Seymour (born 1977) is a Northern Irish author, commentator and owner of the blog Lenin’s Tomb. His books included The Meaning of David Cameron (2010), Unhitched (2013), Against Austerity (2014) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (2016). Seymour was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland to a Protestant family, and currently lives in London. A former member of the Socialist Workers Party, he left the organisation in March 2013. He completed his PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Paul Gilroy. His thesis, dated 2016, was titled Cold War anticommunism and the defence of white supremacy in the southern United States. In the past he has written for publications such as The Guardian and Jacobin.
A must-read by Richard Seymour @leninology.bsky.social, on David Graeber for the @lrb.co.uk
Baseline Communism —> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n14/richard-seymour/baseline-communism
notes/quotes from (looong) article:
In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) – a manifesto for his method, in which Graeber attributes the ‘strange affinity’ between anarchism and anthropology to the anthropologist’s ‘keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities’ – he describes the ‘non-vanguardist’ intellectual contribution to struggle: observe, decipher ‘the hidden symbolic, moral or pragmatic logics that underlie [people’s] actions’ and ‘offer those ideas back … as gifts’. This is strikingly reminiscent of the communist’s role, per Marx, as someone who shows ‘the world what it is really fighting for’. And indeed, Graeber described himself at one point as a ‘libertarian, practice-oriented Marxist’. There was ‘no necessary contradiction’ between Marxism and anarchism, he said, since the former was ‘about theory’ and the latter the ‘ethics of practice’. Or, more pointedly: ‘The Marxists can tell us why the economic crisis happened … the anarchists can decide what to do about it.’
fragments of an anarchist anthropology
rather.. to me.. need to let go of ie: econ crisis ness.. and create something legit diff
Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001) is a cross-cultural revision of value theory which characteristically draws on but also stretches Marxist categories in order to move beyond theories of value internal to capitalism based on such quantities as labour-time or utility. Building on Marcel Mauss’s description of gift economies, Graeber argues for a labour theory of value that defines labour ‘much more broadly than almost anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has’: since labour is an act of self-realisation, however alienated under capitalism, individuals are evaluated on the basis of their actions. What is of value in any society, whatever the mode of production, will be judged according to the imaginative and ethical principles guiding communal life.
if we want legit freedom.. we need to let go of judge\ment ness and even gift\ness.. any form of people telling other people what to do
Graeber’s doctoral fieldwork among the Malagasy in the rural community of Betafo, Madagascar, conducted in the early 1990s under Marshall Sahlins’s supervision, was eventually published as Lost People (2007) and explored manifestations of historical trauma among descendants of slaves and slaveholders. It is difficult to overstate how formative this was for Graeber’s politics. Here was a place where people were still haunted by history, disempowered and poor. Yet, as he observed in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, these rural people had withdrawn from the state and gone about their lives, and the sky hadn’t fallen in. They were still, at least in potentia, historical actors. Lost People is also exemplary of Graeber’s idiosyncratic way of theorising: the book is an opulently observed micro-ethnography, on the basis of which he makes sweeping theoretical claims. He treats magic and ritual as ordinary contemporary facts that suffuse systems of law, exchange and bureaucracy. On Kings (2017), written with Sahlins, takes a similar approach, interpreting kingship as a system of cosmological beliefs, ritual obligation and kinship structures that imposes moral and spiritual imperatives on king-ruled communities. The essays in The Utopia of Rules (2015) examine a supposedly disenchanted modernity to discover its hidden fetishes, taboos and magical thinking.
madagascar.. madagascar love.. lost people.. on kings.. utopia of rules..
What made Graeber’s name, however, was his work as a participant-theorist, first in the anticapitalist movement and then in Occupy. Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009) is half thick description, in diary format, of a movement, its tactical dilemmas and above all its deliberative ethos of consensus decision-making, and half meditation on the nature of anarchism and its practical ethics. Direct action embodies the anarchist ethos: not a ‘cataclysmic seizure of power’ but a ‘continual creation and elaboration of new institutions’ and ‘non-alienating’ relations. Far from requiring a totalising transformation, anarchy is always a possibility latent in the present.
direct action.. direct action an ethnography.. david on direct action
The Occupy movement, whose slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ is often credited to Graeber, sprang up shortly after the publication of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (2011) and inspired The Democracy Project (2013). Debt, Graeber’s most ambitious work up to that point, is a revisionist history of exchange systems which argues that debt preceded both barter and money as a structure of violence. There was ‘no better way’, he wrote, ‘to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt’. If debt is a language of violence, the tradition of a debt jubilee is a vital means of averting social disaster. The Democracy Project, written in the afterglow of the spread of Occupy camps across the United States, Europe, South America, Africa, East Asia and the Middle East, when the horizons of possibility still seemed wide open, was a story of success.
doccupy wall street.. 99 and 1.. the democracy project.. debt (book)..
The Dawn of Everything (2021), arguably Graeber’s most important work, wasn’t published until after his death from pancreatitis in September 2020. It is in this book, co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow, that Graeber emerges most clearly as, in Ayça Cubukçu’s phrase, an anthropologist of human possibilities. Always hostile to evolutionist theories of history, whether Hegelian or Darwinian, Graeber upends the familiar history of the species in which primitive societies were egalitarian and the agricultural revolution brought a new order of class and domination. He wanted to show that life wasn’t really like that: there were always multiple, contending possibilities. ..But the point, as Graeber and Wengrow stress, is to move ‘the dial a bit further to the left than usual’, to explore the possibility that ‘human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume.’
dawn of everything (book).. david wengrow.. ayça on david’s possibilities..
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, edited and introduced by Graeber’s widow, Nika Dubrovsky, attempts to convey the breadth and flavour of his thought by selecting essays, articles and interviews from across his career, most of them already available on his website. The quality of the material is decidedly uneven, some of it (the debate with Thomas Piketty on debt, for instance) barely scratching the surface, some of it (the essay ‘On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets’) incomparably rich. A method is implied in the title, which alludes to Graeber’s conviction that the ‘ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’. Wherever he encounters what seems to be a structural limit to human freedom, he inquires into its history and class basis.
ultimate hard copy.. nika dubrovsky.. giant puppets.. bs jobs from birth..
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World begins with a long and ambitious critique of ‘the West’, which gives an extended commentary on Samuel Huntington and civilisational discourse before *revealing its true purpose: a defence of consensus decision-making. ..as Graeber acknowledges in The Utopia of Rules, that consensus groups can also lend themselves to moral coercion and clique formation, why would the answer be to formalise cliques and coercion constitutionally in the form of elected leaderships?
*how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
The clichéd response to all this would be that consensus is a lovely, fluffy idea in principle, but entirely unrealistic in practice. In fact, its precepts are perfectly reasonable, and there is nothing prefigurative about it. Based on the anthropological evidence that Graeber sets out, *consensus is an excellent way for small, face-to-face groups to sublate their differences. But beyond that, in my view, it is a disastrous idea. Why should groups of people who want different and opposing things be compelled to agree?
*to me.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
All societies maintain what, in Debt, he calls ‘baseline communism’: a free, non-commodified mutuality without which no society can exist. Baseline communism happens wherever ‘no accounts are taken’ and it would be ‘offensive, or simply bizarre’, even to consider taking them: giving a stranger directions, buying someone a pint, offering food to a guest, or fixing a friend’s car. Graeber finds this ‘raw material of sociality’ everywhere, usually working alongside more hierarchical and contractual relations.
gift\ness et al.. need deeper.. otherwise will keep perpetuating the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
‘Baseline communism’ is suggestive, like so many of Graeber’s formulations, of untold possibility in the present. But sometimes the formulations are less satisfying, even patronising. ‘*Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose,’ he writes in one essay, ‘and when they deal with others who are equally free.’ Just like your local bowling club or credit union. From this point of view, freedom and coercion are among the myriad possibilities in any society regardless of its historical situation, and it is the job of anarchists to back the libertarian and egalitarian streak in everyday life. The challenge of building the future in the interstices of the present is not successfully answered by rehearsing the flaws of prefiguration. It is interesting, in this regard, that The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World does not include Graeber’s coverage of the Kurdish Rojava experiment, a bold effort to realise Murray Bookchin’s ‘social ecology’ in a fragile space created by state collapse, civil war and funds from trade in black market oil. In the most unpromising of circumstances, Kurdish revolutionaries built a ‘stateless’ enclave based on communes, but it’s debatable whether this would have been possible without the implosion of the Syrian dictatorship.
*won’t happen till we get to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
rojava’s third way.. social eco and communalism
The next section of the book, ‘Against Economics’, spins off the research for Debt. Far from being against economics as such – Graeber draws a great deal on heterodox economists – its foil is the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM), the idea that money should be regarded as a physical commodity, not a social convention, and that prices rise and fall with the amount of money in circulation.
In ‘Against Economics’, Graeber develops the argument as a counterpoint to austerity, with its derisive attitude to ‘magic money trees’. The banks, he argues, are indeed magic money trees.
The collection turns next to Graeber’s fascination with bureaucracy, its occulted functions and moral satisfactions. ..Keynes predicted that advanced societies would work fifteen-hour weeks. ‘In technological terms,’ Graeber says, ‘we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.’ As a corollary, he wonders why useful labour is so undervalued and useless labour so heavily remunerated. Is capitalism doing something supposedly foreclosed by the profit motive? Is it keeping millions busy with pointless and unprofitable occupations that largely service ‘managerial feudalism’? This isn’t Graeber at his absolute best – he’s relying on an intuitive interpretation of anecdotal evidence – but as ever he produces, offhand, some luminous axioms. People ‘find a sense of dignity and self-worth in their jobs’, he says, precisely ‘because they hate them’..
debt (book).. managerial feudalism.. bs jobs from birth..
Better by far are the essays ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’ and ‘On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets’. The first studies the ‘boring, humdrum, yet omnipresent forms of structural violence’ which, because they lack symbolic ‘density’, don’t tend to attract the attention of anthropologists. What Graeber has in mind in particular is everyday encounters with bureaucracy, and his own experience of struggling to arrange Medicaid for his mother after she had a series of strokes. Any institution, he writes, involved in the ‘allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments … ultimately rests on the threat of force’. Violence is useful in such a system because it ‘may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing’. Bureaucracy is an ‘area of violent simplification’. And yet, as he also argues in The Utopia of Rules, it is not without ‘a kind of covert appeal’, since the pleasure we take in complaining about red tape implies that if only it were perfected it could deliver the ‘fairness’ it seems to promise.
dead zones of imagination.. giant puppets
In the second of these essays, ..consider the secret rules governing the dynamic between anticapitalist activists and the police in the US. ‘Cops hate puppets,’ he observes, discussing their habit of seizing and destroying giant papier-mâché puppets before protests. ‘Activists are puzzled as to why.’ Graeber detects an answer in the way the puppets, made from salvaged trash and worn as garish, outsized costumes, are put to work during direct actions. Police, he writes, are ‘bureaucrats with guns’, and the surest way to prov0ke violence is to ‘challenge their right to define the situation’. That was the role of the puppets.
A persistent challenge to anarchism is that it can’t work because human nature ‘isn’t like that’. People are too selfish. Graeber responds by casting doubt on the idea that human nature is so simple. ‘Neither egoism nor altruism are natural urges,’ he writes in ‘Army of Altruists’. They are ‘ideas we have about human nature’, and the opposition between egoism and altruism is itself inconceivable without the market and its imperative of competition. The job of the left is to undo that opposition, so that pragmatic, self-interested action is also collective, other-interested action – as in mutual aid. This doesn’t stop Graeber looking for signs of altruism where it is least expected. He finds it lurking, improbably, in the US army, whose outreach programmes at overseas military bases had soldiers repairing schoolrooms, offering free dental check-ups and the like. The programmes were kept up not because of their success in improving local relations but because of their ‘enormous psychological impact on the soldiers’, who would ‘wax euphoric’ about them: ‘This is why I joined the army.’ Elsewhere, he speculates that a perverse source of austerity’s ideological appeal is that working-class people care too much. It is a ‘universal sociological law’ that the poor are more giving than the rich, and that those at the bottom of any unequal arrangement ‘think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them’.
khan filling the gaps law et al
Graeber is at his most speculative, and engaging, as a theorist-practitioner of fun. Elaborating the political ethics of play and care, in the final part of the collection, he takes up a version of the question he once posed in an introduction to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: ‘If all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it?’ In an essay titled ‘What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?’, ..
mutual aid (kropotkin).. david on mutual aid.. david on fun
A large body of work will inevitably include some mistakes and conceptual sloppiness, and over the years Graeber supplied plenty of ammunition to his critics. In Debt, for example, he appears to confuse the economist Carl Menger with his son, the mathematician Karl Menger. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow mistakenly describe Rousseau as one of a class of men who ‘spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants’, even though Rousseau had himself been a domestic servant. In his essay ‘Turning Modes of Production Inside Out’, Graeber mangles a line from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy and attributes it to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the same essay, he startlingly claims that Marxists have ‘largely abandoned’ the concept of ‘mode of production’ – which would be a shock to most Marxists. Errors of this sort suggest that Graeber was at times only half attending to his sources. Still, there is always a tension between innovation and rigour, and Graeber was nothing if not inventive.
domestic (structure) mode of (under) production..
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be you. 