ultimate hard copy
(2024) by david graeber.. foreword by rebecca solnit.. intro and edits by nika dubrovsky
other notes/quotes on book here: ultimate hidden truth of world (book)
and now i have 3 hard copies.. this one and the two books
notes/quotes from 320 p hard copy (356 w/endnotes):
Foreword
IntroductionPART I: THERE NEVER WAS A WEST
There Never Was a West
aka: no legit data to date.. need to try diff data.. ie: self-talk as data
PART II: AGAINST ECONOMICS
Finance Is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts (An interview with Hannah Chadeayne Appel)
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
Against Economics
Soak the Rich (Debate with Thomas Piketty)
aka: need a diff econ.. ie: bachelard oikos law; mitchell garden law; hari rat park law; ..
PART III: BEYOND POWER
Culture as Creative Refusal
Hatred Has Become a Political Taboo
Dead Zones of the Imagination
The Bully’s Pulpit
I Didn’t Understand How Widespread Rape Was. Then the Penny Dropped
On the Phenomenology of the Giant Puppets
aka: not about power.. about love.. about love enough.. about the unconditional part of left to own devices ness; has to be all of us for the dance to dance
PART IV: THE REVOLT OF THE CARING CLASS
Are You an Anarchist?
Army of Altruists
Caring Too Much
The Revolt of the Caring Classes
aka: crazywise ness.. and higashida autism law.. and i’m not the only one.. graeber care/free law
PART V: WHAT’S THE POINT IF WE CAN’T HAVE FUN?
Another Art World, I (with Nika Dubrovsky)
Museum of Care (with Nika Dubrovsky)
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?TranslationsBook Reviews
aka: if org around legit needs (what’s already on each heart.. what every soul already craves).. that soul resonation has nothing to do with drudgery and takes a lot of work ness.. but rather with eu\daimon\ia and shaimcha ness
vii
foreword: with ferocious joy by rebecca solnit
shaimcha ness.. rebecca solnit – notes from extracted guardian post before book release here: rebecca on hidden truth
he was a joyful celebratory person.. an enthusiast, voluble.. on fire w the possibilities in the ideas/ideologies he wrestled with.. beaming, rumpled, w a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing.. but he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was lived out in how he related to the people around him.. after doing field work among traditional peoples in madagascar, he just never stopped, turning his focus to his own society.. t
swartz no going back law.. swartz most important law.. et al.. the thing(s) you can’t not do.. et al
vii
dead zones: on violence, bureaucracy and interp labor and bs jobs came from using equip of anthro on stuff usually regarded as boring or not regarded at all.. the function and impact of bureaucracy.. his bestseller on debt reminded us that money and fin are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better..
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
dead zones of imagination.. bs jobs from birth.. debt (book)
work culminated in 2-21 book w wengrow, doe, prefigured in the essay here – never was a west.. he rejected all the linear narratives.. he offered many variations.. that sheer variety was source of hope for him.. a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way..
david wengrow.. dawn of everything (book).. there never was a west
imagine the variety of imagine if we ness..
rediker in review of pirate enlightenment ‘everything graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and a account of what a just society might look like’.. he focused in short on freedom and its impediments..t
pirate enlightenment.. conditions for freedom.. impediment ness = any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do.. [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 m\a\p]
ix
that joy: maybe this is how everyone should feel about ideas and the ways that they open up or close off possibilities.. the way that ..well.. to quote the sentence from which the title of book comes ‘the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and coul djust as easily make diff’. if you truly believe that then you see it can be changed.. not least by changing those assumptions/values..
x
david wanted to put those tools in everyone’s hands or remind them that they are already there..
in order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people.. and david did..t
huge.. the thing we haven’t yet tried/seen.. the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
fragments of anarchist anthro.. tenure..
fragments of an anarchist anthropology.. david on tenure not tenure
xi
that is .. he was of the academy and also an outcast and enemy of it.. but more than that it was full of animosity toward him.. because he did not operate by its rules..
warning ness et al
david’s recurrent rallying cry; ‘it does not have to be this way’.. t
graeber make it diff law et al
xii
david’s extended essay ‘the shock of victory’ begins ‘the biggest problem facing direct action is that we don’t know how to handle victory.. despair fatigue opens w similar line: ‘is it possible to become bored w hopelessness’
david’s superpower was being an outsider.. so much of his writing says in essence ‘what happens if we don’t accept this;.. what happens is we get free: his is an analysis for the sake of lib.. lib in its means and its ends.. in that.. it’s a gift and a generous one
xiii
intro – nika dubrovsky
took so much of it in that put it on own page: nika on hidden truth
1
part 1 – there never was a west
3
never was a west – on the incoherence of the notion of the ‘western tradition’
4
if we start calling direct democracy something else, how can we say we’re against democracy – a word with such universally positive associations
need to let go of words ness (rumi words law.. lanier beyond words law.. et al).. and try ie: the idiosyncratic jargon ness of self-talk as data.. to me.. any form of democratic admin as a cancerous distraction
zaptista ness et al.. so ensure the voices of those who would normally find themselves marginalized or excluded from traditional participatory mechs are heard
need to let go participatory ness (seat at the table ness et al).. and try tech as it could be.. ie: as nonjudgmental expo labeling
my own approach has normally been to openly embrace both terms.. to argue in fact.. that anarchism and democracy are.. or should be.. largely identical..
david on anarchism ness.. graeber anarchism law.. are you an anarchist.. anarch\ism et al
david on direct action et al
5
for most people democracy is still identified w some notion of ordinary people collectively managing their own affairs..t
yet haven’t really yet tried the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. the dance.. so we keep perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord
11
the amazing thing is that what huntington is doing here is trying to turn the very incoherence of his category into its defining feature.. it is the perfect circular argument
the word civ can be used in diff ways.. 1\ to refer to society in which people live in cities.. 2\ can mean refinement, accomplishment, cultural achievement.. .. culture has much same double meaning..
civilization ness et al.. culture ness et al
12
in short, for the notion of ‘civ’ in sense used by huntington to really make sense.. civs have to be conceived basically as traditions of people reading one another’s books.. western culture is not just a collection of ideas; it is a collection of ideas that are taught in textbooks and discussed in lecture halls, cafes, or lit salons.. t
black science of people/whales law et al
13
some elements of that tradition do, gradually, become part of everyone’s common sense.. t
rather.. part of whalespeak
why i’m bothering to spend so much time on him .. huntington’s argument brings out the incoherence in assumption that are shared by almost everyone.. t
need global detox leap to get back/to legit ‘common sense’ ness
[skimming rest via there never was a west page .. probably same w against econ.. and.. ?.. – this is why i almost didn’t buy book.. hard for me to focus on this (these) essay(s) et al.. these words.. if am thinking makes no diff till we get out of sea world.. until we get to the root of problem.. we need to try something legit diff.. ie: a nother way.. to me all else is cancerous distraction .. we’re just perpetuating the whac-a-mole-ing ness of myth of tragedy and lord et al.. 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.. 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).. what we haven’t yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. (the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness).. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition]
19
The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to- face community, to figure out what *most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to change the minds of those who don’t want to do it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision; either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has no interest in or does not tend to intervene in local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee the sort of humiliations, resentments, and hatreds that ultimately lead the destruction of communities. As any activist who has gone through a facilitation training for a contemporary direct action group can tell you, consensus process is not the same as parliamentary debate and **finding consensus in no way resembles voting
*double speak.. exclusive.. whalespeak.. has to be all for the dance to dance
**same song in regard to legit free people.. any form of democratic admin.. any form of m\a\p.. same song
37
ll this might seem less surprising if one considers the pirates’ origins. Pirates were generally mutineers, sailors often originally pressed into service against their will in port towns across the Atlantic, who had mutinied against tyrannical captains and “declared war against the whole world.” They often became classic social bandits, wreaking vengeance against captains who abused their crews, and releasing or even rewarding those against whom they found no complaints. The make-up of crews was often extraordinarily heterogeneous. . It was the perfect intercultural space of experiment. In fact, there was likely to be no more conducive ground for the development of new democratic institutions anywhere in the Atlantic world at the time.
14/354
This is not to say that pirate practices were likely to have influenced democratic constitutions. Only that we would not know if they did. One can hardly imagine things would be too different with those they ordinarily referred to as “the American savages.”
Colin Calloway (1997; cf. Axtell 1985) has documented just how entangled the societies of settlers and natives often were, with settlers adopting Indian crops, clothes, medicines, customs, and styles of warfare; trading with them, often living side by side, sometimes intermarrying, and most of all, inspiring endless fears among the leaders of colonial communities and military units that their subordinates were absorbing Indian attitudes of equality and individual liberty. .. .. that ordinary Englishmen and Frenchmen settled in the colonies only began to think of themselves as “Americans,” as a new sort of freedom-loving people, when they began to see themselves as more like Indians. ..The colonists who came to America, in fact, found themselves in a unique situation: having largely fled the hierarchy and conformism of Europe, they found themselves confronted with an indigenous population far more dedicated to principles of equality and individualism than they had hitherto been able to imagine; and then proceeded to largely exterminate them, even while adopting many of their customs, habits, and attitudes.
14/355
Traditions as Acts of Endless Refoundation
Throughout this essay, I’ve been arguing that democratic practice, whether defined as procedures of egalitarian decision-making, or government by public discussion, tends to emerge from situations in which communities of one sort or another manage their own affairs outside the purview of the state. The absence of state power means the *absence of any systematic mechanism of coercion to enforce decisions; this tends to result either in some form of consensus process, or, in the case of essentially military formations like Greek hoplites or pirate ships, sometimes a system of majority voting (since, in such cases, the results, if it did come down to a contest of force, are readily apparent). Democratic innovation, and the emergence of what might be called democratic values, has a tendency to spring from what I’ve called *zones of cultural improvisation, usually also outside of the control of states, in which diverse sorts of people with different traditions and experiences are obliged to figure out some way to deal with one another. Frontier communities whether in Madagascar or Medieval Iceland, pirate ships, Indian Ocean trading communities, Native American confederations on the edge of European expansion, are all examples here.
*still coercive.. if any form of m\a\p
**we need to get out of the zone of sea world first.. we have no idea what legit free people are like
51
It is in this context that I might suggest that the anarchist solution— that there really is no resolution to this paradox—is really not all that unreasonable. The democratic state was always a contradiction. Globalization has simply exposed the rotten underpinnings, by creating the need for decision making structures on a planetary scale where any attempt to maintain the pretense of popular sovereignty, let alone participation, would be obviously absurd. The neo-liberal solution, of course, Is to declare the market the only form of public deliberation one really needs, and to restrict the state almost exclusively to its coercive function. In this context, the Zapatista response— to abandon the notion that revolution is a matter of seizing control over the coercive apparatus of the state, and instead proposing to refound democracy in the self-organization of autonomous communities—makes perfect sense. This is the reason an otherwise obscure insurrection in southern Mexico caused such a sensation in radical circles to begin with. Democracy, then, is for the moment returning to the spaces in which it originated: the spaces in between. Whether it can then proceed to engulf the world depends perhaps less on what kind of theories we make about it, but on whether we honestly believe that ordinary human beings, sitting down together in deliberative bodies, would be capable of managing their own affairs as well as elites, whose decisions are backed up by the power of weapons, are of managing it for them—or even whether, even if they wouldn’t, they have the right to be allowed to try. For most of human history, faced with such questions, professional intellectuals have almost universally taken the side of the elites. It is rather my impression that, if it really comes down to it, the overwhelming majority are still seduced by the various ugly mirrors and have no real faith in the possibilities of popular democracy. But perhaps this too could change.
need structure of ie: curiosity.. itch-in-the-soul.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
53
part 2 – against economics
55
finance is just another word for other people’s debts (interview w hannah chadeayne appel)
david on finance (page of this essay/interview – adding some from that below)
In the months after city officials forcibly evicted occupiers from Liberty Square (née Zuccotti Park), this public conversation—like the occupiers themselves—dispersed. The talk did not stop so much as it spread out, changed forms, and took route through and beyond New York..
56
Debt: The First 5,000 Years established an intellectual reference point almost immediately, but it also became the visual sign of membership in a new kind of political dialogue about who owes what to whom.
57
Clearly, my dad did not have what it took to be a foot soldier, to just blindly follow stupid orders, so he became an ambulance driver in the ambulance corps.
58
This is our big family claim to fame: he was apparently the man who introduced the mandolin to American music.
59
And so my mom had this curious rags-to-riches-to-rags story where she was suddenly famous as a female lead on Broadway, ..And then she went back to working in the factory after three or four years. When she married my dad, she met him at some lefty summer camp or something. ..My mother’s family disowned her when she married my dad. Not only was he not Jewish, he was German by background, despite the fact that he was what they called then a “premature antifascist” who fought in Spain. I mean, you can’t get much less Nazi than that. It didn’t matter to them. So I never actually met my grandmother, for example, even though she continued to live in Brooklyn and only died when I was about sixteen. There was a profound rift there.
60
I think my father was very sympathetic with anarchism because he’d seen it work. He was in Barcelona when it was basically organized on anarchist principles. It worked fine. There were problems, but the problems got resolved. So the way I always put it is that most people don’t think of anarchism as a bad idea; they think of it as insane, right? “That would never work! C’mon!” My dad knew that was not the case. It was never treated as insane in my family. So it’s hardly surprising that I came into it at an early age. I had all sorts of weird interests and obsessions when I was a kid which weren’t explicitly political.
anarch\ism.. david on anarchism ness
61
So I read Orwell and I read up on Spain and politics, and, you know, I came around to the realization that anarchism is a reasonable position.
62
So my reaction was, “This is the movement that I always wished existed, and they put it together. It came about when I wasn’t paying attention. Where do I go?” So I got involved. A16—the April 16, 2000, actions against the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank in Washington, DC—was my first action. Gradually, I became deeply involved in ***Direct Action Network in New York.
david on direct action et al
63
One of the things I would say about the emergence of Occupy is, at some point, you find yourself organizing your life around something that, on some level, you don’t think is going to happen. We’d always had this idea that direct democracy is contagious. It will be. You can’t explain it to people, but if people actually experience it, it changes their life; they can’t go back. But the question is how to get them in the room. So we thought, “This is going to happen eventually.” It’s going to happen, but at some level we didn’t believe it was going to happen, because at some level you have to create this armor to cover up the continual disappointment. And then it happened, and we were like, “Oh, my God! It worked! Finally! How do you like that?”
So it was like that. *I think one of my most important roles in the origins of Occupy was actually just being that generational bridge. Calling up all these people to say, “No, really, it’s actually happening this time. I know you’ve heard me say this before . . . ”
(to me) any form of democratic admin .. a cancerous distraction
*sounds like how he describes turner in david on turner’s fire of jag.. ability to see deep et al
64
*Occupy is constantly reinventing itself. Strike Debt is a good example. But let’s talk about the holding-space tactic—the importance of the camp or the community. As in the globalization movement, this did not start in the North. That technique of holding space starts in Tahrir Square and Tunisia, and it goes on through Syntagma and Plaça de Catalunya. **In contrast, the core thematic center of the globalization movement was the carnival or the festival—festival of resistance, carnival against capitalism, hence the whole clown-and-puppets theme. And it made sense when you’re dealing with what’s basically a solidarity movement trying to make a mockery of, or attack, the whole structure of global governance. Whereas this round, you don’t see so many puppets and clowns at the center. You see some, but it wasn’t so central to what we were doing. Rather, again, it was the camp, the community. But, still, there’s some continuity here: ***We’re going to create forms of organization which not only show that organizations we’re contesting are bad, which everybody knows, but that they’re unnecessary. We’re going to put an alternative directly in their face as the most potent way of destroying their legitimacy and authority..t The carnival made sense for the first round, but ****the most potent thing we could possibly create as a symbol against Wall Street specifically was a community of people who care about one another. And there’s nothing more radical than performing exemplary love in front of this symbol of the impossibility of a society based on that..t
*occupy wall street and strike debt et al.. still in same song
**giant puppets et al
***huge.. yeah .. let’s do that.. graeber model law.. one that makes shows everything else irrelevant.. cancerous distraction
****ie: a nother way
65
debtors are notoriously difficult to organize. It’s a real challenge. And there’s a strange paradox about this: the first effect of debt is to create isolation, shame, humiliation, a fear of even talking about it. On the other hand, if you look at history, *the vast majority of revolts and insurrections are about debt. So in a sense it’s incredibly effective, ideologically, at isolating people. But once people overcome that isolation, the results are always explosive..
*global leap/re\set.. not ridiculous.. for (blank)’s sake
66
what financialization actually means is they collude with the government through various elaborate forms of bribery to change the law so as to put everyone deeper and deeper in debt, directly turning their income over to the FIRE [finance, insurance, and real estate] sector..
graeber f & b same law – that financialization and bureaucratization are the same thing.. ie: the govt is the bank.. et al
for companies like General Motors (GM) (at least in 2007–8) none of their profits came from the cars. It all came from lending people money for the cars, and that’s counted as industrial. In fact, it’s almost all from financial profits, basically indebting people..
67
they charge people interest, and use that money to bribe politicians to change the laws that regulate them to be able to extract even more. And that’s basically how the American system works, and that’s why Wall Street and the government become almost indistinguishable. Government coercive force becomes a means through which profit is extracted, and that’s why suddenly you have this change of how people perceive one another in relation to this system..
First of all, fewer and fewer people see themselves as middle-class. Being middle-class means you see the basic bureaucratic apparatus around you as existing in your favor, which is hard to see when you have some illegal robo-signed mortgage guys taking away your home..t Second of all, it means that suddenly we have this alliance between the working poor and indebted college students. You never would have seen that in the past. They would’ve been archenemies. All of this is directly attributable to the changing nature of capital extraction. I always think of the proliferation of storefront banks as this beautiful symbol of that change. There are hundreds and hundreds of these Bank of America branches or Citibank branches opening up. In New York, they’re everywhere. Every block has one. And what do they sell? Nothing. They sell money. So they have these stores with no merchandise, but they have lots of guards with guns wandering around. It’s a perfect expression—these beautiful, shiny, nothing stores with armed security everywhere.. That’s what it is. Both nationally and internationally we’re ruled by a ruling class whose profits are based primarily on complex forms of rent extraction, backed by coercive force..t
structural violence.. spiritual violence.. et al
69
In particular, I was really shocked by the degree to which, after 2008, for example, there was this moment that lasted maybe a month or so, where suddenly you could talk about anything. Everything was in doubt. Even the Economist ran headlines effectively asking: “capitalism: was it a good idea?” Obviously, they concluded yes; they’re the Economist. But, nonetheless, it seemed like everything was up for grabs. You could think big thoughts again and wonder why it was all here. Why do we have an economy? And that lasted about four weeks, until everyone said, “Shut up and stop thinking about this. It will come back if we just close our eyes and ears and keep carrying on as if nothing is happening.”t
same after covid.. and we’re missing it again..
70
The idea that the market and the state are somehow separate entities is absurd. So once all moral justifications for the system have been blown away, all they have left is to destroy any locus from which alternatives might emerge. The only line they have left is, “Okay, the system isn’t so great, but it’s the only one that can possibly exist.”..t
need a legit nother way.. not a reform of ed .. or anything
72
Mauss stressed that, that democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy, and everything in between is present in all societies at some level or another, that individualism and communism, rather than being in any way contradictory, are mutually reinforcing of each other and always there. So I think I took a lot from that. So I’ve been trying to reconcile those two traditions throughout my intellectual life..t
the unconditional part of left to own devices ness – left to own devices.. stabilize the whole
I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane..
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I think anthropology is a happy medium. We can fill in the blank spaces, but we can do so based on empirical observation of what **people in analogous situations actually have tended to do. That’s what I think we can add.
to me.. still **whales.. so still not legit
So there are titanic struggles going on between people saying, “This is an emergency, we have to address this situation,” and people who have a different long-term view or others who are just blindly saying, “Absolutely not.” They’re just going to hold on to this thing until cataclysms embrace us. t I’ve talked to people at the Federal Reserve. Not very important people, but nonetheless people who say they’re really worried. They released a white paper calling for mortgage cancellation. They did. Look it up. They know that there’s going to be a huge collapse if they don’t. They’d never call for it otherwise. That’s the Federal Reserve! So on top there are people who are really worried. Radical things might happen. We have a juncture where they’re listening..
huge.. again.. like now.. but still missing it w/cancerous distractions.. ffor (blank)’s sake
74
What does the ruling class always do? They take the best ideas coming out of social movements and turn them into something horrible. . I remember for the G8 in Sapporo, Japanese people asked us to write something up, so we wrote up an analysis in which we said, look, there’s only one way to save the system. They’ll have to announce an emergency and declare that green capitalism is the only thing to save the planet. Then they’ll divert all that money accumulating to sovereign wealth funds in the global South and places that are not supposed to have it back into the system. It was the only logical thing they could do from their point of view. *Except they kept not doing it. They kept sitting around arguing with one another instead.. And there we were saying, “Can’t they come up with their evil plan? We can’t fight their evil plan unless they have their evil plan. We can think of a better evil plan than that! Hire us. Give us $1 million to come up with an evil plan for you, and then give us $1 million to fight you.” It sounds like that’s what’s happening right now. They’re asking me for a plan, and they’ll make it evil. So we’re at that kind of moment.. But which one they adopt, who knows?
*whalespeak as cancerous distraction
ie: a nother way.. an unjustifiable strategy
75
*It could be [that] we could move in a direction of democratization of finance. It could happen. I don’t know what that would look like or what it would mean. I do think one of the most important things we could be doing right now is to think about that.. **There are people like Charles Eisenstein who are coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas about what to do with money—ideas that might well work. .
*need to let go of finance.. any form of m\a\p..
**radical econ (d&c).. graeber model law
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
We could go to a basic income system. There are a million ways to do it. If you go to a four-hour day, for example, it’s not like people don’t do anything during the rest of the hours. They do whatever they want. They’ll be producing things, but hopefully things that don’t require so much coal..
gershenfeld something else law as way sans even the 4 hr.. because graeber stop at enough law et al
mitchell garden law.. garden-enough.. et al.. will only see if we try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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Money is something we promise one another. We need to think democratically about what kinds of promises we want to make to one another and how we can create a just social order on that basis. It could happen. Anything could happen..
and/or no promises.. this is not ridiculous.. for (blank)’s sake
*I personally don’t see how capitalism could really, ultimately, be preserved in any meaningful sense of the term within that virtual money environment. In fact, the very meaning of money itself will shift into something radically different.. The potential for that happening is there. And something like that will happen eventually if history rings true. ..****And there are people on the top who realize they have to start listening to other perspectives..t Again, they boxed themselves into a hole much like the German situation, where *****they’ve been so effective with the ideology, in convincing everybody that nothing else is conceivable, that the moment the thing starts to collapse everyone is sitting there with their mouths gaping open, saying, “But wait, this was supposed to be there forever. Now what do we do?”..
*not radical enough.. not even different.. same song if still measuring things
****but won’t/can’t really listen/hear.. that’s why we need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
*****let’s not sit.. there’s a legit nother way.. and we’re missing it
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
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 listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
78
on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs – a work rant
adding some notes below from anarchist library read.. see on phenom of bs jobs for more notes
[note: this essay is ref’d in preface of book.. bs jobs from birth and bullshit jobs – dg.. originally published in strike 2013]
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. *Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more..t In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. **Huge swathes of people,..t in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. ***The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul..t Yet virtually no one talks about it.
*there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
this is beyond getting us to 15 hr work week – ie: no work.. rather art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
***spiritual violence.. need a means to listen to itch-in-the-soul
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
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m. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.
whales ness.. cope\ing ness.. maté addiction law et al
At the same time, * ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled,
*graeber increase B law.. inspectors of inspectors ness et al
But *rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas,..t we have seen the **ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up
*this would still keep us in sea world.. because any form of m\a\p messes with the dance
‘in undisturbed ecosystem ..the avg individual.. left to its own devices.. behaves in ways that serve/stabilize the whole’ –dana meadows
we keep disturbing the ecosystem because we can’t seem to let go enough to see/try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. if we start with ie: have to work this much per day/week.. no matter how little that number is.. we won’t dance
**too much ness et al
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*The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political..t The ruling class h
*need a global detox leap.. a sabbatical ish transition
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with *one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at..t
*all the versions = any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
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Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary”? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the “need” for that?’ (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value..t
graeber values law et al.. and the myth .. cancerous distraction.. of thinking we have to be measuring things
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There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely (one or t’other?) Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
or catch them one on one.. dm ness et al
*This is a profound psychological violence here..t How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? **How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment..t Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there ***seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it..t Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. ****A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place.
*spiritual violence.. structural violence.. et al
**khan filling the gaps law.. hari present in society law.. et al
***caring labor.. and yet 10-day-care-center\ness.. need a sabbatical ish transition.. where we try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring.. so we can finally try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. the dance
****perhaps sea world would be in trouble.. but not legit free world..
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*Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be..t This is
*myth of normal.. graeber rethink law.. graeber make it diff law.. swartz no going back law.. et al.. warning ness.. we have to let go of things we keep still holding onto.. ie: teaching ness, auto ness, healthcare ness, .. any form of people telling other people what to do.. no matter how ‘good’ ‘harmless’ ‘better’.. whatever.. it seems
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. *Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. **It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.
*this mindset/label is squeezing/exploiting us
**rather.. since forever.. mitchell garden law.. garden-enough.. et al.. so that we can get back to ie: graeber stop at enough law et al
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against econ
against econ [original notes here.. will add some of them below]
*A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be **constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation.
*all ie’s w any form of m\a\p
**cancerous distraction.. takes a lot of work ness and safety addiction ness
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We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash.
same song if any form of m\a\p
To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, *unimpeachable mathematical truths. “Heterodox” theories of economics do, of course, exist (institutionalist, Marxist, feminist, “Austrian,” post-Keynesian…), but their exponents have been almost completely locked out of what are considered “serious” departments, and even outright rebellions by economics students (from the post-autistic economics movement in France to post-crash economics in Britain) have largely **failed to force them into the core curriculum.
**curriculum ness is ie of any form of m\a\p
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“There is no magic money tree,” as Theresa May put it during the snap election of 2017—virtually the only memorable line from one of the most lackluster campaigns in British history. The phrase has been repeated endlessly in the media, whenever someone asks why the UK is the only country in Western Europe that charges university tuition, or whether it is really necessary to have quite so many people sleeping on the streets.
The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).
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..microeconomics itself was completing a *profound transformation..**from a technique for understanding how those operating on the market make decisions to a general philosophy of human life. It was able to do so, remarkably enough, by proposing a series of assumptions that even economists themselves were happy to admit were not really true:..t let us posit, they said, purely rational actors motivated exclusively by self-interest, who know exactly what they want and never change their minds, and have complete access to all relevant pricing information. This allowed them to make precise, predictive equations of exactly how individuals should be expected to act...t
*not profound.. rather.. same song
**yeah.. but doing that since forever.. mitchell garden law et al
*Surely there’s nothing wrong with creating simplified models. Arguably, this is how any science of human affairs has to proceed..t But an empirical science then goes on to test those models against what people actually do, and adjust them accordingly. This is precisely what economists did not do. Instead, **they discovered that, if one encased those models in mathematical formulae completely impenetrable to the noninitiate, it would be possible to create a universe in which those premises could never be refuted..t (“All actors are engaged in the maximization of utility. What is utility? Whatever it is that an actor appears to be maximizing.”) ***The mathematical equations allowed economists to plausibly claim theirs was the only branch of social theory that had advanced to anything like a predictive science (even if most of their successful predictions were of the behavior of people who had themselves been trained in economic theory)..t
*simple we need: sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
**of math and men.. graeber violence/quantification law.. lit & num as colonialism ..et al
***graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. black science of people/whales law.. but again.. since forever
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The problem, as Skidelsky emphasizes, is that if your initial assumptions are absurd, multiplying them a thousandfold will hardly make them less so..t Or, as he puts it, rather less gently, “lunatic premises lead to mad conclusions”:
taleb center of problem law – iterating on cancerous distractions.. need to get at root of problem
expo ness we need – nonjudgmental expo labeling .. so we can try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
In other words, we were obliged to pretend that markets could not, by definition, be wrong..t—if in the 1980s the land on which the Imperial compound in Tokyo was b.
ha.. nice phrase.. like voluntary compliance.. manufacturing consent.. et al.. graeber obliged to pretend law
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At this point, we have come full circle. After such a *catastrophic embarrassment, orthodox economists fell back on their strong suit—academic politics and institutional power. In the UK, one of the first moves of the new Conservative-Liberal Democratic Coalition in 2010 was to reform the higher education system by tripling tuition and instituting an American-style regime of student loans. Common sense might have suggested that if the education system was performing successfully (for all its foibles, the British university system was considered one of the best in the world), while the financial system was operating so badly that it had nearly destroyed the global economy, the sensible thing might be to reform the financial system to be a bit more like the educational system, rather than the other way around. An aggressive effort to do the opposite could only be an ideological move. **It was a full-on assault on the very idea that knowledge could be anything other than an economic good.
**yet.. intellectness as cancerous distraction
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Even at the height of the eventual recovery, in the fifth-richest country in the world, something like one British citizen in twelve experienced hunger, up to and including going entire days without food. *If an “economy” is to be defined as the means by which a human population provides itself with its material needs, the British economy is increasingly dysfunctional. Frenetic efforts on the part of the British political class to change the subject (Brexit) can hardly go on forever. **Eventually, real issues will have to be addressed.
*need – oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
**aka: need to org around legit needs
Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same *problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth.t This demands a different science. The “microfoundations” of current economics are precisely what is standing in the way of this. **Any new, viable science will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both..t
*rather just 2 missing pieces .. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
**rather.. drawn on what’s already on each heart.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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*Intellectually, this won’t be easy. Politically, it will be even more difficult..t Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, **books (texts) like this—and quite possibly this book (text)—will play a crucial part.
*intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. need: legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil seeming chaos of a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
also.. takes a lot of work ness as cancerous distraction
**lanier beyond words law.. graeber model law.. et al
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soak the rich – an exchange on capital, debt, and the future
soak the rich – [adding page.. and guess reading for first time]
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Piketty: The way you redirect our attention by stressing the relationships of power and domination that underlie relationships of indebtedness is admirable. The fact remains that capital is useful in itself. The inequalities associated with it are problematic, but not capital per se. And there is much more capital today than formerly.
oi
Graeber: You mean to say that there is now more wealth per capita than before?
nika and david on wealth et al
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Graeber: Getting back to the original question, *the possible collapse of the system, I think that historical forecasts of this kind are a trap. What is certain is that all systems must end, but it is very hard to predict when the end might come.
james on collapse ness et al.. all cancerous distraction
t is quite clear that this ideological hegemony has now reached its limit. Does this mean that the system is on the point of collapse? It’s hard to say. But capitalism is not old. It hasn’t been around forever, and it seems just as reasonable to imagine it can be transformed into something completely different as to imagine it will necessarily continue existing until the sun blows up, or until it annihilates us through some ecological catastrophe
rather.. been around forever.. aka: any form of m\a\p.. until we go that deep.. nothing ‘completely diff’
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Piketty: One of the points that I most appreciate in David Graeber’s book is the link he shows between slavery and public debt. The most extreme form of debt, he says, is slavery: slaves belong forever to somebody else, and so, potentially, do their children. *In principle, one of the great advances of civilization has been the abolition of slavery.
*who’s slavery.. ooof.. none of us are free
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Piketty: But for all that, is the elimination of debt the solution, as Graeber writes? I have nothing against this, but I am more favorable to a progressive tax on inherited wealth along with high tax rates for the upper brackets. Why? *The question is: What about the day after? What do we do once debt has been eliminated? What is the plan?..t
*need a sabbatical ish transition
Graeber: No one is saying that debt abolition is the only solution. In my view, it is simply an essential component in a *whole set of solutions. I do not believe that eliminating debt can solve all our problems. **I am thinking rather in terms of a conceptual break..t. To be quite honest, I really think that massive debt abolition is going to occur no matter what. ***For me the main issue is just how this is going to happen: ****openly, by virtue of a top-down decision designed to protect the interests of existing institutions, or under pressure from social movements..t Most of the political and economic leaders to whom I have spoken acknowledge that some sort of debt abolition is required.
*just a sabbatical ish transition
**yes that.. huge.. for that need a sabbatical ish transition
***a sabbatical ish transition
****neither.. need a sabbatical ish transition
Graeber: Once we grant that debt cancellation is going to take place, the question becomes how we can control this process and ensure that its outcome is desirable. History offers many examples of debt elimination serving merely to preserve iniquitous social structures..t
huge.. again.. need a sabbatical ish transition.. money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence .. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..
But debt abolition has also at times produced positive social change.
rather.. not any legit change to date
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Graeber: I feel that we are now confronted by a similar situation and that it calls for political inventiveness
need to try a legit nother way
This is a typical case of reactionary calls for debt annulment
any form of re ness as cancerous distraction
The present mode of production is based more on moral principles than on economic ones. The expansion of debt, of working hours, and of work discipline—all of them seem to be of a piece. *If money is indeed a social relationship, founded on the assumption that everyone will assign the same value to the banknote that they have in their possession, shouldn’t we think about what kind of assumptions we wish to embrace regarding future productivity and commitment to work?
10-day-care-center\ness.. need to let go of money.. production.. commitment.. work.. all the cancerous distractions
That’s why I say that the abolition of debt implies a *conceptual break. My approach is intended to help us imagine other forms of social contract that could be **democratically negotiated.
*not a deep enough ‘break’.. won’t get to root of problem
**any form of democratic admin still as cancerous distraction.. need to let go.. and give the unconditional part of left to own devices ness a try
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Piketty: All I can say is that a lot of people would need to be convinced! ..t
won’t be able to ‘convince’ anything .. need a nother way that all of us already crave.. ie: missing pieces; what’s already on each heart; facil itch-in-the-soul; et al
convincing ness as red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
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part 3 – beyond power
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culture as creative refusal
david on creative refusal notes/quotes
What I would like to do in this essay is to talk about cultural comparison as an active force in history. That is, I want to address the degree to which cultures are not just conceptions of what the world is like, not just ways of being and acting in the world, but active political projects which often operate by the explicit rejection of other ones.
any form of re ness as cancerous distraction
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No culture exists in isolation; self-definition is always necessarily a process of comparison..t I think ..that large-scale projects of mutual self-definition have played a far more important role in human history than either anthropologists or historians have usually imagined
so.. a killer.. ie: graeber values law et al.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
so to me.. why define culture? isn’t that just killing us
but i think there is a reason to believe that it is rarely limited to that.. and *that large scale projects of mutual self definition have played a far more important role in human history than either anthropologists or historians have usually imagined.. that is.. many of the cultural forms we still, at least tacitly, treat as primordial could equally well be seen, **in their origins and to a large degree in their maintenance, as self conscious political projects
*aka: wilde not-us law; black science of people/whales law; et al
**aka: manufacturing consent et al
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part 1 – world history
to make my case here i will draw, first, on unlikey set of sources: marcel mauss.. peter lamborn wilson (hakim bey); and finally.. david wengrow
bey articles et al.. david wengrow
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let me turn to my 3rd source of inspiration.. the work of david wengrow.. in my view the most creative archaeological thinker alive today.. on the bronze age of potlatch..
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common features of such heroic societies: .. politics is composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals.. all are profoundly theatrical and both boasting and lying are highly developed and appreciated arts
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part 2 – madagascar
madagascar.. madagascar love et al
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the malagasy cultural matrix has been remarkably effective in absorbing and incorporating almost any other population that later came to settle on the island
need a means (a nother way) to see/try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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what i am suggesting.. malagasy culture has its origins in a rebel ideology of escaped slaves and that the moment of ‘synthesis’ in which it came together can best be thought of as *a self conscious movement **of collective refusal directed against representatives of a larger world system.. despite the egalitarian emphasis, ***money and writing were the two features..t of urban civ that were embraced and appreciated: everyone was involved in petty commerce in some form or another, and the literacy rate was extraordinarily high
*super.. great.. but **need (and can now do/be) something deeper.. something not a form of re ness (which are all cancerous distractions.. sucking all our time/energies)
to me.. this is why money/writing/whatever (ie: lit & num as colonialism) embraced (ie: voluntary compliance)
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‘anti heroic society’:.. public/political life should definitely not consists of a series of gamelike contests.. *decisions were made by consensus.. theatrically boasting and self aggrandizing lying were at the very center of **moral disapproval.. public figures made dramatic display of self effacement
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 listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness..
**have to let go of all the forms of m\a\p
***lit & num as colonialism et al
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by such arrangements , the original schizmogenetic gesture of definition over and against the values of port cities.. could become.. for each new emergent group.. a permanent process of definition against their own specific collection of permanent heroic outsiders..
schismogenesis ness
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hatred has become a political taboo
reading hatred has become a political taboo via anarchist library just now
ok.. so read and took notes there.. but skppingi a hard copy read and note taking.. was unsettling to read.. ie: can’t have us & them ness (99 and 1 ness) and have legit global freedom.. has to be all of us for the dance to dance.. and today we have the means to facil that dance.. so all else is a cancerous distraction
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dead zones of the imagination – on violence, bureaucracy and interpretive labor
dead zones of imagination.. violence.. bureaucracy.. interpretive labor
part 1
This essay is an exploration of certain areas of human life that have tended to make anthropologists uncomfortable: those areas of starkness, simplicity, obliviousness, and outright stupidity in our lives made possible by violence. By “violence” here, I am not referring to the kind of occasional, spectacular acts of violence that we tend to think of first when the word is invoked, but again, the boring, humdrum, yet omnipresent forms of structural violence that define the very conditions of our existence, the subtle or not-so-subtle threats of physical force that lie behind everything from enforcing rules about where one is allowed to sit or stand or eat or drink in parks or other public places, to the threats or physical intimidations or attacks that underpin the enforcement of tacit gender norms.
i see any form of people telling other people what to do.. any form of measuring/accounting.. as structural violence
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story of his mom et al.. also in utopia of rules – (where ch1 is whole essay)
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As an intellectual, probably the most disturbing thing was how dealing with these forms somehow rendered me stupid too. How could I not have noticed that I was printing my name on the line that said “signature” and this despite the fact that I had been investing a great deal of mental and emotional energy in the whole affair? The problem, I realized, was that most of this energy was going into a continual attempt to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me—when all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and a correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions. Spending so much of my time worrying about how not to seem like I was rubbing the notary’s face in her incompetence, or imagining what might make me seem sympathetic to various bank officials, made me less inclined to notice when they told me to do something foolish. It was an obviously misplaced strategy, since insofar as anyone had the power to bend the rules they were usually not the people I was talking to; moreover, if I did encounter them, I was constantly being reminded that if I did complain, even about a purely structural absurdity, the only possible result would be to get some junior functionary in trouble
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without those forms, my mother would not be, legally—hence socially—dead
Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of
the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general.5
As an intellectual, probably the most disturbing thing was how dealing with these forms somehow rendered me stupid too. How could I not have noticed that I was printing my name on the line that said “signature” and this despite the fact that I had been investing a great deal of mental and emotional energy in the whole affair? The problem, I realized, was that most of this energy was going into a continual attempt to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me—when all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and a correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions. Spending so much of my time worrying about how not to seem like I was rubbing the notary’s face in her incompetence, or imagining what might make me seem sympathetic to various bank officials, made me less inclined to notice when they told me to do something foolish. It was an obviously misplaced strategy, since insofar as anyone had the power to bend the rules they were usually not the people I was talking to; moreover, if I did encounter them, I was constantly being reminded that if I did complain, even about a purely structural absurdity, the only possible result would be to get some junior functionary in troublewithout those forms, my mother would not be, legally—hence socially—dead
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part 2
It’s interesting that just about all these works of fiction not only emphasize the comic senselessness of bureaucratic life, but mix it with at least undertones of violence. That is to say, they emphasize the very aspects most likely to be sidestepped in the social scientific literature.
fuller too much law et al
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The real core of the anthropological literature on bureaucracy, even at the height of the “literary turn,” took the completely opposite direction, asking not why bureaucracy produces absurdity, but rather, why so many people believe this is the case.
Michael Herzfeld’s The social production of indifference (1992), which begins by framing the question thusly:
‘..If one could not grumble about “bureaucracy,” bureaucracy itself could not easily exist: both bureaucracy and the stereotypical complaints about it are parts of a larger universe that we might call, quite simply, the ideology and practice of accountability.‘
accountable ness.. one of the red flags we’re doing it/life wrong
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One might even speak here of the gradual emergence of a kind of division of labor within American universities, with the optimistic side of Weber reinvented (in even more simplified form) for the actual training of bureaucrats under the name of “rational choice theory,” while his pessimistic side was relegated to the Foucauldians. . This gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus—the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power—a particular appeal.
intellectness as cancerous distraction.. david on hostile intelligence.. et al
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This essay is not, however, primarily about bureaucracy—or even about the reasons for its neglect in anthropology and related disciplines. It is really about violence. What I would like to argue is that situations created by violence— particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm—invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence. ..t
part 3
We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not epistemic. It’s quite concrete. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force,” in turn, is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence...t
ie: This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life, without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would indeed be summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required. It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm..t159
In all these formulations, “structural violence” is treated as structures that have violent effects, whether or not actual physical violence is involved. This is actually quite different from my own formulation, more consonant with the feminist tradition (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1992; Nordstrom and Martin 1992), which sees these more as structures of violence—since it is only the constant fear of physical violence that makes them possible, and allows them to have violent effects. Racism, sexism, poverty, these cannot exist except in an environment defined by the ultimate threat of actual physical force.
one could argue it’s this very tendency toward abstraction that makes it possible for everyone involved to imagine that the violence upholding the system is somehow not responsible for its violent effects..t
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part 4
It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even in the possibility of having social effects without being communicative..t
To be more precise: violence 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. .. t
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the most characteristic effect of violence—its ability to obviate the need for what I would call “interpretive labor”—becomes most salient when the violence itself is least visible, in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are least likely to occur. These are situations of what I’ve referred to as structural violence,.. t on the assumption that systematic inequalities backed up by the threat of force can be treated as forms of violence in themselves.
interpretive labor.. structural violence et al
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ref to compassion fatigue
part 5
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In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification.
graeber violence/quantification law et al
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part 6
Social theory itself could be seen as a kind of radical simplification, a form of calculated ignorance, meant to reveal patterns one could never otherwise be able to see.
black science of people/whales law
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They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.
It is one thing to say that, when a master whips a slave, he is engaging in a form of meaningful, communicative action, conveying the need for unquestioning obedience, and at the same time trying to create a terrifying mythic image of absolute and arbitrary power. All of this is true. It is quite another to insist that is all that is happening, or all that we need to talk about.
supposed to’s of school/work.. suffocating – from the day.. the death of us ness..
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the bully’s pulpit – on the elementary structure of domination
david on bullying – has notes quotes from this essay
just added a few notes to hard copy
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i didn’t understand how widespread reape was. then the penny dropped
notes in david on rape
The only logical explanation was that businessmen, politicians, officials and financiers rape, or attempt to rape, hotel workers all the time. It’s just that normally, those assaulted know there’s nothing they can do about it.
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if any woman they attacked did protest too strenuously, everyone would move in lockstep to do whatever was required to make the problem go away.
It’s of course this very disbelief that allows such things to happen. We are loth to accept people we might know might practice pure, naked aggression. This is how bullies get away with what they do..t I’ve written about this.
Bullying is not just a relation between bully and victim. It’s really a three-way relation, between bully, victim and everyone who refuses to do anything about the aggression; all those people who say “boys will be boys” or pretend there’s some equivalence between aggressor and aggressed. Who see a conflict and say “it doesn’t matter who started it” even in cases where, in reality, nothing could possibly matter more.
It makes no difference if there’s a real physical audience or if the audience just exists inside the victim’s head. You know what will happen if you fight back. You know what people will say about you. You internalize it. Before long, even if nothing is said, you can’t help wonder if these things they would say are actually true.
Sexual predation is a particular variety of bullying but like all forms of bullying it operates above all in precisely this way by destroying the victim’s sense of self.
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I had another, similar, horrified moment of realization in reading Dame Emma Thompson’s remarks about Harvey Weinstein. Not because of her observation that his predations were, as she said, “the tip of the iceberg” – this is surely true, but not entirely unknown; what startled me was one word. She described Weinstein’s behavior as typical of “a system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference” that women had faced from time immemorial.
The word that struck me was “belittling”..t
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This is why I’d like to get my thumbs on the throat of Harvey Weinstein. It’s not just that creeps like him drove my mother off the stage. It’s that in the process, they broke something..t
Because just as everyone associated with hotels falls into lockstep to tell chambermaids they are unworthy of protection from rapists, so did everything in my mother’s environment conspire to tell her she had no grounds for complaint if someone told her was unworthy to continue to perform on stage, whatever her attainments, without also performing in private as a part-time sex worker.
As a result, her sense of self collapsed.
All of us are heirs to a thousand forms of violence. Many shape our lives in ways we’ll never know. My mother was an enormous human stuck in a tiny box..t Late in her life she was still hilariously funny; but she also collected tea towels with inscriptions like “don’t expect miracles”.
structural violence.. spiritual violence
In endless ways, the violence of powerful men plays havoc with our souls..t It makes us complicit in acts of mutual destruction. It’s too late now for my mother. She died 10 years ago, taking the details of what happened with her. But if we can do anything for her now, can’t we at least break out of lockstep?
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on the phenomenology of giant puppets – broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in american culture
notes here: giant puppets
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Why puppets? Why windows? Why do these images seem to have such mythic power? Why do representatives of the state react the way they do? What is the public’s perception? What is the “public”, anyway? *How would it be possible to transform “the public” into something else?—is to begin to try to piece together the tacit rules of game of symbolic warfare, from its elementary assumptions to the details of how the terms of engagement are negotiated in any given action, ultimately, to understand the stakes in new forms of revolutionary politics. I am myself personally convinced that such understandings are themselves revolutionary in their implications
*there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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The movement’s disarray was not simply due to heightened levels of repression. Another reason was, however paradoxical this may seem, that it reached so many of its immediate goals so quickly. After Seattle, the WTO process froze in its tracks and has never really recovered. Most ambitious global trade schemes were scotched. The effects on political discourse were even more remarkable. In fact the change was so dramatic that it has become difficult, for many, to even remember what public discourse in the years immediately before Seattle was actually like.In the late ‘90s, “Washington consensus”, as it was then called, simply had no significant challengers.In the US itself, politicians and journalists appeared to have come to unanimous agreement that radical “free market reforms” were the only possible approach to economic development, anywhere and everywhere. In the mainstream media, anyone who challenged its basic tenets of this faith was likely to be treated as if they were almost literally insane.Speaking as someone who became active in the first months of 2000, I can attest that, however exhilarated by what had happened at Seattle, most of us still felt it would take five or ten years to shatter these assumptions. In fact it took less than two. By late 2001, it was commonplace to see even news journals that had just months before denounced protestors as so many ignorant children, declaring that we had won the war of ideas.
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If there was one central inspiration to the global justice movement, it was the principle of direct action. This is a notion very much at the heart of the anarchist tradition and, in fact, most of the movement’s central organizers—more and more in fact as time went on—considered themselves anarchists, or at least, heavily influenced by anarchist ideas. They saw mass mobilizations not only as opportunities to expose the illegitimate, undemocratic nature of existing institutions, but as ways to do so in a form that itself demonstrated why such institutions were unnecessary, by providing a living example of genuine, direct democracy. The key word here is “process”—meaning, decision-making process.
ugh – democracy – et al
we need to go beyond a finite set of choices.. ie: curiosity over decision making .. because public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
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Direct action is a form of resistance which, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free
but if we were already free.. why would would feel the need to do consensus decision making.. et al
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*This essay thus ends where it should perhaps have begun, with the need to thoroughly rethink the idea of “revolution”. While most of those engaged with the politics of direct action think of themselves as, in some sense, revolutionaries, few, at this point, are operating within the classic revolutionary framework where revolutionary organizing is designed to build towards a violent, apocalyptic confrontation with the state. **Even fewer see revolution as a matter of seizing state power and transforming society through its mechanisms.On the other hand, neither are they simply interested in a strategy of “engaged withdrawal” (as in Virno’s “revolutionary exodus”), and the founding of new, autonomous communities. ***In a way, one might say the politics of direct action, by trying to create alternative forms of organization in the very teeth of state power, means to explore a middle ground precisely between these two alternatives. Anyway, we are dealing with a new synthesis that, I think, is not yet entirely worked out.
**there’s a legit use of tech – as mech – (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
***today have means to get ‘out of the teeth’ of whatever.. beyond ‘middle ground – between’ ness.. hari rat park law et al.. for (blank)’s sake
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States have a strong tendency to define their relation to their people in terms of an unwinnable war of some sort or another. The American state has been one of the most flagrant in this regard: in recent decades we have seen a war on poverty degenerate into a war on crime, then a war on drugs (the first to be extended internationally), and finally, now, a war on terror. But as this sequence makes clear, the latter is not really a war at all but an attempt to extend this same, internal logic to the entire globe. It is an attempt to declare a kind of diffuse global police state.
war on drugs.. johann hari – chasing the scream.. et al.. david on war.. david on police.. police ness.. et al
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In other words, police can be heroes in such movies largely because they are the only figures who can systematically ignore the law. It is constituent power turned on itself of course because cops, on screen or in reality, are not trying to create (or constitute) anything. They are simply maintaining the status quo.
In one sense, this is the most clever ideological displacement of all—the perfect complement to the aforementioned privatization of (consumer) desire. Insofar as the popular festival endures, it has become pure spectacle, with the role of Master of the Potlatch granted to the very figure who, in real life, is in charge of ensuring that any actual outbreaks of popular festive behavior are forcibly suppressed.
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It seems to me it is best seen as a way of managing a situation of extreme alienation and insecurity that itself can only be maintained by systematic coercion. Faced with anything that remotely resembles creative, non-alienated, experience, it tends to look as ridiculous as a deodorant commercial during a time of national disaster. But then, I am an anarchist. The anarchist problem remains how to bring that sort of experience, and the imaginative power that lies behind it, into the daily lives of those outside the small autonomous bubbles they have already created.This is a continual problem; but there seems to me every reason to believe that, were it possible, power of the police cosmology, and with it, the power of the police themselves, would simply melt away
yeah.. let’s try this: 2 convers as infra
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used 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
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part 4 – the revolt of the caring classes
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are you and anarchist – the answer may surprise you
notes here: are you an anarchist
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The most basic anarchist principle is self-organization: the assumption that human beings do not need to be threatened with prosecution in order to be able to come to reasonable understandings with each other, or to treat each other with dignity and respect.
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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*Another basic anarchist principle is voluntary association. This is simply a matter of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. The only difference is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a society in which everything could be organized along these lines, all groups based on the free consent of their members, and therefore, that all top-down, military styles of organization like armies or bureaucracies or large corporations, based on chains of command, would no longer be necessary. Perhaps you don’t believe that would be possible. Perhaps you do. But **every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist — even if you don’t realize it.
*most/all though is voluntary compliance .. if any form of democratic admin.. if any form of m\a\p
**but public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
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: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails. This leads to another crucial point: that while people can be reasonable and considerate when they are dealing with equals, human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another.
to me.. this is still whalespeak.. again.. with the finite set of choices ness as cancerous distraction
Anarchists believe that power corrupts and those who spend their entire lives seeking power are the very last people who should have it. Anarchists believe that our present economic system is more likely to reward people for selfish and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent, caring human beings. Most people feel that way. The only difference is that most people don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it, or anyway — and this is what the faithful servants of the powerful are always most likely to insist — anything that won’t end up making things even worse.
graeber rethink law et al
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But what if that weren’t true?
And is there really any reason to believe this? When you can actually test them, most of the usual predictions about what would happen without states or capitalism turn out to be entirely untrue. For thousands of years people lived without governments. In many parts of the world people live outside of the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban, technological society all this would be more complicated: *but technology can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, **we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshaled to fit human needs. ***How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanizing away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.
*actually.. tech as it could be can make them irrelevant s
**deeper issue – we have no idea what legit needs are.. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
***again.. if tech as it could be.. those questions (any questions other than itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday) become irrelevant s.. so become cancerous distractions
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Take the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right. If you really took it seriously, *that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system. The same goes for sharing: we’re always telling children that they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each other’s needs, to help each other; then we go off into the real world where we assume that everyone is naturally selfish and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, what we say to our children is right. Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history, every discovery or accomplishment that’s improved our lives, **has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend more of our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, there’s no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone ***making people compete over the basic necessities of life. That only serves the interests of people in power, who want us to live in fear of one another. That’s why anarchists call for a society based not only on free association but mutual aid. ****The fact is that most children grow up believing in anarchist morality, and then gradually have to realize that the adult world doesn’t really work that way. That’s why so many become rebellious, or alienated, even suicidal as adolescents, and finally, resigned and bitter as adults; their only solace, often, being the ability to raise children of their own and pretend to them that the world is fair. But *****what if we really could start to build a world which really was at least founded on principles of justice? Wouldn’t that be the greatest gift to one’s children one could possibly give?
*and why we need tech w/o judgment – ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling
**coop and mutual aid still forms of m\a\p
***again.. deeper.. need global detox leap so we grok maté basic needs (a&a)
****khan filling the gaps law et al
*****yeah.. let’s do that.. ie: a nother way via a sabbatical ish transition
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Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is an entirely different matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically. It would just be complicated. In fact, *anarchists have all sorts of different ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suffice it to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for **how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. ***The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.
*we have no idea what legit free people are like.. because we keep not letting go enough to see/try the unconditional ness of left to own devices ness
**again.. any form of democratic admin still whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
***to me.. rather.. that the whole idea of problem ness will be irrelevant if let go of any form of m\a\p
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army of altruists – on the alienated right to do good
notes here: army of altruists
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The answer was that the programs had such enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: e.g., “This is why I joined the army”; “This is what military service is really all about – not just defending your country, but helping people.”
khan filling the gaps law et al
The world is a giant marketplace; everyone is in it for a buck; if you want to understand why something happened, first ask who stands to gain by it. The same attitudes expressed in the back rooms of bars are echoed in the highest reaches of social science. America’s great contribution to the world in the latter respect has been the development of “rational choice” theories, which proceed from the assumption that *all human behavior can be understood as a matter of economic calculation, o
*rather.. all whale behavior
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The only way they can convince themselves to abandon their desire to do right by the world as a whole is to substitute an even more powerful desire do right by their children.
*What all this suggests to me is that American society might well work completely differently than we tend to assume.
*graeber make it diff law et al
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FIRST OF ALL, I should make clear that I do not believe that either egoism or altruism are somehow inherent to human nature. Human motives are rarely that simple. Rather egoism or altruism are ideas we have about human nature.
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PROPOSITION I: Neither egoism nor altruism are natural urges; they are in fact arise in relation to one another and neither would be conceivable without the market.
FIRST OF ALL, I should make clear that I do not believe that either egoism or altruism are somehow inherent to human nature. Human motives are rarely that simple. Rather egoism or altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one tends to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is precisely in the times and places as one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions – Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space, declaring, in effect: “Yes, but here, we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.” It was these latter institutions, of course, that first developed our modern notions of charity.
Even today, when we operate outside the domain of the market or of religion, very few of our actions could be said to be motivated by anything so simple as untrammeled greed or utterly selfless generosity. When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come into play: *envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty, romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so on. These are the motivations that impel the major dramas of our lives, that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize, but that social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore. If one travels to parts of the world where money and markets do not exist – say, to certain parts of New Guinea or Amazonia – such complicated webs of motivation are precisely what one still finds. In societies where most people live in small communities, where almost everyone they know is either a friend, a relative or an enemy, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to “self-interest” or “altruism,” while including very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to be based on much more subtle principles. Anthropologists have created a vast literature to try to fathom the dynamics of these apparently exotic “gift economies,” but if it seems odd to us to see, say, important men conniving with their cousins to finagle vast wealth, which they then present as gifts to bitter enemies in order to publicly humiliate them, **it is because we are so used to operating inside impersonal markets that it never occurs to us to think how we would act if we had an economic system where we treated people based on how we actually felt about them.
*to me.. these are all because in sea world since forever and everywhere everyone
**again.. a deeper econ is if global detox first.. because until then.. ‘how we feel’ about people is still whalespeak
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Nowadays, the work of destroying such ways of life is largely left to missionaries – representatives of those very world religions that originally sprung up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but this rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish, and more altruistic, at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.
same song.. any form of people telling other people what to do
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Consider, for a moment, the word “value.” When economists talk about value they are really talking about money – or more precisely, about whatever it is that money is measuring; also, whatever it is that economic actors are assumed to be pursuing. When we are working for a living, or buying and selling things, we are rewarded with money. But whenever we are not working or buying or selling, when we are motivated by pretty much anything other the desire to get money, we suddenly find ourselves in the domain of “values.” The most commonly invoked of these are of course “family values” (which is unsurprising, since by far the most common form of unpaid labor in most industrial societies is child-rearing and housework), but we also talk about religious values, political values, the values that attach themselves to art or patriotism – one could even, perhaps, count loyalty to one’s favorite basketball team. All are seen as commitments that are, or ought to be, uncorrupted by the market. At the same time, they are also seen as utterly unique; *where money makes all things comparable, “values” such as beauty, devotion, or integrity cannot, by definition, be compared. There is no mathematic formula that could possibly allow one to calculate just how much personal integrity it is right to sacrifice in the pursuit of art, or how to balance responsibilities to your family with responsibilities to your God. (Obviously, people do make these kind of compromises all the time. But they cannot be calculated). One might put it this way: if value is simply what one considers important, then money allows importance take a liquid form, enables us to compare precise quantities of importance and trade one off for the other. After all, if someone does accumulate a very large amount of money, the first thing they are likely to do is to try to convert it into something unique, whether this be Monet’s water lilies, a prize-winning racehorse, or an endowed chair at a university.
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What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” We all are striving to put ourselves in a position where we can dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves.
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The problem, of course, is that a higher education system cannot be expanded forever. At a certain point one ends up with a significant portion of the population unable to find work even remotely in line with their qualifications, who have every reason to be angry about their situation, and who also have access to the entire history of radical thought.
What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” We all are striving to put ourselves in a position where we can dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves. When liberals do well in America, it’s because they can embody that possibility: the Kennedys, for example, are the ultimate Democratic icons not just because they started as poor Irish immigrants who made enormous amounts of money, but because they are seen as having managed, ultimately, to turn all that money into nobility.
PROPOSITION III: The real problem of the American left is that while it does try in certain ways to efface the division between egoism and altruism, value and values, it largely does so for its own children. This has allowed the right to paradoxically represent itself as the champions of the working class.
ALL THIS MIGHT help explain why the Left in America is in such a mess. Far from promoting new visions of effacing the difference between egoism and altruism, value and values, or providing a model for passing from one to the other, progressives cannot even seem to think their way past it. After the last presidential election, the big debate in progressive circles was the relative importance of economic issues versus what was called “the culture wars.” Did the Democrats lose because they were not able to spell out any plausible economic alternatives, or did the Republicans win because they successfully mobilized conservative Christians around the issue of gay marriage? As I say, the very fact that progressives frame the question this way not only shows they are trapped in the right’s terms of analysis. It demonstrates they do not understand how America really works.
This sends liberals into spirals of despair. They cannot understand why decisive leadership is equated with acting like an idiot. Neither can they understand how a man who comes from one of the most elite families in the country, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and whose signature facial expression is a selfsatisfied smirk, could ever convince anyone he was a “man of the people.” I must admit I have struggled with this as well. As a child of working class parents who won a scholarship to Andover in the 1970s and eventually, a job at Yale, I have spent much of my life in the presence of men like Bush., everything about them oozing self-satisfied privilege. But in fact, stories like mine – stories of dramatic class mobility through academic accomplishment – are increasingly unusual in America.
Particularly after World War II, huge resources were poured into expanding the higher education system, which grew extremely rapidly, and all this was promoted quite explicitly as a means of social mobility. This served during the Cold War as almost an implied social contract, not just offering a comfortable life to the working classes but holding out the chance that their children would not be working-class themselves.
The problem, of course, is that a higher education system cannot be expanded forever. At a certain point one ends up with a significant portion of the population unable to find work even remotely in line with their qualifications, who have every reason to be angry about their situation, and who also have access to the entire history of radical thought. During the twentieth century, this was precisely the situation most likely to spark revolts and insurrections – revolutionary heroes from Chairman Mao to Fidel Castro almost invariably turn out to be children of poor parents who scrimped to give their children a bourgeois education, only to discover that a bourgeois education does not, in itself, guarantee entry into the bourgeoisie. By the late sixties and early seventies, the very point where the expansion of the university system hit a dead end, campuses were, predictably, exploding.
What followed could be seen as a kind of settlement. Campus radicals were reabsorbed into the university, but set to work largely at training children of the elite. As the cost of education has skyrocketed, financial aid has been cut back, and the government has begun aggressively pursuing student loan debts that once existed largely on paper, the prospect of social mobility through education – above all liberal arts education – has been rapidly diminished. The number of working-class students in major universities, which steadily grew until at least the late sixties, has now been declining for decades. If working-class Bush voters tend to resent intellectuals more than they do the rich, then, the most likely reason is because they can imagine scenarios in which they might become rich, but cannot imagine one in which they, or any of their children, could ever become members of the intelligentsia? If you think about it, this is not an unreasonable assessment. A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible. There is virtually no chance on the other hand that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to remember not just the changes in higher education, but also the role that unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships. *It has become a fact of life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason other than the money, for the first year or two one will not be paid. This is certainly true if one wishes to be involved in altruistic pursuits: say, to join the world of charities, or NGOs, or to become a political activist. But it is equally true if one wants to pursue values like Beauty or Truth: to become part of the world of books, or the art world, or an investigative reporter. The custom effectively seals off any such career for any poor student who actually does attain a liberal arts education. Such structures of exclusion had always existed of course, especially at the top, but in recent decades fences have become fortresses.
*or ever.. at all.. caring labor.. et al.. need a way sans money ness
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If that mechanic’s son – or daughter – wishes to pursue something higher, more noble, for a career, what options does she really have? Likely just two. She can seek employment with her local church, which is hard to get. Or she can join the Army.
This is, of course, the secret of nobility. To be noble is to be generous, high-minded, altruistic, to pursue higher forms of value. But it is also to be able to do so because one does not really have to think too much about money. This is precisely what our soldiers are doing when they give free dental examinations to villagers: they are being paid (modestly, but adequately) to do good in the world. Seen in this light, it is also easier to see what really happened at universities in the wake of the 1960s – the “settlement” I mentioned above. Campus radicals set out to create a new society that destroyed the distinction between egoism and altruism, value and values. It did not work out, but they were, effectively, offered a kind of compensation: the privilege to use the university system to create lives that did so, in their own little way, to be supported in one’s material needs while pursuing virtue, truth, and beauty, and above all, to pass that privilege on to their own children. One cannot blame them for accepting the offer. But neither can one blame the rest of the country for resenting the hell out of them. Not because they reject the project: as I say, this is what America is all about.
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As I always tell activists engaged in the peace movement and counter-recruitment campaigns: why do working class kids join the Army anyway? Because like any teenager, they want to escape the world of tedious work and meaningless consumerism, to live a life of adventure and camaraderie in which they believe they are doing something genuinely noble. They join the Army because they want to be like you.
again.. rather.. khan filling the gaps law
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caring too much – that’s the curse of the working class
notes here: caring too much
One would think a government that has inflicted such suffering on those with the least resources to resist, without even turning the economy around, would have been at risk of political suicide. Instead, the basic logic of austerity has been accepted by almost everyone. Why? Why do politicians promising continued suffering win any working-class acquiescence, let alone support, at all?
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I think the very incredulity with which I began provides a partial answer. Working-class people may be, as we’re ceaselessly reminded, less meticulous about matters of law and propriety than their “betters”, but they’re also much less self-obsessed. They care more about their friends, families and communities. In aggregate, at least, they’re just fundamentally nicer.
To some degree this seems to reflect a universal sociological law. Feminists have long since pointed out that those on the bottom of any unequal social arrangement tend to think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them. Women everywhere tend to think and know more about men’s lives than men do about women, just as black people know more about white people’s, employees about employers’, and the poor about the rich.
interpretive labor et al
After all, this is what being “powerful” is largely about: not having to pay a lot of attention to what those around one are thinking and feeling. The powerful employ others to do that for them.
What we think of as archetypally women’s work – looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects – accounts for a far greater proportion of what working-class people do when they’re working than hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things.
If you think about it, is this not what life is basically about? Human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other. The working classes just do a disproportionate share. They are the caring classes, and always have been. It is just the incessant demonisation directed at the poor by those who benefit from their caring labour that makes it difficult, in a public forum such as this, to acknowledge it.
maté trump law et al
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the revolt of the caring classes
can’t find (in my notes or online) revolt of caring classes.. dgi has page – but only has this picture – which makes me think i do have this lecture/notes somewhere.. just not same title
i do have managerial feudalism to revolt of caring classes.. caring too much.. but neither are what is here in hardcopy
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how i first came to think of occupy as ‘the revolt of the caring classes’
since the new ruling class based its income increasing on rent taking.. debt creation and debt trading (fin ness)
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(i’ve read all this before.. but where?.. can’t find)
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wage labor seen as stage of life
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trapped in permanent social adolescence.. saved by instilling sense of industrious self discipline.. . full adulthood.. punishment.. et al280
few seem willing to draw obvious conclusion that increasingly people find a sense of dignity and self worth in their jobs because they hate them
bs jobs from birth et al
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caring as work directed toward facilitating others’ freedom
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caring labor as tending to needs/desire of infants /small chldren .. so they have possibility of play.. et al
graeber care/free law.. from david on care and freedom
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part 5 – what’s the point if we can’t have fun?
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another art world, part 1 – art communism and artificial scarcity
original notes here: art world – p1 – from another art world
We would like to offer some initial thoughts on exactly how the art world can operate simultaneously as a dream of liberation, and a structure of exclusion; how its guiding principle is both that everyone should really be an artist, and that this is absolutely and irrevocably not the case.
dream of being/doing/sharing your art..
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
let’s do this first: free art-ists.
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It might even be said that the revolutionary potential of art is a large part of what makes it so effective as a principle of control..t
The world’s cities are full of young people who do see a life of expression as the ultimate form of freedom,.. t and even those who dream of becoming soap opera stars or hip-hop video producers recognize that as things are currently organized, the “art world” is the crowning height of that larger domain of “arts,” and as such, its regulatory principle, that which holds the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of genres and forms of art—so strangely reminiscent of earlier ranks and hierarchies of angels—in their proper place.
1 yr to be 5 again
all of us
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Malevich’s vision implied that curiosity and a desire for self-expression are essential components of whatever it is we are defining as “humanity”—or perhaps all life (some Russian avant-gardists were also interested in the liberation of cows)—and that therefore freedom is more a matter of removing impediments than fundamentally reshaping human nature..t
let’s just facil daily curiosity ie: cure ios city
update:
hari rat park law via a sabbatical ish transition
..the Russian avant-garde project was also educational, designed not to create the “new man”..but to include those previously most excluded—the poor and provincials, the inhabitants of the national suburbs—to give them the minimal tools they would need to join in the collective *project of creating a new society, in which they would, in turn, create absolutely anything they liked.
2 convers as infra via tech as it could be
gershenfeld something else law
update:
*sadly interesting.. this part of the sentence left out in ultimate hard copy.. to me this is a huge part to leave out.. because thisis the part we’ve not yet tried/seen.. ie: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. that makes gershenfeld something else law work.. that makes the dance
because we keep leaving out the deeper part.. that seems too ridiculous .. et al.. we keep not getting to the root of problem.. oi
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
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 listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
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The problem, Romantics insisted, was that bourgeois society had created social pressures and expectations so stifling and atrocious that very few make it to adulthood with their humanity and freedom intact. Bourgeois education had the effect of murdering the imagination. What children and unschooled “primitives” were really thought to have in common, then, was simply that they had not (or not yet) been crushed..t
the supposed to’s.. of school/work.. making us all like whales in sea world.. we need to get back to our not yet scrambled ness
update:
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
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.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
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..Still, one of the most radical Romantic idea was simply that, if everyone is born a free and ingenious child, then the lack of freedom and genius, or the spread of stupidity, malice, and hypocrisy in that society can only be the product of social conditions..t This was considered shocking at the time. French revolutionaries were often so determined to prove it that they sometimes placed aristocratic children with the families of drunks—just to prove that they would turn out to be drunks themselves.
hari rat park law et al
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By the twentieth century, many of the best-known avant-garde artists were no longer even producing much in the way of immortal works of art, but instead largely plans on how to share their power and freedom with others. As a result, the supreme twentieth-century avant-garde genre, or at least the most accomplished and original, was not even the collage but the manifesto.
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..Communism would be a world no longer divided into mad geniuses and dull, obedient, fools—spectators, either uncomprehending or adulatory. Everyone would become both at the same time.
crazywise et al
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the museum of care – imagining the world after the pandemic
original notes/quotes here: david and nika on museum of care
Or more precisely, we are imagining a sane world after the virus, one where, instead of just trying to put things back the way they were, we act on what we’ve learned. For instance, a huge proportion of office work, especially administrative, managerial, marketing, legal, finance, consultancy and the like have shown themselves to be pure *bullshit. If they disappeared, it would either make no difference or the world might even be a slightly better place. **The proof is that during the crisis, most of them did disappear and the world kept spinning. So imagine for a moment we are sane and don’t just go back to pretending there’s some reason to have all these people bluffing to make us think they work all day but instead got rid of the bullshit jobs. Well, one question would be: ***what would we do with all the buildings where they used to work? Obviously, those actually useful workers who kept us alive and cared for during the epidemic – doctors, nurses, cleaners, couriers, electricians, farmers – don’t need giant glass buildings to make them feel important. Some can be blown up. This will be good because it means there will be less energy use to keep them heated, cooled and so forth, which will reduce carbon emissions. But surely we wouldn’t want to blow up all of them.
**to (virus) leap ness
***city sketchup ness
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After the French and Russian revolutions, the royal palaces were turned into state museums. That might point to one sane way to use them. But there’s also a crazy way: a return to “normalcy”. The model for this might be what happened after the large-scale deindustrialization of western metropolises, when former factories and warehouses were turned into private art centers, offices and condominiums for the kind of people who worked in them. Many find it hard to imagine this won’t happen again, if there is rapid de-bullshitization of work, but no real change to the financial system, or structures of wealth and power more generally. Empty offices would be bought up by investors, who would turn them into expensive condominiums or private art spaces whose presence will give the real estate additional market value. The only alternative usually put on the table is if the state takes over everything, either in the form of state socialism (which is basically just state-monopoly capitalism) or its right-wing “national-socialist” variant (in whatever updated 21st century form).
In that future, those empty offices not used to house bureaucrats or secret police will be turned into state museums: conservative, elitist institutions whose general ambiance balances somewhere between that of a cemetery and that of a bank. We would like to insist on the possibility – perhaps not the likelihood, but at least the possibility – of sanity. Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control.
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
Prisons, after all, provide food, shelter and even basic medical care. Still, they are not “caring” institutions. What they provide is not care because real care is directed not just at supplying material needs, not even just to allow others to grow and thrive, but also, to maintain or enhance their freedom. Imagine we jettison the idea of production and consumption being the sole purpose of economic life and substitute care and freedom. What would we do with the buildings then?
In a world built around care and solidarity, much of this vast and absurd office space would indeed be blown up, but others could be turned into free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter. We could call them ‘Museums of Care’ — precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of *entirely new forms of social relations
*huge.. but we keep not letting go enough to see/try something legit diff.. ie: need to try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
from david’s wikipedia page:
“The Museum of Care: imagining the world after the pandemic”, originally published in “Arts of the Working Class” in April 2020. In the article, Graeber and Dubrovsky imagine a post-pandemic future, where vast surfaces of office spaces and conservative institutions are turned into “free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter”. “We could call them ‘Museums of Care’ – precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.”
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
in the city.. as the day.. ness
spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove..
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
findings from on the ground ness:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
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what’s the point if we can’t have fun?
original notes here: david on fun
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Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive success—unless one can absolutely prove that it isn’t, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by.
whales ness
I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.
humanity needs to let go of any form of m\a\p
That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It’s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some long-term survival or reproductive function.
graeber fear of play law.. gray play deprived law.. gray play law..
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil the seeming chaos of a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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There is a way out of the dilemma, and the first step is to consider that our starting point could be wrong. .. What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”?
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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Or more to the point, why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. *If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
*again.. 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.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
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wondering why finishing this hardcopy read was like pulling teeth.. guessing because the ‘differently’ ness is unsettling .. when to me.. not legit diff.. not letting go enough to get to root of problem
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yet.. still.. would love to have this hard copy:
via dgi sept 2025 newletter:
“The Ultimate Hidden Truth” has been translated into German and was published in August 2025. Ursula Weidenfeld discussed the book on the Deutschlandfunkkultur.de on 1 Sept 2025.
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be you. 