David Graeber

Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
Published 15 Jan 2020

Spy Apocalypse Now Great America Capitalism Titanic Repeat Art One’s Own Guggenheim Capitalism Accounting Art Eat a Peach Accounting Capitalism White Russians Spies Citizens Water Art Blood Bicycle Manifesto The Hug Resignation Work All I Wanted Care Ancient Mew The Gift Consumption The Hole Notes Works People About the Author I am afraid to own a Body – I am afraid to own a Soul – Profound – precarious Property – Possession, not optional – —EMILY DICKINSON If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life and, by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start instead with the very small things. —DAVID GRAEBER CONSUMPTION ISN’T IT GOOD? We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying? We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last.

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It costs $200, twice as much as my wedding ring. But I go ahead and buy it. This gives me a strange sense of accomplishment that persists through dinner. On the train home I’m still too tired to read, but I feel like I’ve done something today. Or the necklace has done it for me. CONSUMERS “A metaphor is all this really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.”

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“Willing bondage” is how Lewis Hyde describes the service of the artist who is working to master an art, but art doesn’t appear in these definitions. Service is the act of paying interest on a debt, labor that doesn’t produce a commodity, and a ceremony of religious worship. That’s something close to what I had in mind. Service was a way of life in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages, David Graeber writes. Almost everyone was expected to spend some part of their early lives, seven to fifteen years, as a servant. Older children and teenagers, boys and girls both, were sent by their parents to work as servants in other households. This was true even for the elite, who would serve as pages or ladies-in-waiting before becoming knights and noblewomen.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
by David Graeber
Published 13 Aug 2012

Still, even if you eliminate the contestable categories the numbers are striking, and even more, the fact that the numbers vary dramatically between countries: with Greece, the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain having roughly 20–24 percent of workers doing some sort of guard labor, and Scandinavian countries a mere 1 in 10. The key factor seems to be social inequality: the more wealth is in the hands of the 1 percent, the larger a percentage of the 99 percent they will employ in one way or another to protect it. ALSO BY DAVID GRAEBER Debt: The First 5,000 Years ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of several books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, and other magazines and journals.

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The Democracy Project is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Weekly Standard for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Anarchy in the U.S.A.: The Roots of American Disorder” by Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

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Reprinted by permission. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Graeber, David. The Democracy Project : a history, a crisis, a movement / David Graeber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-679-64600-6 1. Democracy—History. I. Title JC421.G677 2013 321.8—dc23 2012031998 www.spiegelandgrau.com Jacket design: Jamie Keenan v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction 1. The Beginning Is Near 2. Why Did It Work? 3. “The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason”: The Covert History of Democracy 4. How Change Happens 5. Breaking the Spell Dedication Acknowledgments Notes Other Books by This Author About the Author INTRODUCTION On April 26, 2012, about thirty activists from Occupy Wall Street gathered on the steps of New York’s Federal Hall, across the street from the Stock Exchange.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

—Karl Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital What ever happened to Political Economy, leaving me here? —John Berryman, “Dream Song 84” Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction 1. David Harvey: Crisis Theory 2. Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Logic of Neoliberalism 3. Robert Brenner: Full Employment and the Long Downturn 4. David Graeber: In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt 5. Slavoj Žižek: The Unbearable Lightness of “Communism” 6. Boris Groys: Aesthetics of Utopia Guide to Further Reading Introduction To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction—as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it—I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual.

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One of us has just referred to the financial district around us, including the twin towers of the World Trade Center, as the belly of the beast, and it seems to us that from our position in the belly there isn’t anything we can do to provoke the least indigestion in the beast. At the same conference, I’d met the anarchist and scholar David Graeber (whose book Debt: The First 5,000 Years furnishes the subject of another essay here). Graeber struck me then, and on the half-dozen later occasions when we hung out, as a brilliant mind and fascinating talker, but by no means as the sort of person ever likely to be profiled by a major business magazine—as he was in 2011, when Bloomberg Business Week described his connection to a meteoric social movement called Occupy Wall Street.

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” * The terror inspired by the notion of a “public option” attached to health care reform always indicated the bad faith behind familiar eulogies to the marvelous competitiveness of capital by comparison with the lumbering state. If the self-description of business were accurate, it would have nothing to fear from public competition. 4 David Graeber: In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt Most analysts divide postwar capitalism into two periods. The first extends from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The end of the second appears to have been announced by the crisis—at first a “financial” crisis, now often a “debt” crisis—that broke out in 2008.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Finally, what measures might be useful in alleviating problems caused by automation? Of course, the way we react to change depends not only on the problem but also on the assumptions we hold about what would constitute a good outcome. Both David Graeber and Rachel Kay favour reducing human work, while Irmgard Nübler focuses on how technological unemployment can be mitigated and job growth maintained. David Graeber argues that the future of technological unemployment predicted by J.M. Keynes has in fact come to pass—but that we have compensated for the lack of work by creating millions of make-work jobs with little purpose.

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109 Simon Colton Contents vii Part V Work in the Digital Economy 123 13 Work in the Digital Economy125 Daniel Susskind 14 Two Myths About the Future of the Economy133 Nick Srnicek Part VI AI, Work and Ethics 143 15 AI, Ethics, and the Law145 Cathy O’Neil Part VII Policy 155 16 Policy for the Future of Work157 David Graeber 17 Automation and Working Time in the UK175 Rachel Kay 18 Shaping the Work of the Future: Policy Implications189 Irmgard Nübler Index203 Notes on Contributors James Bessen is an economist who studies technology and innovation policy. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company.

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Frey has served as an advisor and consultant to international organisations, think tanks, government and business, including the G20, the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations and several Fortune 500 companies. He is also an op-ed contributor to the Financial Times, Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, he was named the second most influential young opinion leader by the Swedish business magazine Veckans Affärer. David Graeber is an American anthropologist, activist and author of Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Rachel Kay is a researcher at the Centre for Global Studies. Before joining the Centre, she completed an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.

DeFi and the Future of Finance
by Campbell R. Harvey , Ashwin Ramachandran , Joey Santoro , Vitalik Buterin and Fred Ehrsam
Published 23 Aug 2021

Our goal in this book is to give an overview of the problems that DeFi solves, describe the current and rapidly growing DeFi landscape, and present a vision of the future opportunities that DeFi unlocks. NOTES 1. Alan White, “David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,” Credit Slips: A Discussion on Credit, Finance, and Bankruptcy, June 18, 2020, https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2020/06/david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html. 2. Ibid. See also Euromoney. 2001. “Forex Goes into Future Shock.” (October), https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2001/EuromoneyOct01.pdf. 3. PayPal, founded as Confinity in 1998, did not begin offering a payments function until it merged with X.com in 2000. 4.

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Next, we detail the solutions DeFi offers and couple this with a deep dive on some leading ideas in this emerging space. We then analyze the major risk factors and conclude by looking to the future and attempt to identify the winners and losers. NOTES 1. See Alan White, “David Graber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,” Credit Slips, June 24, 2020, https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2020/06/david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html. 2. Dean Corbae and Pablo D'Erasmo, “Rising Bank Concentration,” Staff Paper #594, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, March 2020, https://doi.org/10.21034/sr.594 . 3. Plaid, http://plaid.com. 4. R. Chetty, N. Hendren, P. Kline, and E. Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?

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Based on executed purchases and sales, the contract updates the asset size behind both the bid and the ask and uses this ratio to define a pricing function. Barter. A peer-to-peer exchange mechanism in which two parties are exactly matched. For example, A has two pigs and needs a cow. B has a cow and needs two pigs. There is some debate as to whether barter was the first method of exchange. For example, David Graeber argues that the earliest form of trade was in the form of debit–credit. People living in the same village gave each other “gifts,” which by social consensus had to be returned in future by another gift that is usually a little more valuable (interest). People kept track of exchanges in their minds as it was only natural and convenient to do so since there is only a handful sharing the same village.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

We also cannot imagine having written this book without the influence and support of colleagues and friends: Rebecca Gibbs, Andy Berriman, Ognjen Bubalo, Carmen Campeanu, Franko Cancino, Fabien Cante, Manuela Cisternas, Zara Coombes, Eduardo Lobos, Nat O’Grady, Mark Perryman, Marcela Santana, Steve Sawh, Marita Unepiece, Thiago Vilas-Boas, Israel Yamaguchi, Compass colleagues, Woking Labour CLP and Make Votes Matter. Finally, we wish to dedicate this book to the memory of Sir John Hills, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nigel Dodd and David Graeber. ix Foreword Something isn’t working. Everyone can feel it. Why, when we live in an age of unparalleled prosperity does it seem so hard to make ends meet? But surely the top 10% are okay, right? Everything is relative, and of course, their problems are largely ‘first world problems’. But they’re still problems.

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In other words, much has to happen for a Brahmin to be raised and equipped for the role: investment in their cultural capital, in time not working and in cultivating themselves. This puts Brahmin status out of reach for most people, especially in countries where access to education is increasingly unequal and mediated by debt. David Graeber once wrote that conservative voters in the US ‘tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine 46 On the ubiquity and invisibility of the upper-middle class one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite’.14 In that broad sense, both Merchants and Brahmins share (as to an extent, we all do), a certain unawareness of how many people lead very different lives from themselves.

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Susannah is a highly educated, highachieving woman at the top of her career working in a senior position in banking in one of the financial centres of the world. And yet she doesn’t think her work makes a massive difference to the lives of others. Would we be right to disagree, considering she is the one actually doing the job? Anthropologist David Graeber famously argued in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs that an increasing number of employees do not believe society would be worse off if their jobs did not exist. This applied even to the private sector (35% of its employees in the surveys he cites), which is supposed to be driven by efficiency and where useless jobs would supposedly be driven out by the bottom line.24 Only a few respondents in the private sector conveyed a sense of purpose in or motivation for their work beyond material gain and the narrow, direct satisfaction of the needs of their clients.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

“the power of organizing without organization”: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: For the instituting of participatory democracy within OWS, see David Graeber, “Enacting the Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making,” The Occupied Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2011; Drake Bennett, “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 26, 2011; and Jeff Sharlet, “Inside Occupy Wall Street,” Rolling Stone, November 10, 2011. For an invaluable survey of some of the movement’s participants (based, unfortunately, on a survey conducted on May 1, 2012, months after the movement’s glory days in the fall of 2011), see Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City (New York: Murphy Institute, 2013).

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“There is an energy and an amazing consensus”: DG, “Some Impressions from Saturday and Monday,” 16beaver website, www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms09.23.11.htm. “Consensus only works if working groups”: David Graeber, “Some Remarks on Consensus,” February 26, 2013, http://occupywallst.org, and http://occupywallstreet.net/story/some-remarks-consensus. the militancy of Occupy Oakland: The infatuation with Oakland’s Black Bloc anarchists and their tactics provoked a heated debate. See Chris Hedges, “The Cancer in Occupy,” February 6, 2012, www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206. David Graeber—the most prominent of those infatuated—responded to Hedges with an “open letter,” “Concerning the Violent Peace Police,” February 9, 2012, http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police.

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Expecting an open assembly, the radical democrats and anarchists had found instead a few people with megaphones and prefab placards, trying to rally participants for a conventional march that would make conventional demands. In response, the radical democrats, led by an anthropology professor and avowed anarchist named David Graeber, retreated to a corner of the park to discuss alternative steps. Sitting in a circle, they debated how they might better organize a Wall Street occupation. They agreed that they would take seriously the online call to create a general assembly—and proposed implementing one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: a daily meeting, open to all, where virtually all decisions would be made without voting, by consensus, and formally subject to veto by a single “block,” if anyone felt a proposed decision violated an ethical principle.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

Practised with ‘skill sharing, resource sharing, horizontal organizing without leaders, mutual emotional caretaking, no official membership lists or fees, joining by doing’, consensus contributes to the construction of the non-hegemonic social relationships that enable self-government.88 These ideas also infused the politics of the Occupy movement of 2011, where consensus decision-making was practised by large numbers of people. For David Graeber, one of the leading lights in Occupy, consensus not only described a participatory decision-making practice but an alternative system of self-government. As it was enacted in Occupy camps, consensus emerged as a political practice that enabled participants to take decisions at General Assemblies transparently and directly.

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Splitting with the anti-art, Dada-inspired Letterist Isidore Isou, Debord set up the Letterist International (LI) in the early 1950s before founding the Situationist International (SI) in 1957. The SI was dissolved in 1972. In 1989 Debord published Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. He committed suicide five years later.5 DAVID GRAEBER (b. 1961) The anthropologist and activist Graeber was born on the West Side of Manhattan, studied at the State University of New York (Purchase College) and the University of Chicago. He is professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. In the early 2000s he participated in actions in Quebec City and Genoa, at the Republican National Conventions in Philadelphia and New York and the New York meeting of the World Economic Forum.

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, in Social Ecology and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 45 [19–52]. 75 Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015), p. 71. 76 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 70. 77 Murray Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992), p. x. 78 Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, ch. 7: ‘The Organization of Territory’, para. 174, online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/24 [last access 4 June 2018]. 79 Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities, p. 3. 80 Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities, p. x. 81 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 66. 82 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, in Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 66. 83 Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 137. 84 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, p. 61. 85 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 87. 86 David Graeber, ‘Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)’, Occupy Wall Street, 29 October 2011, online at http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/ [last access 2 December 2017]. 87 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism’, Democracy & Nature: The International Journal of Politics and Ecology, 3 (2) (1995), pp. 1–17, online at https://www.democracynature.org/vol3/bookchin_communalism.htm [last access 5 May 2017]. 88 Émilie Breton, Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski and Rachel Sarrasin (Research Group on Collective Autonomy), ‘Prefigurative Self-Governance and Self-Organization: The Influence of Antiauthoritarian (Pro)Feminist, Radical Queer, and Antiracist Networks in Quebec’, in Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley and Eric Shragge (eds), Organize!

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

I think I should also thank Megan Laws, the indefatigable LSE anthropology graduate student whose entire job is to monitor my “impact.” I can only hope this book will facilitate her efforts. About the Author © MARI JAN MURAT David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of DEBT: The First 5,000 Years, and a contributor to Harper’s, The Guardian, and The Baffler. He lives in London. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/David-Graeber @simonbooks We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. * * * Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster.

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Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. ALSO BY DAVID GRAEBER Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Notes Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs 1. I’ve got a lot of push-back about the actuaries, and now think I was being unfair to them. Some actuarial work does make a difference. I’m still convinced the rest could disappear with no negative consequences. 2. David Graeber, “The Modern Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Canberra (Australia) Times online, last modified September 3, 2013, www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/the-modern-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-20130831-2sy3j.html. 3.

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The jailers had evidently read the classics. 24. The three-part list is not meant to be comprehensive. For instance, it leaves out the category of what’s often referred to as “guard labor,” much of which (unnecessary supervisors) is bullshit, but much of which is simply obnoxious or bad. 25. In David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 9, I refer to this as “the Iron Law of Liberalism”: that “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.” 26.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

But actually existing neoliberalism is based on a fusion between Hayek’s free-market thinking and a longer managerialist tradition focused on developing ever more efficient methods through which to control workers.103 As Hayek might have predicted, without any real marketplace to speak of, these reforms simply ended up increasing bureaucracy and leading to a dramatic expansion in middle management across the sector. This bureaucratization isn’t just a feature of the neoliberal shift; it’s been associated with “free market” reforms since the dawn of capitalism. As David Graeber forcefully argues in The Utopia of Rules: “English liberalism, for instance, did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy, but the exact opposite: an endlessly ballooning array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials who made the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals possible.

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In return, they would be allowed to form a limited company—the Governor and Company of the Bank of England—that would be entrusted with holding the government’s balances. It also gained the exclusive privilege to issue banknotes on the sovereign’s behalf. The lenders provided the king with the gold he needed to build his navy, and in return they were able to issue paper notes backed by the power of the king. As David Graeber writes in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years: “This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it), but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding.

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Had it simply been the civilizing influence of the church that had allowed the boys to remain such good friends throughout their ordeal? Unfortunately for Ballantyne, who had never visited any of the places he wrote about so vividly, the anthropological evidence doesn’t support his view of humanity either. As David Wengrow and David Graeber demonstrate in their book The Dawn of Everything, far from experiencing a miraculous conversion upon meeting their European “saviors,” many indigenous people were repulsed by their contact with European societies, which they saw as greedy, competitive, and thoroughly uncivilized.47 Wengrow and Graeber piece together what they call “the indigenous critique” of European society from notes detailing the interactions between indigenous intellectuals and European adventurers.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

The development of capitalism and the application of technology to the productive process led many to identify the potential to drastically reduce the amount of time that people had to work. David Graeber notes that Keynes predicted in 1930 that by the end of the century the working week would be reduced to 15 hours.48 Not only did this fail to materialise, but the opposite now seems to be true. The potential of technology has instead been exploited to make people work even more. In the place of declining manufacturing jobs there has been an increase in what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’. These jobs are far removed from any fulfilling activity, so much so that many people find it difficult to explain what they are actually employed to do.

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No longer faced with the same physical demands of the assembly line, the new demand is for a repetition of the same performance trying to convince people to part with their money for insurance over the phone. The reaction to this is not the loss or alienation of some part of the self; rather it is a ‘condition of estrangement from the mode of production and its rules, as refusal of work’.18 In the call centre, like many of the ‘bullshit jobs’ David Graeber describes,19 it is not a question of seizing back the means of production in order to fulfil the workers’ potential, but resistance is more likely to take the form of refusal. management The role of management in the call centre has been detailed in this book. We began with the figure of Nev, declaring that ‘Napoleon . . . a dictator’ was his inspiration.20 However, this ridiculous statement was not just a performance for the TV programme; it also indicates how much power managers and supervisors have on the call-centre floor.

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Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), p. 23. van der Linden, Workers of the World (2008), p. 179. Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), available at: http://libcom.org/library/strategyrefusal-mario-tronti Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 204. David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, Strike Magazine, 17 August 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs Ibid. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999). Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’ (2013). 177 Working the Phones chapter 5 1. Robert Blackburn, Union Character and Social Class (London: Batsford, 1967), p. 18. 2.

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

Also by David Graeber Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Possibilities Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire Direct Action An Ethnography Debt The First 5,000 Years Revolutions in Reverse Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination The Democracy Project A History, A Crisis, A Movement THE UTOPIA OF RULES Copyright © 2015 by David Graeber First Melville House printing: February 2015 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint a panel from Kultur Dokuments, which originally appeared in Anarchy Comics #2 and was collected in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, edited by Jay Kinney and published by PM Press in 2012.

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I pointed out that no one had mentioned any such letter previously. “What?” the manager suddenly interjected. “Who gave you those forms and didn’t tell you about the letter?” Since the culprit was one of the more sympathetic bank employees, I dodged the question,40 noting instead that in the bankbook it was printed, quite clearly, “in trust for David Graeber.” He of course replied that would only matter if she was dead. As it happened, the whole problem soon became academic: my mother did indeed die a few weeks later. At the time, I found this experience extremely disconcerting. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian student existence comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking my friends: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?

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Obviously, “fantasy” can refer to a very wide range of literature, from Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Call of Cthulhu, and many critics include science fiction as a subgenre of fantasy as well. Still, Middle Earth style heroic fantasy remains the “unmarked term.” 151. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to this as “the ugly mirror phenomenon.” See David Graeber, “There Never Was a West: Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between,” in Possibilities: Notes on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 343. 152. The key difference here is no doubt that Medieval carnivals were, in fact, organized largely bottom-up, much unlike Roman circuses. 153.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

Countries loaded with old debts are under heavy pressure to deregulate logging and mining and other extractive industries, plundering ecosystems in order to meet their debt obligations. The same is true of households. Researchers have found that households with high-interest mortgages work longer hours than they would otherwise need to simply in order to stay afloat.44 As the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, the financial imperatives of debt ‘reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money’.45 Fortunately, there’s a way to relieve this pressure. We can just cancel some of the debt. In an era of ecological breakdown, debt cancellation becomes a vital step towards a more sustainable economy.

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Big creditors would lose out, of course, but we might decide that this is OK – a loss we’re willing to have them bear in order for us to build a fairer and more ecological society. We can cancel debts in such a way that nobody gets hurt.49 Nobody dies. Compound interest is just a fiction, after all. And the nice thing about fictions is that we can change them. Perhaps no one has put this more eloquently than David Graeber: [Debt cancellation] would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.50 New money for a new economy But debt cancellation is just a one-off fix; it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem.

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At every step along the way I have relied on the grace of fellow travelers who have pulled me out of ruts and opened me to new ways of seeing the world. I’ve benefitted immensely from personal conversations – and in some cases collaborations – with Giorgos Kallis, Kate Raworth, Daniel O’Neill, Julia Steinberger, John Bellamy Foster, Ian Gough, Ajay Chaudhary, Glen Peters, Ewan McGaughey, Asad Rehman, Bev Skeggs, David Graeber, Sam Bliss, Riccardo Mastini, Jason Hirsch, Federico de Maria, Peter Victor, Ann Pettifor, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Peter Lipman, Joan Martinez-Alier, Martin Kirk, Alnoor Ladha, Huzaifa Zoomkawala, Patrick Bond, Rupert Read, Fred Damon, Wende Marshall, The Rules team, my editors at the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera and other outlets, where I first worked out many of the ideas that appear in this book, and of course my agent Zoe Ross, and Tom Avery, my editor at Penguin, who were willing to give this idea a platform.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

the United States of America: Morgan Keith, “Over the Last Four Decades, HIV/AIDS Has Killed at Least 700,000 Americans: COVID-19 Has Killed More in Two Years,” Business Insider, October 30, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-deaths-americans-hiv-aids-united-states-2021–10. “the ninety-nine percent”: Sam Roberts, “David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Is Dead at 59,” New York Times, September 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html. “long-term psychological impoverishment”: The School of Life, “SARTRE ON: Bad Faith,” YouTube video, 3:37, October 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxrmOHJQRSs&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=TheSchoolofLife.

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This book is also a story of the guides I’ve learned from as I’ve traveled through the viral underclass on five continents: of the doctors, condom-mongers, syringe-exchange volunteers, lovers, librarians, colleagues, boyfriends, sex workers, journalists, bathhouse attendants, friends, activists, bartenders, maps, movies, dogs, doulas, and drag queens who have pointed me in the right direction. By hearing a few of their stories, we will learn together about the structures that ensnare most of us who live in what the late anthropologist David Graeber first called “the ninety-nine percent.” And while these stories will be narrated by me, an American trying to make sense of the particular cruelties of the American empire, the viral underclass is a global phenomenon. This is not a book about or for only the United States of America. While we will follow, on our journey, people in the viral underclass encountering or negotiating life around a number of pathogens, such as hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C (HCV), West Nile virus (WNV), influenza, and smallpox, we will see them dealing mostly with two viruses: HIV and SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus.

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As with the lynching postcards documenting the public execution of Black Americans that were available at the turn of the twentieth century, videos of police killing people like Oscar Grant in 2009, Eric Garner in 2014, Zak Kostopoulos in 2018, and George Floyd in 2020 serve both as proof of murder and, as they circulate online, a warning to marginalized folks of what could happen to them if they ever step out of line. Before I arrived in Greece, I understood how governmental debt can lead to austerity, ruthless policing, and disease. Anthropologist David Graeber, in writing about the uprisings in St. Louis County, gave a simple, definitive example of austerity in 2015: “Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors,” fining arrestees because “local governments have become deeply indebted to large, private financial institutions—many of the same ones that brought us the crash of 2008.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Of course, recent investigations using technological innovations in archaeogenetic testing, such as the study of ancient DNA, have revealed that not all hunting-and-gathering societies were the “noble savages” or egalitarian communalists we have long been taught they were. And while the hunting-and-gathering societies that survived into the twentieth century did practice a form of egalitarianism, other preagricultural societies enforced strict hierarchies. Far from being a “natural” state of innocence, archaeologist and anthropologist David Wengrow and David Graeber suggest that egalitarianism was a chosen way of life, one fiercely defended by ensuring that no one person or group of people could establish arbitrary authority over others.1 In either case, our forebears coveted far fewer material possessions than most of us today. The key point is that different belief systems about the owning or sharing of property emerged from specific historical and cultural circumstances, but property regimes, once in place, always seek to justify themselves by claiming their own naturalness and inevitability.

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We have the power to contest, challenge, and change history because all histories begin first in the current moment. You are reading these words in a temporal frame that we call the present, but by tomorrow this sentence will be in your past and on its way into the realm of what we call “history.” As David Graeber and David Wengrow assert in their wonderfully contrarian tome, The Dawn of Everything, “We are all projects of collective self-creation,” so how is it that we came “to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”6 The stability of the world around us is a fiction we all accept so we can go about our daily lives.

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Or are these things half measures that prevent the growth of the kinds of intentional communities that will better serve to shrink our collective carbon footprints and break down patriarchal relations in the private sphere? When we let the good be the enemy of the perfect, are we not shackling our political imaginations to the choices already laid out before us? In their sweeping review of the diversity of the ways our evolutionary ancestors organized their political and economic lives, Davids Graeber and Wengrow suggest that, “If something did go terribly wrong in human history, then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.”36 Continuing to emphasize the pragmatism of incremental reform can also produce a strong disciplining function on our cognitive capacities to hope.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Moreover, participative democracy might well be constructed without them, particularly using the communications technologies available today. Another folk-political constraint emerged with the emphasis on consensus as a basic goal of the process. The aim of consensus is to reach a decision that is acceptable to everyone, again reliant upon spatial immediacy. As anarchist David Graeber notes, ‘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 convince those who do not to go along with it.’41 Yet what works well on one scale (the face-to-face community) is much more difficult to make work on larger ones.

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We would argue that, while spontaneous political and social movements lasting a relatively short time have a role to play, a politics that consists entirely of such entities will find it extremely difficult to take apart and replace the relatively long-lasting embedded phenomena that characterise advanced capitalism. 33.Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003); Gregory Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007); Keir Milburn, ‘Beyond Assemblyism: The Processual Calling of the 21st-Century Left’, in Shannon Brincat, ed., Communism in the 21st Century, Volume 3: The Future of Communism (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013). 34.Isabel Ortiz, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrada and Hernán Cortés, World Protests 2006–2013 (New York: Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2013), pdf available at fes-globalization.org. 35.Michael Albert, Parecon: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2004). 36.Samuel Farber, ‘Reflections on “Prefigurative Politics”’, International Socialist Review 92 (March 2011), at isreview.org. 37.Jane McAlevey, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (London: Verso, 2014), p. 11. 38.Not An Alternative, ‘Counter Power as Common Power’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 9 (2014), at joaap.org. 39.Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics 12: 3 (2014). 40.Rodrigo Nunes, Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute, 2014), p. 36. 41.David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2004), p. 89. 42.Helen Hester, ‘Synthetic Genders and the Limits of Micropolitics’, … ment 6 (2015). 43.Marco Desiriis and Jodi Dean, ‘A Movement Without Demands?’ Possible Futures, 3 January 2012, at possible-futures.org. 44.Noam Chomsky, Occupy (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 58. 45.Not An Alternative, ‘Counter Power as Common Power’. 46.Ibid. 47.Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square?

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See, for example, historical reflections on anarchism and communism in Mexico in ibid., p. 6. 56.The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 12; John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010); Nathan Brown, ‘Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Badiou and Theorie Communiste in the Age of Riots’, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 5 (2012); David Graeber, ‘Afterword’, in Khatib et al., We Are Many, p. 425. 57.Spence and McGuire, ‘Occupy and the 99%’, p. 61. 58.Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012), p. 63. 59.In light of the emergence of Occupy, McKenzie Wark memorably asked: How do you occupy an abstraction?

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 5 Oct 2015

Keith Roberts, The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 126; “Temple archives demonstrate that the temple held deposits by individuals but did not allow others to access them or in any other way use the negotiable instruments that complete the definition of ‘banking.’ … So temples were not ‘banks’ in antiquity. Rather, the more precise designation for the role of the temple in antiquity would be ‘financial intermediary.’ ” David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 13. 2. Earlier Italian banks formed during the fifteenth century. The Medici Bank and those in the Venetian Republic were family-run institutions that lent to the crown but were not as integrally tied to the state and did not issue government bonds.

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Peter Rose, The Interstate Banking Revolution (New York: Quorum Books, 1989), 4–5. 64. “Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Chicago, Illinois, July 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1896,” in The Annals of America, vol. 12, 1895–1904: Populism, Imperialism, and Reform (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), 100–105. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012), 52–53. 69. In fact, Grossman and Calomiris and Haber all remark on just how uniquely unstable this period was. Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, 183; Grossman, Unsettled Accounts, 68. 70. Political debates during this era, and especially the presidential election of 1908, were focused on banking reform.

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Courts will not enforce contracts that run counter to public policy or are not allowed by law, such as selling babies, organs, cocaine, or human slaves. 2. This is not to say that human civilization was ever free of usury. In fact, predatory lending has been present ever since human societies have existed but has generally operated on the fringe of society within a sphere of corruption, violence, and stigma. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House 2011), 10–11. 3. Ronald W. Del Sesto, “Should Usury Statutes Be Used to Solve the Installment Sales ‘Problem?,’ ” Boston College Law Review 5, no. 7 (1964): 389, 390. 4. L. C. Jain, Indigenous Banking in India (London: Macmillan, 1929).

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life
by Scott. Branson
Published 14 Jun 2022

There is a whole anarchist literature that has emerged over more than a century since that argues for the practicality and functionality of anarchism, rather than allowing it to be transformed into an extreme outside chance (utopian vision) or bogey-man of liberal democratic nation states. Anarchism is quickly debunked by a request for proof of an “anarchist society.” As David Graeber pointed out, this is a trick question, as typically the doubter wants you to point to something that would end up being an anarchist state, since our minds are so saturated with the state as a marker of culture and identity. This means we overlook not only the temporary constellations of anarchy that have existed throughout (and in some cases predate) recorded history, but the anarchist experiments in larger-scale social organizing that persist despite (or have been crushed by) international capitalist state accord.

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One major way for us to rethink our relationship to each other—and to money—would be to think about how it can be used against purposes, to forge bonds rather than to pay off our responsibility. An alternative economic thinking that many anarchists refer to is “the gift economy.” The conceptualization of this comes from the French sociologist (and revolutionary socialist) Marcel Mauss’s 1925 book Essay on the Gift. David Graeber frames Mauss’s ideas through an anarchist lens in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology: Before Mauss, the universal assumption had been that economies without money or markets had operated by means of “barter”; they were trying to engage in market behavior (acquire useful goods and services at the least cost to themselves, get rich if possible ... ), they just hadn’t yet developed very sophisticated ways of going about it.

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carla bergman and Nick Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy counters rigid thinking in radical circles, avoiding nihilistic or macho adherence to a singular view of struggle, and imbuing militancy with a sense of joy—not frivolous happiness, but the collective work of care and world-building that enables any kind of large-scale resistance. All of David Graeber’s work provides accessible anarchist entry points. My favorite, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, builds from histories of counterpower in colonized societies, where people lived outside the state while not actively confronting it, discusses the different economic ideas based on the gift, and develops a theory of revolution outside the punctual event of superb violence.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Our addiction to consumption is enabled mostly by robots and Third World wage slaves. And although agricultural and manufacturing production capacity have grown exponentially over the past decades, employment in these industries has dropped. So is it really true that our overworked lifestyle all comes down to out-of-control consumerism? David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” In Graeber’s analysis, innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless, jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices.

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After all, for the moment our clothes aren’t being produced by steel robotic arms or intelligent cyborgs but by fragile children’s fingers in Vietnam and China. For many companies, outsourcing work to Asians still beats using robots. This could also be why we’re still waiting for so many of the big technological dreams of the twentieth century to materialize. See: David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler (2012). 30. Andrew McAfee, “Even Sweatshops are Getting Automated. So What’s Left?” (May 22, 2014). http://andrewmcafee.org/2014/05/mcafee-nike-automation-labor-technology-globalization/ 31. Steven E. Jones, Against Technology. From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (2006), Chapter 2. 32.

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The cynical thing is that claimants often aren’t even allowed to do purposeful work in exchange for their benefits because that would lead to fewer paid jobs. 37. Deborah Padfield, “Through the eyes of a benefits adviser: a plea for a basic income,” Open Democracy (October 5, 2011). http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/deborah-padfield/through-eyes-of-benefits-adviser-plea-for-basic-income 38. David Graeber, “On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine (August 17, 2013). http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-job 7 Why It Doesn’t Pay to Be a Banker 1. This reconstruction of the strike is based on contemporary coverage in The New York Times. 2. Though officially there were only 12,281 lobbyists registered in Washington in 2014, this misrepresents the situation since an increasing share of lobbyists operates underground.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

It is not just an economic claim, it is a highly moral one. It’s about giving people what they are due. It’s about accepting one’s responsibilities. It’s about fulfilling one’s obligations. Refusing to pay a debt seems like reneging on a promise – it’s just wrong. And this is why debt is so powerful. The anthropologist David Graeber puts it nicely when he says, ‘There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.’54 There have been some efforts to challenge the framing around debt, and to call it what it is.

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Five: Debt and the Economics of Planned Misery 1  ‘It drove right to the …’ For more on this movement, see Vijay Prashad’s excellent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007). 2  ‘The idea was to create …’ Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso Books, 2013). 3  ‘Outraged by this incursion …’ This shipment was known as Operation Nickel Grass. 4  ‘In response, the Arab coalition …’ Egypt’s Sadat managed to convince Saudia Arabia’s King Faisal to make this move. 5  ‘Desperate for a quick solution …’ Lizette Alvarez, ‘Britain says US Planned to seize oil in ’73 crisis’, New York Times, 2 January 2004. 6  ‘As a result of the oil …’ The $450 billion figure reflects petrodollar influx into OPEC as of 1981. 7  ‘Loan pushers were trained …’ John Perkins offers a troubling account of his time as a loan pusher during those years, in his bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. 8  ‘These “juicers” created a strong …’ Perkins, Economic Hit Man. 9  ‘By 1982, total debt stocks …’ In 2013 dollars, according to World Development Indicators (DataBank). 10 ‘Through the miracle of compound …’ In 2013 dollars, according to World Development Indicators (DataBank). 11 ‘And that’s exactly what happened …’ Average interest rates on new loans to global South countries shot up from 5 per cent in 1970 to more than 10 per cent in 1981. 12 ‘In 1982, Mexico took …’ In current dollars. 13 ‘In other words, the IMF …’ I am indebted to my colleague David Graeber for this comparison. 14 ‘This is how the plan …’ The IMF had been using conditional lending since 1952, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that this power was leveraged to impose a specific economic ideology around the world. This idea was first hatched by World Bank president Robert McNamara (formerly president of Ford Motor Company, and then Secretary of Defense) in 1979.

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See note in Chapter 1 for more on Köhler’s methods and the meaning of unequal exchange. 50 ‘Altogether, during the whole period …’ All of these figures come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, accessed through DataBank, and are reported in 2013 dollars. 51 ‘Lebanon, for instance, spends 52 …’ New Economics Foundation, ‘Debt Relief as if Justice Mattered’, 2008. 52 ‘The rest was piled up …’ J. W. Smith, The World’s Wasted Wealth (Sun City, AZ: Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 1994), p. 143. 53 ‘External debt as a percentage …’ External debt stocks (percentage of GNI), World Bank, International Debt Statistics. 54 ‘“There’s no better way …”’ David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), p. 5. 55 ‘In all of these cases …’ In other words, in order win debt relief a country must first agree to submit to IMF structural adjustment. 56 ‘One of the key tenets …’ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 57 ‘The World Bank itself defines …’ World Bank, ‘What is Development?’

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

#OccupyWallStreet, September 17, Bring Tent,” Adbusters, Poster (2011), http//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/WallStreet-1.jpg, accessed June 28, 2021; William Yardley, “The Branding of the Occupy Movement,” New York Times, November 27, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/the-branding-of-the-occupy-movement.html, accessed June 28, 2021. 55.Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied”; Brian Greene, “How ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Started and Spread,” USNews.com, October 17, 2011, https://www.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2011/10/17/how-occupy-wall-street-started-and-spread, accessed April 28, 2021; David Graeber, “Occupy’s Liberation from Liberalism: The Real Meaning of May Day,” The Guardian, May 7, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/07/occupy-liberation-from-liberalism, accessed April 28, 2021. On the student debt crisis, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021). 56.David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011); on 1990s protest, see Richard Saich, “Contesting Neoliberalism: Social Movements and Resistance in America, 1982–2000” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022). 57.Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied”; Mattathias Schwartz, “Map: How Occupy Wall Street Chose Zuccotti Park,” New Yorker, November 21, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20140405004551/http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-map.html, accessed April 28, 2021; Brian Greene, “How ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Started and Spread,” USNews.com, October 17, 2011, https://www.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2011/10/17/how-occupy-wall-street-started-and-spread, accessed September 9, 2021. 58.On the demographics of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, see Laura Norén, “Occupy Wall Street Demographics,” Thesocietypages.org, November 17, 2011, https://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/2011/11/17/occupy-wall-street-demographics/, accessed June 28, 2021; Jillian Berman, “Occupy Wall Street Actually Not at All Representative of the 99 Percent, Report Finds,” Huffington Post, January 29, 2021, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/occupy-wall-street-report_n_2574788?

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The widening economic inequality of American life, the architects of this slogan charged, had reached grotesque proportions. It had to be stopped, and then reversed.55 Many rallying to the “99 percent” slogan were new to politics. However, their ranks were leavened by anarchists and other veterans of the protests against the WTO that had flared briefly but fiercely in the 1990s. One of the latter was David Graeber, a University of Chicago–trained anthropologist and anarchist thinker then teaching at Goldsmiths, part of the University of London. Graeber had written sweepingly about how debt across the ages had been a key instrument used by elites to ensnare ordinary people in poverty and dependency. He wanted all debt forgiven immediately, the surest way, he argued, to free people from oppression and bring the world’s powerful financial institutions to heel.

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Across the next five years, left-leaning intellectuals and politicians acquired an influence on American politics that they had not enjoyed since the heyday of the New Deal order in the 1930s and 1940s.59 The leftist moment that Occupy inaugurated was marked by the flourishing of the so-called little magazines of the left, old (Dissent) and new (n + 1 and Jacobin), full of ideas about how to build radically different futures; by dramatic growth in the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America; by the popularity of books like Capital to the Twenty-First Century, an 800-page tome on inequality published by French economist Thomas Piketty in 2013 that sold approximately 3 million hardcover copies in the United States and beyond; by the soaring reputations of left-leaning writer-activists (and anti-neoliberal crusaders) Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and David Graeber; and by the sudden appearance in electoral politics of individuals who made a critique of free market capitalism—and the concentration of wealth and power that went with it—their signature message. Elizabeth Warren won election as a US senator from Massachusetts in 2012 by making attacks on the dominance and irresponsibility of America’s mega-banks the centerpiece of her campaign.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

community-minded version of Darwin: Of course, we mustn’t forget that critics find evidence of “scientific racism” in his work, citing examples like this sentence from The Descent of Man: that at “some time the civilized races of man will exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” the late scholar and activist David Graeber wondered: David Graeber, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?,” The Baffler 24 (January 2014), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun. “A Symbiotic View of Life”: In an essay by Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber from 2012 titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” the authors write that while “the notion of the ‘biological individual’ is crucial to studies of genetics, immunology, evolution . . .” in the twenty-first century, the level at which animals and plants are interconnected with “symbiotic microorganisms” has come to disrupt the boundaries of the individual, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/668166.

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It is also a gentler, snuggly-er “dependence of one being on another and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual. . . .” For Johnson and other researchers, this more community-minded version of Darwin guided not only their intellectual works but their belief systems. This included humanities folks who have joined their virtual institute, among them the late scholar and activist David Graeber, who wondered, “Why should worker bees kill themselves to protect their hive?” To protect their community over themselves was Graeber’s answer, in his essay that also presented a Mutual Aid Darwin. It’s also a position refracted in harder sciences as well. A recent essay along these lines stridently titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.”

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

This feels wrong because our social psychology and our economic debate is often characterized by a picture-book nostalgia. It seems that we have lost ‘real jobs’ where ‘real men’ produced things you could drop on your foot – the kind of jobs that are in children’s picture books. In exchange we get a lot of unsatisfactory bullshit jobs (as David Graeber called them in a popular book of the same name) with temporary contracts where it’s unclear what is actually produced. Which children’s books are really about art directors, personal trainers, PR consultants, content managers, food couriers or biotechnological analysts? The picture books should be supplemented with the views of people who have actually worked in those fabled factories.

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During this quarter of a century, when tougher competition and globalization are said to have undermined all good jobs, the proportion who are completely satisfied with their work increased from 35 to 56 per cent. (Together with those who are reasonably satisfied, it is now almost nine out of ten workers.) The proportion who are satisfied with the amount of work required of them has increased by a third and the proportion dissatisfied has halved.25 Some critics of modern working life, such as David Graeber and Roland Paulsen, say that all the time we spend talking on the phone, emailing, playing and wasting time at work shows that we may not have very important and meaningful jobs.26 Of course, this can be the case, although it may be more about our need for micro-breaks and distractions even when doing something urgent.

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Annual geographic mobility rates, by type of movement: 1948–2020’, www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geographic-mobility/historic.html. 23. Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina & Max Roser, ‘Working hours’, Our World in Data, December 2020. 24. Ibid. 25. Gallup, ‘Work and Workplace’, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1720/work-work-place.aspx. 26. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Simon & Schuster, 2018. Roland Paulsen, The Working Society: How Work Survived Technology, Gleerups, 2010. See also Andreas Bergh, ‘Tre böcker av Roland Paulsen – en kritisk läsning’, Ekonomisk Debatt, no.3, 2017. 27. Graeber 2018, pp.xix, xxiv. 28. Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood, Brendan Burchell, ‘Alienation is not “bullshit”: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs’, Work, Employment and Society, June 2021. 29.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice and liberation, giving hope to the oppressed and inspiring countless others to follow suit. The book is dedicated to the fond memory of David Graeber (1961–2020) and, as he wished, to the memory of his parents, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber (1917–2006) and Kenneth Graeber (1914–1996). May they rest together in peace. Acknowledgements Sad circumstances oblige me (David Wengrow) to write these acknowledgements in David Graeber’s absence. He is survived by his wife Nika. David’s passing was marked by an extraordinary outpouring of grief, which united people across continents, social classes and ideological boundaries.

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BY THE SAME AUTHORS David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Direct Action: An Ethnography Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Bullshit Jobs: A Theory David Wengrow: The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 bc What Makes Civilization?

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BY THE SAME AUTHORS David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Direct Action: An Ethnography Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Bullshit Jobs: A Theory David Wengrow: The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 bc What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction Copyright © 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow Signal and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

J. Gordon, “Aristotle, Schumpeter, and the Metallist Tradition,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75 (4) (1961): 608–14. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: Martin, Money, 8–10. The anthropologist David Graeber hypothesizes: David Graeber, “On the Invention of Money—Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics,” http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-%E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html. Money, then, made human settlements less vulnerable: See Martin, Money, 50–64.

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You draw on the writings of dozens of twentieth-century anthropologists who have visited places where currencies weren’t used; anthropologists who claim to have found no evidence that these peoples ever engaged in barter, at least not as the primary system of exchange. Instead, these societies came up with elaborate codes of behavior for sorting out their various debts and obligations. Debt, in other words, came first. The anthropologist David Graeber hypothesizes that specific debt agreements likely evolved out of gift exchanges, which generated the sense of owing a favor. After that, codified value systems may have emerged from the penalties that tribes meted out for various wrongdoings: twenty goats, say, for killing someone’s brother. From there human beings started to think about money as a system for resolving, offsetting, and clearing those debts across society.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

‘Our laborious manner of life . . . they esteem slavish and base,’ Franklin observed of his Indian neighbours, and noted that while he and his fellow colonists were hostage to ‘infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature’ that were often ‘difficult to satisfy’, the Indians had only ‘few . . . wants’, all of which were easily met by ‘the spontaneous productions of nature with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty’. As a result, compared to the colonists, Franklin noted somewhat enviously, the Indians enjoyed an ‘abundance of leisure’, which, in happy accordance with his views that idleness was a vice, they used for debate, reflection and refining their oratorical skills. As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become ‘the founding myth of our system of economic relations’ and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like that described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded ‘no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money’, and that ‘all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing’..

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And while views on what counts as entertainment vary, few people dispute the fact that entertainers, chefs, musicians, tour guides, hoteliers, masseuses and others whose work involves bringing others happiness or stimulating and inspiring them are important too. One of the most novel approaches to re-categorising roles in the service sector is that proposed by the anthropologist David Graeber. In a brief essay he wrote in 2013, which subsequently went viral and later formed the basis of a book, he differentiated between jobs that were genuinely useful, like teaching, medicine, farming and scientific research, and the apparent efflorescence of other jobs that served no obvious purpose other than giving someone something to do.

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Ancient Greek philosophers, for instance, may have been contemptuous of hard manual labour but they still acknowledged its fundamental importance, even if they had slaves to do it for them. The same principle is also discussed in the writings of fourteenth-century scholars like Thomas Aquinas – who insisted that any commodity’s value should ‘increase in relation to the amount of labour which has been expended in the improvement’ of it. As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become ‘the founding myth of our system of economic relations’ and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like that described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded ‘no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money’, and that ‘all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing’..

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

This view was put forward, for example, in 1864 by Bruno Hildebrand of the German historical school of economics; it happens to be wrong.”17 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, a rare academic consensus had been reached amongst those with an interest in empirical evidence that the conventional idea that money emerged from barter was false. As the anthropologist David Graeber explained bluntly in 2011: “[T]here’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.”18 The story of Yap does not just present a challenge to the conventional theory’s account of money’s origins, however. It also raises serious doubts about its conception of what money actually is.

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Ibid., p. 97. 7. Ibid., pp. 97–8. 8. Keynes, 1915a. 9. Aristotle, 1932, I.3.13–14. As we shall see in chapter 8, Aristotle also developed a quite different theory, however. 10. Locke, 2009, pp. 299–301. 11. Smith, A., 1981, pp. 37–8. 12. Ibid., p. 38. 13. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 14. The anthropologist David Graeber exasperates himself presenting a catalogue of examples from recent textbooks in Graeber, 2011, p. 23. 15. Dalton, 1982. 16. Humphrey, 1985, p. 48. 17. Kindleberger, 1993, p. 21. 18. Graeber, 2011, p. 28. 19. Smith, T., 1832, p. 11ff. 20. Mitchell Innes, 1913. Like, I expect, most modern readers, I owe the discovery of both this essay and Mitchell Innes, 1914 to Wray, 2004. 21.

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Finally, two significant books on money were published in the U.K. when I was already in the midst of writing, with the unfortunate result that I was not able to absorb and make reference to them as I would in retrospect have liked. These are Philip Coggan’s Paper Promises: Money, Debt, and the New World Order (Coggan, 2011) and David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber, 2011). BOOKS AND ARTICLES Alessandri, P., and Haldane, A. (2009), Banking on the State. London: Bank of England. Amis, M. (1984), Money: A Suicide Note. London: Vintage. Andreau, J. (1999), Banking and Business in the Roman World (tr. Lloyd, J.).

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now , Pinker credits the European Enlightenment (the same one that brought us John Locke and the justification of slavery) with an aggregate decline in violence and increase in health, longevity, education level, and universal human rights. It’s a highly problematic account. First off, as David Graeber and David Wendgrow demonstrated in their myth-smashing book, The Dawn of Everything , the oversimplified unidirectional narrative of civilizational progress from agriculture to cities and through technology and the Enlightenment to modern society is just wrong. There have been all sorts of different city-states throughout history, with and without what we think of as technology.

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How Growing Rent-Seeking Is at the Heart of America’s Economic Troubles,” Journal of Public and International Affairs , https:// jpia .princeton .edu /news /something -nothing -how -growing -rent -seeking -heart -americas -economic -troubles.   74   “some kinds of social change” : Jennifer Szalai, “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans,” New York Times , February 28, 2018, https:// www .nytimes .com /2018 /02 /28 /books /review -enlightenment -now -steven -pinker .html.   74   The Dawn of Everything : David Graeber and David Wendgrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).   74   problem with Pinker’s oft-quoted statistics : Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

But in the face of perhaps the biggest challenge for seventy-five years, government, corporate and even personal thinking was often trapped by the models of the past, incapable of building those of the future on the fly. Despite all our technologies, businesses and knowledge, we are vulnerable. Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously encapsulated the argument as ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ But there is more to it than that – in the words of David Graeber, it encompasses ‘a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise – of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what the adult world was supposed to be like’.5 This isn't just about flying cars and colonies on Mars, the tug of war between techno optimism and pessimism.

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The shape of academia is more settled as a result: in the twentieth century we gained such major new disciplines as anthropology and psychology, computer science and biochemistry, management studies and media studies. In the twenty-first century came a proliferation of niche masters’ degrees, but few major new branches of knowledge. Few would call this a golden age for original thought. Bemoaning the state of the humanities and social sciences, the anthropologist David Graeber saw an attenuation of ambitious thinking. Everyone still endlessly discusses the thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s without producing comparable work: ‘No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years.’ 15 The philosopher Agnes Callard agrees, writing, ‘When I am asked for sources of “big ideas” in philosophy – the kind that would get the extra-philosophical world to stand up and take notice – I struggle to list anyone born after 1950.’ 16 Similarly a study of 500 Western polymathic intellectuals finds plenty born in the 1940s, from Julia Kristeva to Vaclav Smil, Jacqueline Rose to Bruno Latour, but encounters a precipitous fall from the 1950s on: ‘The drop around 1950 may be an alarm signal’, the author writes.17 In a core area of big ideas – political thinking – intellectuals are in full-scale retreat.

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My thanks to: Euan Adie, Azeem Azhar, Courtney Biles, Francis Casson, Krishan Chadha, Sen Chai, Ben Chamberlain, Tom Chatfield, Harry Cliff, Matt Clifford, Daniel Crewe, Lee Cronin, Payel Das, Danny Dorling, Eric Drexler, Fredrik Erixon, Jeremy Farrar, Iason Gabriel, Ian Goldin, Robert J. Gordon, the late and much missed David Graeber, Alexey Guzey, Anton Howes, William Isaac, Matthew Jockers, Benjamin F. Jones, Richard A.L. Jones, Victoria Krakovna, Roman Krznaric, François Lafond, James Le Fanu, Joel Mokyr, Geoff Mulgan, Mikko Packalen, Carlota Perez, Mark Piesing, Benjamin Reinhardt, Matt Ridley, Jack Scannell, Vera Schäfer, Ben Southwood, Peter Watson and Michael Webb.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

It may even be one of the best measures of inequality to consider in terms of how simple a target it may be for effective social policy.12 Economists have measured the fortunes of the best-off 1 per cent for decades. Only recently have political activists, campaigners, and even those anarchists who most distrust economists become as interested in these statistics. In 2011 David Graeber was credited with coining the phrase ‘We are the 99 per cent’, and so made the best-off 1 per cent the object of opposition. And with that phrase came what appeared to be new home truths. For example, for the 99 per cent, as Graeber explains, for most people ‘the fear of losing your job is far greater than the hope of finding a truly fulfilling one’.13 However, not all of the 99 per cent are unfulfilled, and many of the 1 per cent undertake work they find dull just to remain in that income bracket – though their income often means that in the rest of life they have choices that others can only dream of, other than the choice to be normal.

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While better than the Gini measure, it is still not as simple as the 1 per cent measure, and may well not correlate as well with social problems. On the Palma ratio, see A. Cobham, ‘Palma vs Gini: Measuring Post-2015 Inequality’, Centre for Global Development Blog, 5 March 2014, at cgdev.org. 13. D. Runciman, ‘The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber – review’, Guardian, 31 March 2013. 14. When the very well-paid, now publicly owned, financial institutions such as Royal Bank of Scotland are excluded. See ONS, ‘Labour Market Statistics’, 16 October 2013, at ons.gov.uk. 15. We know it is roughly fifteen times as much, because that figure is given by the World Top Incomes Database – the most respected source in the world.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

If Frey and Osborne are right, and 47 percent of jobs may be automated in the next two decades, then we face one of two possible futures. The dystopian future of mass unemployment and psychological alienation leading to deep social unrest is one we have already seen in Blade Runner. The only present remedy is to create millions of low-wage “bullshit jobs”—the writer David Graeber’s term. Graeber notes, “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

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Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest and Google Buses Swells into Revolt,” Guardian, January 25, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco. Tom Perkins, “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014, www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (London: Melville House, 2015). This is a funny, biting chronicle of the world of “bullshit jobs.” Chapter Eleven: What It Means to Be Human Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Portfolio, 2014).

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

In subscribing to this notion, the left unconsciously accepts the key notion of the populist right and the neoclassical orthodoxy, that “nothing is substantially different between then and now.” Markets are timeless entities with timeless laws, they insist. Indeed, this is the identical premise of some of the most popular crisis books of the last few years, from Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s This Time Is Different to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.24 Yet that is precisely where the polemical divergence should originate on the left. Things are profoundly different about the economy, the society, and in the global political arena than they were during the Cold War: some recent neoliberal innovations have lent the current crisis its special bitter tang; understanding precisely how and where they are different is a necessary first step in developing a blueprint for a better world.

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Kalle Lasn Associates has also published an anti-textbook entitled Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics which contains contributions by George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. At least the graphics were radical. Similar ideas were promoted in the curiously titled Occupy Handbook, which included chapters by Raghuram Rajan, Tyler Cowen, Martin Wolf, David Graeber, Jeffrey Sachs, and Robert Shiller.6 Besotted by the millenarian idea of starting anew, and lacking any sense of the history of protest and political organization, both neoliberals and neoclassical economists rapidly addled whatever political curiosity and radical inclinations that the well-intentioned protestors might have had.

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Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. 13 Bankers (New York: Pantheon, 2010). Jones, Daniel Stedman. Masters of the Universe: Friedman, Hayek and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2011). Jones, Rachel. “Bookforum Talks with David Graeber” (2012), at www.bookforum.com/interview/9154. Jovanovic, Franck. “Finance in Modern Economic Thought,” in Alex Preda and Karin Knorr-Cetina, eds., Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Judt, Tony. Ill Fares the Land (London: Penguin, 2010). Jung, Alexander. “The EU’s Emissions Trading System Isn’t Working,” Der Spiegel, February 15, 2012.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

To top it all, there is a conspicuous absence of broadly agreed concrete proposals as to how to reorganize divisions of labor and (monetized?) economic transactions throughout the world to sustain a reasonable standard of living for all. Indeed, this problem is all too often cavalierly evaded. As a leading anarchist thinker, David Graeber, puts it, echoing the reservations of Murray Bookchin set out above: Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free com munities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational rela­ tion with everyone around them.

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Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, London: Pengui n, 1 978; David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volu me 2, London: Verso, forthcoming. 9. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: OUP, 2005. 1 0. Murray Bookchin, Urban iza tion Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 992. 1 1 . David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009: 239. See also Ana Dinerstein, Andre Spicer, and Steffen Bohm, "The (lm)possibilities of Autonomy, Social Movement in and Beyond Capi tal, the State and Development;' Non- Governmental Public Action Program, Working Papers, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009. 1 2.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

There’s no need to be afraid of the technology – it’s how we use it that matters. The invention of the power loom didn’t have to create a hateful factory system and slum cities – it could have freed men and women from long hours of work. Instead, working hours increased. Getting rid of what the great economist and anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’ is not anything to mourn. What we need is economic fairness. What we need is to get away from the false binary of sustainability or growth. What we need in the Information Age really is information; not propaganda, fake news, outright lies. Our problem is that governments do not know how to legislate Big Tech.

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Haraway The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil, 2005 The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels, 1845 The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848 The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill, 1869 The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson, 1963 Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, Eric Hobsbawm, 1968 Why the West Rules – For Now, Ian Morris, 2010 Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, 2011 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem), Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1832: ‘Ye are many—they are few’ ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ (essay), Simon Fairlie, 2009 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy, Jonathan Taplin, 2017 The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860 From Sci-fi to Wi-fi to My-Wi Rocannon’s World, Ursula K.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

That might work in theory, but when those insiders’ priorities are not aligned with what’s good for the general public, then we have a problem. Indeed, the careful cultivation and protection of that group of technocrats by both Wall Street and Washington is one reason the discussion around financialization and its perverse effects on our economy has become so muddled. As the anthropologist David Graeber, one of the key participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has pointed out, bureaucracy of this kind is the enemy. Incomprehensible rules crafted and controlled by a small cadre of insiders, discussed in a language that only they find comprehensible, is one of the key ways that elites maintain power—in finance and elsewhere.19 Financiers claim that their disproportionate privilege is a reward for the responsibilities they assume for lubricating the economy.

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Taylor, Robin Greenwood, David Scharfstein, Raghuram G. Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, Ken Rogoff, Thomas Philippon, Robert Atkinson, J. W. Mason, Luigi Zingales, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Jeff Madrick, George Akerlof, Robert Shiller, John Coates, Karen Ho, Enisse Kharroubi, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, David Graeber, Charles Calomiris, Stephen H. Haber, Allan H. Meltzer, Robert Reich, Alan Blinder, John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa, Alexander Ljungqvist, Kimberly Krawiec, Thomas Ferguson, Gerald Epstein, Michael Spence, Sarah Edelman, Monique Morrissey, Mariana Mazzucato, Atif Mian, and Amir Sufi. Finally, the biggest thanks of all to my husband, John Sedgwick, the author of thirteen books himself, who talked me down from the ledge numerous times during the three years it took to complete this project.

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For example, Princeton economist and former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder has estimated, in a study he coauthored with Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, that without the bailouts, American GDP would have plunged 12 percent rather than 4 percent. See Alan S. Blinder and Mark Zandi, “Stimulus Worked,” Finance & Development 47, no. 4 (December 2010). 19. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015). 20. Mason, “Disgorge the Cash,” 32. 21. William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2014; Drew Desilver, Pew Research Center, “For Most Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged for Decades,” October 9, 2014. 22.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

Morgan’s financial concerns were so all-encompassing that when his bank was broken up by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, it turned into three different institutions, all of them very big: the bank J. P. Morgan and Co., the investment house Morgan Stanley, and the overseas investment bank Morgan Grenfell in London. jubilee A word with a number of meanings, but in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber advocates a global jubilee in the specific sense of a cancellation of all outstanding debt in the developing world. Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) One of the greatest minds ever to dedicate himself to the study of money—I put it like that because although many very clever people have spent most of their lives thinking about money, it’s noticeable that there haven’t been many geniuses attracted to the field, minds of the order of Mozart or Einstein or Shakespeare.

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Notes 1Grayson Perry and Brian Eno, “How the Internet Has Taught Us We Are All Perverts,” New Statesman, 7 November 2013. 2Daniel, quoted in Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 206. 3You can read the original Fortune article at www.awjones.com/images/Fortune_-_The_Jones_Nobody_Keeps_Up_With.pdf. 4See http://www.awjones.com/historyofthefirm.html. 5Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, trans. Patrick James Stirling (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1873) , p. 83. 6See David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Felix Martin’s Money: The Unauthorised Biography for more on this. 7John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 5. 8John Maynard Keynes, ”Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924,” Economic Journal 34, no. 135 (1924): 333. 9Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 13. 10Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 32. 11Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 231–33. 12Ibid., pp. 231–32.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

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That image—a sci-fi writer using the small marvel of a flat-screen TV to watch a larger marvel recede into the past—is a compelling one for our era, which for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted. The technological sublime, unlike the natural or religious sort, does not renew itself in every generation. And though we are habituated to that reality, as Stephenson’s lament suggests, it is not at all what was expected fifty years ago. Here is David Graeber, writing in the very left-wing Baffler several years ago, making a version of this point: As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like.… It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 20 Feb 2018

The large cities in the pre-Christian ancient world, particularly in the Levant and Asia Minor, were full of fraternities and clubs, open and (often) secret societies—there was even such a thing as funeral clubs, where members shared the costs, and participated in the ceremonials, of funerals. Today’s Roma people (aka Gypsies) have tons of strict rules of behavior toward Gypsies, and others toward the unclean non-Gypsies called payos. And, as the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, even the investment bank Goldman Sachs, known for its aggressive cupidity, acts like a communist community from within, thanks to the partnership system of governance. So we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply. It is unfortunate, but the general kills the particular.

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Acknowledgments Ralph Nader; Ron Paul; Will Murphy (editor, advisor, proofreader, syntax expert and specialist); Ben Greenberg (editor); Casiana Ionita (editor); Molly Turpin; Mika Kasuga; Evan Camfield; Barbara Fillon; Will Goodlad; Peter Tanous; Xamer ‘Bou Assaleh; Mark Baker (aka Guru Anaerobic); Armand d’Angour; Alexis Kirschbaum; Max Brockman; Russell Weinberger; Theodosius Mohsen Abdallah; David Boxenhorn; Marc Milanini; ETH participants in Zurich; Kevin Horgan; Paul Wehage; Baruch Gottesman, Gil Friend, Mark Champlain, Aaron Elliott, Rod Ripamonti, and Zlatan Hadzic (all on religion and sacrifice); David Graeber (Goldman Sachs); Neil Chriss; Amir-Reza Amini (automatic cars); Ektrit Kris Manushi (religion); Jazi Zilber (particularly Rav Safra); Farid Anvari (U.K. scandal); Robert Shaw (shipping and risk sharing); Daniel Hogendoorn (Cambyses); Eugene Callahan; Jon Elster, David Chambliss Johnson, Gur Huberman, Raphael Douady, Robert Shaw, Barkley Rosser, James Franklin, Marc Abrahams, Andreas Lind, and Elias Korosis (all on paper); John Durant; Zvika Afik; Robert Frey; Rami Zreik; Joe Audi; Guy Riviere; Matt Dubuque; Cesáreo González; Mark Spitznagel; Brandon Yarkin; Eric Briys; Joe Norman; Pascal Venier; Yaneer Bar-Yam; Thibault Lécuyer; Pierre Zalloua; Maximilian Hirner; Aaron Eliott; Jaffer Ali; Thomas Messina; Alexandru Panicci; Dan Coman; Nicholas Teague; Magued Iskander; Thibault Lécuyer; James Marsh; Arnie Schwarzvogel; Hayden Rei; John Mast-Finn; Rupert Read; Russell Roberts; Viktoria Martin; Ban Kanj Elsabeh; Vince Pomal; Graeme Michael Price; Karen Brennan; Jack Tohme; Marie-Christine Riachi; Jordan Thibodeau; Pietro Bonavita.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Cyberspace today offers an expansive opportunity, much as the vast physical expanse of North America did for previous generations; the promise of a land stake was the great difference between America and other societies in prior centuries.81 Is ever greater technological consolidation inevitable? It is possible that as these firms move further from their entrepreneurial roots, many take on what anthropologist David Graeber describes as “a timid, bureaucratic spirit” that responds to the needs of investors and focuses on preserving already established business lines. Many observers, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Joseph Schumpeter, agree that monopoly creation, rent seeking, and price fixing are the natural instincts of the monied classes rather than risk taking, hard work, and free enterprise.82 Over time, this yearning for oligarchy could also threaten a host of other large firms, in media and finance in particular, which have been subject to what one analyst calls the “super-sizing” of big business.

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Jigar Shah, “Social Media Won’t Drive a New Economy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (blog), August 30, 2012, http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/social_media_wont_drive_a_new_economy. 80. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 8-13. 81. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 249. 82. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, pp. 8–13; David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Baffler, no. 19 (March 2012): 66–84; Nick Wingfield, “Worries That Microsoft Is Growing Too Tricky to Manage,” New York Times, September 9, 2013. 83. Murray, Coming Apart, p. 48. 84. “Has the Ideas Machine Broken Down?” Economist, January 12, 2013; Alexandra Petri, “Dear Google, about These Recent Changes to Gmail,” ComPost (blog), Washington Post, July 18, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/07/18/dear-google-about-these-recent-changes-to-gmail; Nick Mokey, “What Happened to You, Google?”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

You see it in the flexible jobs that characterize the gig economy, such as driving for Uber or DoorDash, where workers can choose their own hours. You see it in the ever-greater number of hours people spend in the office futzing around on social media. And you see it in the rise of what the anthropologist David Graeber colorfully calls “bullshit jobs.” He describes several types, including “box tickers,” who generate lots of paperwork to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t, and “taskmasters,” who manage people who don’t need management. A big problem with technological revolutions, Keynes said, was that with so much of the work increasingly being done by technology, humans would have to find a sense of purpose.

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Norton, 1963), 358–73. 113 Jetson of the 1960s cartoon: “works three hours a day, three days a week,” per Sarah Ellison, “Reckitt Turns to Jetsons to Launch Detergent Gels,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2003; pushing a button, per Hanna-Barbera Wiki, “The Jetsons,” https://hanna-barbera.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jetsons. 113 four-day workweek: Zoe Didali, “As PM Finland’s Marin Could Renew Call for Shorter Work Week,” New Europe, January 2, 2020, https://www.neweurope.eu/article/finnish-pm-marin-calls-for-4-day-week-and-6-hours-working-day-in-the-country/. 114 “bullshit jobs”: David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 115 “slaves of time without purpose”: McEwan, Machines Like Me. 116 atoms in the observable universe: David Silver and Demis Hassabis, “AlphaGo: Mastering the Ancient Game of Go with Machine Learning,” Google DeepMind, January 27, 2016, https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html. 116 all fifty-seven games: Kyle Wiggers, “DeepMind’s Agent57 Beats Humans at 57 Classic Atari Games,” Venture Beat, March 31, 2020; Rebecca Jacobson, “Artificial Intelligence Program Teaches Itself to Play Atari Games—And It Can Beat Your High Score,” PBS NewsHour, February 20, 2015. 117 Stuart Russell: Stuart Russell, “3 Principles for Creating Safer AI,” TED2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_creating_safer_ai/transcript?

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
by Annalee Newitz
Published 2 Feb 2021

Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay about Diamond’s work called simply “F**k Jared Diamond.”3 Correia calls out Diamond’s “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse. They write: Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization … it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe.

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Lizzie Wade, “It Wasn’t Just Greece—Archaeologists and Early Democracy in the Americas,” Science (March 15, 2017), https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas. 3. David Correia, “F**k Jared Diamond,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24, no. 4 (2013): 1–6. 4. David Graeber and David Wingrow, “How to Change the Course of Human History,” Eurozine (March 2, 2018), https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/. Chapter 12: Deliberate Abandonment 1. Samuel E. Munoz et al., “Cahokia’s Emergence and Decline Coincided with Shifts of Flood Frequency on the Mississippi River,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 20 (May 2015): 6319–24. 2.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

The final disappointing feature of the economy in the twenty-first century is not something that economists talk about, but it looms large in laypeople’s discussions. We call it inauthenticity or fakeness: the idea that workers and businesses lack the grit and authenticity they should have, and that they once had. Consider anthropologist David Graeber’s critique of “bullshit jobs”: “Through some strange alchemy, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand” even while “the lay-offs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things.”3 Graeber’s critique follows in the footsteps of postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, who argued that the modern world is dominated by “simulacra”: imitations and symbols that, like Disneyland, take on a new life of their own that is detached from the underlying reality.4 Likewise, the conservative commentator Ross Douthat has argued that one of the characteristics of modern decadence is the prevalence of imitation rather than originality in culture, media, and entertainment.

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Inauthenticity The idea that our economy lacks authenticity and that we should be troubled by it has at least three dimensions. The first is Ross Douthat’s observation in The Decadent Society that too much of our output is derivative and self-referential, the product of recombination rather than original effort.14 The second is the concern expressed by David Graeber and a thousand politicians in rich countries that the economy involves too much fakery, too much work that does not produce useful, tangible results. In the public mind, and in political discourse, the most lamented type of lost economic activity is manufacturing. Third, there is the widespread impression that the modern economy is replete with frothy get-rich-quick schemes that lack substance and are at best risible and at worst fraudulent, such as Juicero’s failed plans to make $1 billion from web-enabled juicers, the collapse of Theranos’s fake blood-test empire, and the sudden liquidation of British government outsourcer Carillion.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Thiel explained that too many companies are “too drawn to incremental point solutions and very scared of complex operational problems,” and that only those with “a fairly inspiring long-term vision at their core” can overcome this problem —a state that he did not think defined many Silicon Valley start-ups.15 Thiel’s argument is ultimately riddled with contradictions, but there have been more logical explanations for what is considered technological deceleration. The late anthropologist David Graeber argued that the perception that innovation has slowed down is the product of a shift in how research funding was allocated and what kinds of research it is targeted toward. Even though research funding has generally increased over time, especially in the private sector, less of that money has gone to the basic research that often produces the transformative innovations that we associate with the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century or the ambitious moonshot projects that tended to generate unintended technological advancements.

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Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview 1 Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 75–6. 5 Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, December 1983, Classic.esquire.com. 6 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 73. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs
Published 8 Apr 2015

On 5 January 2015, the first working day after Christmas, adverts appeared on underground trains, where adverts for Match.com normally are. In black type on canary yellow, there was a sentence – ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – which came from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night pizza delivery. These are the bullshit jobs that are, you could add, very like T’s.

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Pret’s policy on migrant labour was reported on in the Evening Standard; my colleague Paul Myerscough first wrote about Pret’s use of emotional labour in the LRB of 3 January 2013, which was subsequently picked up by the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Independent. The Communication Workers’ Union’s campaign against Payment between Assignment contracts can be seen on their website. David Graeber’s article about ‘bullshit jobs’ is in the 17 August 2013 edition of Strike! Magazine. The FT reported Spad Jo Moore’s comments that 9/11 would be a ‘good day to bury bad news’ and my anthropology of a Spad is drawn from the figures and history in Special Advisers: Who They Are, What They Do and Why They Matter by Ben Yong and Robert Hazell (Hart, 2014) and the Telegraph recorded that Cameron had hung an Emin neon in Number 10 on 20 August 2011.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

In particular, I reject the line of reasoning that suggests that since race is a technology and technologies have multiple uses, then perhaps racial categories are not inherently oppressive and can instead be put to subversive and liberatory uses by creative individuals. This sounds to me like the point, identified by David Graeber, where neoliberalism and postmodern critique become mirror images of each other: both see the world as bound by totalizing systems of power, and fixate on action at the individual level. In the case of former, taking action means becoming an entrepreneur, and in the latter it means “fashioning of subversive identities.”

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Ironically, in the same piece Boden called for funds to be devoted to “combatting the ignorance and sensationalism that attends AI today” (75). For a discussion of the proliferation, not reduction, of administrative jobs in capitalist societies and the connection to Keynes’s prediction of a diminished work week, see David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” Strike Magazine 3 (August 2013).   35.   Simon won great acclaim in both AI and economics. Within the latter he is often presented as a “heretical” thinker, despite winning the field’s coveted Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economics. See Leonard Silk, “Nobel Winner’s Heretical Views,” New York Times, November 9, 1978.

Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen's Guide to Reinventing Politics
by Manuel Arriaga
Published 1 Jan 2014

In all of these, the focus was strictly on electoral reform, but there is, of course, no reason to restrict the assembly’s mandate in that way. Notes [i] Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions offers a glimpse into this other reality. [ii] For the opposite argument, see David Graeber’s The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. [iii] A good illustration of the different facets of this process can be found in George Clooney’s 2011 film The Ides of March. [iv] Admittedly, we all tend to reserve the word “ideology” for those ideas we disagree with. In this section, I will use it to refer to ideas that seem to fly in the face of most available evidence and, yet, are so strong that they seem largely unaffected by it.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg
Published 1 Jun 2011

Through a trade-led process of economic expansion, non-industrial countries with subsistence economies and large indigenous populations must aim to become urbanized, consumer-driven, cosmopolitan manufacturing centers (according to this view): it is their right and destiny to do so. This set of assumptions was always questionable. Indeed, it has been attacked with some vigor by Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Martin Kohr, Jerry Mander, Doug Tompkins, Gustavo Esteva, Edward Goldsmith, Ivan Illich, Manfred Max-Neef, David Graeber, and other prominent development critics (sometimes also known as post-development–theorists).38 The critics of development claimed that the project of using loans and aid packages to fund huge infrastructure projects in poor nations, or to build factories there for multinational corporations, was at its core merely a continuation of colonialism by other means.

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The Oil Drum, posted January 14, 2011, theoildrum.com/node/7343. Chapter One 1. See Marvin Harris and Orna Johnson, Cultural Anthropology (Boston: –Allyn & Bacon, 2006), pp. 98–107. See also Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, transl. I. Cunnison (New York: Norton, 2000), and David Graeber, Toward an Anthropology of Value (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 2. Elman R. Service, The Hunters (New York: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 14–21. 3. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 436. 4. This story is told at greater length in, for example, Jack Weatherford, The History of Money (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998). 5.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

But their reasoning contains a fundamental flaw: they don’t understand what money actually is. In the popular version of economics, money is just a convenient means of exchange, invented because in early societies swapping a handful of potatoes for a raccoon skin was too random. In fact, as the anthropologist David Graeber has shown, there is no evidence that early human societies used barter, or that money emerged from it.26 They used something much more powerful. They used trust. Money is created by states and always has been; it is not something that exists independently of governments. Money is always the ‘promise to pay’ by a government.

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The advantages of working remain clear, but there are also advantages to be gained through not working: you can look after your kids, write poetry, go back to college, manage your chronic illness or peer-educate others like you. Under this system, there would be no stigma attached to not working. The labour market would be stacked in favour of the high-paying job and the high-paying employer. The universal basic income, then, is an antidote to what the anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’: the low-paid service jobs capitalism has managed to create over the past twenty-five years that pay little, demean the worker and probably don’t need to exist.10 But it’s only a transitional measure for the first stage of the postcapitalist project. The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it takes to produce what humanity needs.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin
Published 25 Feb 2014

I didn’t want my purchases to peg me as a “high spender” so that I would never be offered discounts online. I didn’t want to be suspected of being an anarchist after exploring bitcoins. However, I did not expect or want immunity from criminal transactions. My desire for immunity from the consequences of commerce reminded me of the anthropologist David Graeber’s beautiful meditation on the meaning and moral implications of debt. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber describes how there are debts that should never be paid, such as our debt to our parents or a debt for an unsolicited kindness. Only some debts can be settled with money. Those debts have certain characteristics, he says.

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search/assasination$20politics$20jim$20bell|sort:date/list.libernet/Mo2RIiViYDE/Pp7BMppVDBYJ. In 1997, IRS agents raided Bell’s home: Associated Press, “Bell Gets 11 Months in Prison, 3 Years Supervised Release, Fine,” December 12, 1997, http://cryptome.org/jdb/jimbell7.htm. They are debts between: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2010), 120. 10. POCKET LITTER I had just arrived in the city: Julia Angwin, “Secret Orders Target Email,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613284007315072.html. About a year after our meeting: Ira Hunt, “The CIA’s ‘Grand Challenges’ with Big Data,” GigaOM Structure: Data Conference 2013, http://new.livestream.com/accounts/74987/events/1927733/videos/14306067.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

Sometimes the textbooks recognize that the government can print money, but this method of financing is quickly dropped from the formal budget model on the grounds that printing money is inflationary, so the student is taught that governments must either finance their expenditures by collecting taxes or borrowing someone’s savings. 10. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011); L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006); and Stephanie A. Bell, John F. Henry, and L. Randall Wray, “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke’s Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: Or, Is It Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?

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Randall Wray, “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke’s Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: Or, Is It Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?,” Review of Social Economy 62, no. 1 (2004): 51–65. 11. There is an enormous literature that traces the history of state-issued currencies. Interested readers should consult works by Christine Desan, Mathew Forstater, David Graeber, John Henry, Michael Hudson, and L. Randall Wray. 12. Buttonwood, “Monopoly Money,” Buttonwood’s notebook, The Economist, October 19, 2009, www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2009/10/19/monopoly-money. 13. There is also the US Federal Reserve, which is “the issuing authority for all Federal Reserve notes.”

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

In the United States, almost 70 percent of workers are either “not engaged” in or “actively disengaged” from their work, while only 50 percent say they “get a sense of identity from their job.”32 In the UK, almost 40 percent of people think their work does not make a meaningful contribution to the world.33 In the words of the sociologist David Graeber, many people today find themselves trapped in “bullshit jobs.”34 Finally, even for those who are fortunate and privileged enough to find their jobs meaningful, it does not follow that they would want to work if they did not have to. Take the French. They attach more importance to their work than many other nationalities.

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Gallup, “State of the American Workplace” (2017); Pew Research Center, “How Americans View Their Jobs,” 6 October 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ (accessed 24 April 2018). 33.  Will Dahlgreen, “37% of British Workers Think Their Jobs Are Meaningless,” YouGov UK, 12 August 2015. 34.  David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” STRIKE! magazine, August 2013. 35.  Pierre-Michel Menger calls this “the French Paradox.” He set it out in a presentation titled “What Is Work Worth (in France)?,” prepared for the “Work in the Future” symposium, 6 February 2018, organized by Robert Skidelsky. 36.  

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Rarely is this written down – and even if it was, we would still likely learn this better from experience than by studying. There is a tacit dimension to our lives that is not codified, and perhaps never can be. This is perhaps even truer of supposedly ‘low-skill’ jobs than it is of ‘high-skill’ ones like a Wall Street trader. The anthropologist David Graeber was fond of pointing out that many jobs that we sometimes deem repetitive, task-oriented and perhaps easily automatable are, in fact, more like care work. They’re based less on specific tasks and more on human interaction and emotional labour. Think of a London Underground worker. In practice, this job isn’t so much about watching ticket barriers as it is about helping other humans – guiding confused tourists, ensuring lost children find their parents, explaining to angry commuters why their trains have been delayed.

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Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 15. 23 ‘Liquidity, Volatility, Fragility’, Goldman Sachs Global Macro Research, 68, June 2018. 24 John Gittelson, ‘End of Era: Passive Equity Funds Surpass Active in Epic Shift’, Bloomberg, 11 September 2019 <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-11/passive-u-s-equity-funds-eclipse-active-in-epic-industry-shift> [accessed 14 October 2020]. 25 ‘March of the Machines – The Stockmarket Is Now Run by Computers, Algorithms and Passive Managers’, The Economist, 5 October 2019 <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/10/05/the-stockmarket-is-now-run-by-computers-algorithms-and-passive-managers> [accessed 14 October 2020]. 26 Michael Polanyi and Amartya Sen, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 4. 27 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 236 28 Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 311. 29 Staci D. Kramer, ‘The Biggest Thing Amazon Got Right: The Platform’, Gigaom, 12 October 2011 <https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-got-right-the-platform/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 30 The approach has become de rigueur among other digital cognoscenti, but Bezos’s email should surely be considered as one of the single most important internal communications of all time. 31 Chris Johnston, ‘Amazon Opens a Supermarket with No Checkouts’, BBC News, 22 January 2018 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42769096> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 32 Peter Holley, ‘Amazon’s One-Day Delivery Service Depends on the Work of Thousands of Robots’, Washington Post, 7 June 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/amazons-one-day-delivery-service-depends-work-thousands-robots/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 33 Harry Dempsey, ‘Amazon to Hire Further 100,000 Workers in US and Canada’, 14 September 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/9817aae3-1e89-4383-aa34-742447d5794a> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 34 ‘Netflix Continues to Hire Through the Pandemic, Says Co-CEO Reed Hastings’, Bloomberg, 9 September 2020 <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-09-09/netflix-continues-to-hire-through-the-pandemic-video> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 35 ‘Netflix: Number of Employees 2006-2020’, Macro Trends <https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/number-of-employees> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 36 Vishnu Rajamanickm, ‘JD.Com Opens Automated Warehouse That Employs Four People but Fulfills 200,000 Packages Daily’, FreightWaves, 25 June 2018 <https://www.freightwaves.com/news/technology/jdcom-opens-automated-warehouse-that-employs-four-people-but-fulfills-200000-packages-daily> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 37 Reuters Staff, ‘Dish to Close 300 Blockbuster Stores, 3,000 Jobs May Be Lost’, Reuters, 23 January 2013 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockbuster-storeclosings-idUSBRE90M05I20130123> [accessed 7 January 2021]. 38 Daron Acemoglu, Claire LeLarge and Pascual Restrepo, Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2020) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w26738>. 39 Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w23285>. 40 David Klenert, Enrique Fernández-Macías and José-Ignacio Antón, ‘Don’t Blame It on the Machines: Robots and Employment in Europe’, VoxEU, 24 February 2020 <https://voxeu.org/article/dont-blame-it-machines-robots-and-employment-europe> [accessed 10 September 2020]. 41 Till Leopold et al., The Future of Jobs 2018, World Economic Forum <https://wef.ch/2NH6NiV> [accessed 25 September 2020]. 42 Leslie Willcocks, ‘Robo-Apocalypse Cancelled?

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Of course, that’s a huge if, especially when – as in the UK – rough sleeping and dependence on food banks have already been rising for years. Yet this is what a surrender looks like: it’s about how much of the organized activity of a society can be decommissioned, not by 2050 or 2030, or even 2025, but as soon as possible. The fact that David Graeber found out when he wrote about ‘bullshit jobs’ – that much of our activity shown up as GDP is widely recognized as pointless, including by those carrying it out – is beneficial. To negotiate a surrender, you need a credible threat – and this is where the movement that began in London in November 2018 might look again at its strange twin across the Channel.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

But the euphoria soon fades, swept away by the swiftly sobering recognition that there is terribly little chance for a soft landing in any of this, for any one of us. Though we may debate the degree to which choice and conscious authorship are involved in it, it seems important to note that automation is a directional process whose initial stages we’ve already entered. In this respect David Graeber’s empty, signifier-shuffling “bullshit jobs” are a signal from the future. They’re not so much a return as an anticipation of the repressed: the surfacing in the present, and pricing into contemporary ways of doing and being, of the recognition that there simply won’t be enough meaningful work for anyone to do following the eclipse of human judgment.

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Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume110, Number 2, 2004, pp. 349–99. 43.David Bicknell, “Sloppy Human Error Still Prime Cause of Data Breaches,” Government Computing, June 2, 2016. 44.Mark Blunden, “Enfield Council Uses Robotic ‘Supercomputer’ Instead of Humans to Deliver Frontline Services,” Evening Standard, June 16, 2016. 45.Jun Hongo, “Fully Automated Lettuce Factory to Open in Japan,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2015. 46.Jim Tankersley, “Robots Are Hurting Middle Class Workers, and Education Won’t Solve the Problem, Larry Summers Says,” Washington Post, March 3, 2015. 47.Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; see also Lawrence H. Summers, “The Inequality Puzzle,” Democracy, Summer 2014 No. 33. 48.David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” STRIKE!, August 17, 2013. 49.Walter Van Trier, “Who Framed ‘Social Dividend’?,” USBIG Discussion Paper No. 26, March 2002. basisinkomen.nl/wp-content/uploads/020223-Walter-VanTrier-8.pdf. See also John Danaher, “Libertarianism and the Basic Income (Part One),” Philosophical Disquisitions, December 17, 2013; Noah Gordon, “The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income,” Atlantic, August 2014. 50.Mike Alberti and Kevin C.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

Anonymous’s Trickster’s Trick: Defying Individual Celebrity through Collective Celebrity Fame-seeking pervades practically every sphere of American life today, from the mass media, which hires Hollywood celebrities as news anchors, to the micro-media platforms that afford endless opportunities for narcissism and self- inflation; from the halls of academia, where superstar professors command high salaries, to sports arenas, where players rake in obscene salaries. Fame-seeking behavior reinforces what anthropologist David Graeber, building on the seminal work of C. B. Macpherson, identifies as “possessive individualism,” defined as “those deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”22 How did 4chan—one of the seediest zones of the Internet—hatch one of the most robust instantiations of a collectivist, anti-celebrity ethic, without its members even intending to?

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Lee Knuttila, “Users unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency,” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (Oct. 2011). 20. “Internet Hate Machine” was a phrase used by a local Fox News program in Los Angeles in 2007 to describe Anonymous. The group promptly turned the phrase into a popular meme. 21. Phillips, “LOLing at tragedy.” 22. David Graeber, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39 (October 1997): 694–728. 23. Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Chapter 2. Project Chanology—I Came for the Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage 1.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

If one party wanted to trade wheat for nails, and the counterparty wanted wheat but had only rope to trade, the first party might accept the rope and go in search of someone with nails who wanted rope. In this telling, money was an efficient medium of exchange that solved the simultaneity problem because one could sell her wheat for money and then use the money to buy nails without having to barter the rope. But as author David Graeber points out, the history of barter is mostly a myth. Economists since Adam Smith have assumed that barter was the historical predecessor of money, but there is no empirical, archaeological, or other evidence for the existence of a widespread premoney barter economy. In fact, it appears that premoney economies were based largely on credit—the promise to return value in the future in exchange for value delivered today.

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.”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936; reprint New York: New Directions, 2009). The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 . . . : Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. the history of barter is mostly a myth: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), pp. 21–41. “Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination . . .”: Thomas L. Friedman, “A Failure to Imagine,” New York Times, May 19, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/a-failure-to-imagine.html.

Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

The problem is the combination of concentrated economic power, weakened limits on corporate political spending,72 and an amorphous legal standard, such as the Supreme Court’s “rule of reason” legal standard for most antitrust violations.73 The amorphous legal standard is attractive to economists, lobbyists, and antitrust counsel who “know” and “can work” with the agency to dissuade it from intervening in our three scenarios. Intellectual Capture Closely linked to economic power is the ability to foster intellectual and regulatory capture. As anthropology professor David Graeber observed, “if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.”74 Lobbying, discussed above, provides a central tool to shape opinions of governments and the public—to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.75 Other means to capture the debate include the funding of articles, academic initiatives, and think tanks.76 Here one may harness the credibility of individuals and institutions to propagate certain ideas and create a pool of supportive media and writing that can cross-reference itself.

…

The rule of reason also “varies in focus and detail depending on the nature of the agreement and market circumstances.” Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations among Competitors (2000) §1.2, at 4, http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/04 /ftcdojguidelines.pdf. David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine, August 17, 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs. See generally, interview with Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at New America Foundation, “What We Have Is Capture of the Regulators’ Minds, a Much More Sophisticated Form of Capture Than Putting Money in Their Pockets,” published in Pro-Market Blog, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, https://promarket.org/what-we-have-is-capture-of-the -regulators-minds-a-much-more-sophisticated-form-of-capture-than -putting-money-in-their-pockets/.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise. There are utopias whose ideals pointedly include freedom from coercion and dispersal of power to the many. Most utopian visions nowadays include many worlds, many versions, rather than a coercive one true way. The anthropologist David Graeber writes, “Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams—actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination—but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. This led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence.”

…

Barker, ed., Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1998), 301. 16 “in cordial appreciation of her prompt”: Argonaut, May 21, 1927. 18 “A map of the world”: Oscar Wilde (quoting from Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”), in Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8. 19 “Stalinists and their ilk”: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 11. 21 “The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled over the past”: “Climate Alarm, 2007”: Oxfam Briefing Paper 108. Pauline Jacobson’s Joy 24 Mary Austen: “The Temblor,” in David Starr Jordan, ed., The California Earthquake of 1906 (San Francisco: A.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

In the profile Thiel seemed a embarrassed about seasteading, his gloriously controversial project to create floating libertarian utopias. Now he spoke of it “almost in the past tense,” as Fortune put it. In September, Thiel showed up at New York’s General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen to debate David Graeber, the left-wing academic who’d helped inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement, and found common ground. When a New York Times reporter asked what Thiel thought of an essay, published by the event’s sponsor, The Baffler, that noted Thiel’s fondness for neo-reactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin, Thiel laughed this off, calling the article, which ran under the title “Mouth-Breathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich,” “vaguely flattering,” but a “full-on conspiracy theory.”

…

“America’s leading public intellectual”: Roger Parloff, “Peter Thiel Disagrees with You,” Fortune, September 4, 2014, https://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strategy/. Thiel laughed this off: Jennifer Schuessler, “Still No Flying Cars? Debating Technology’s Future,” The New York Times, September 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/arts/peter-thiel-and-david-graeber-debate-technologys-future.html?searchResultPosition=1. “total insider and a total outsider”: For instance, Lillian Cunningham, “Peter Thiel on What Works at Work,” The Washington Post, October 10, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10/10/peter-thiel-on-what-works-at-work/.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 24 Apr 2015

Qualities that should be encouraged in society—like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others—are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care. “I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they’ve grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn’t just for the money—the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity,” notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.” Fair and Just On the day the story of the alleged $22,000 UN internship broke, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman assured us that our world is fair and just.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

I’d put Josh Cohen in an emergent purist camp which believes that work represents a failure of society, certainly of capitalism, and that work is essentially not an opportunity but a threat: ‘The reason I didn’t pursue a career in law, accountancy, finance, corporate management, the civil service or any other respectable middle-class profession… was that they all seemed to assume a belief in work as its own justification.’9 This view became more widespread during the Co-Working Years, peaking perhaps as we entered the Nowhere Office in 2020 with anthropologist James Suzman’s book Work in which he speaks of ‘avariciousness amplified’ and argued that the growth mindset of big business was not only disastrous ecologically but morally and emotionally.10 The title of Sarah Jaffe’s 2021 book says it all: Work Won’t Love You Back. Again, as in other areas, Covid-19 was accelerating a pre-existing trend. Take sociologist David Graeber’s highly influential 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, which built on an essay he’d written five years earlier, arguing that it is political control of the workers by the owners of capital/business which ensures that the shorter working shifts, which technology was supposed to usher in, constantly elude most workers, and as a result so too does a life of more meaning.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

In a monetary system, as explained in an earlier chapter, all money is based on a system of claims: assets and liabilities backed up by collateral, and on the exchange of these in social relationships that are vital to the economic sustainability of households and communities. All money is a claim on another – an obligation to be reciprocated – or a debt. And debt, not barter, has been a feature of community life since the dawn of time, as David Graeber explained in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.22 Adam Smith saw ‘the origins of language – hence of human thought – as lying in our propensity to “exchange one thing for another” in which he also saw the origins of the market. The urge to trade, to compare values, is the very thing that makes us intelligent beings, and different from other animals’, writes Graeber.23 The issue, therefore, is not the creation of a debt-free economy, but of one in which economic and other obligations can be freely and easily reciprocated to achieve the common purpose of stability, sustainability, justice and prosperity.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

The German economist Helmut Creutz calculated that in his country, 38% of the price of drinking-water is hidden interest, as is 77% of the rent on government-subsidised housing and 40% of the cost of a typical bundle of goods bought by a German household.37 But there’s a different and much older way of talking about interest on debt: as usury. As David Graeber shows in his remarkable book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, usury has been understood and resented for millennia, and is still condemned by some religions, for example Islam.38 The objections are not directed at lending and borrowing as such, but at lending at interest. This pre-modern term may sound anachronistic and negative, with its associations of exploitation and grinding oppression.

…

Even to offer or accept an interest-free loan might be seen as introducing an unwanted, if temporary, dependence and asymmetry into what would otherwise be seen as properly a relationship of equality and generosity. For this reason, people may prefer to borrow impersonally from a bank and pay interest, rather than borrow from a friend at zero interest. 54 David Graeber’s term for this asymmetry is ‘the logic of hierarchy’ (Graeber, 2011). Gift relationships, where ‘debts’ are not precisely quantified or ever cleared but alternately reciprocated at intervals by each person, thus maintaining the relationship, are the norm in human history. One of the most distinctive, indeed exceptional, features of modern societies is that so many relationships between people are contractual, and hence can be terminated with the meeting of agreed mutual obligations: you did this for me, I paid you the agreed amount, that’s the end of our relationship. 55 This contradiction is a secular version of the Old Testament ‘Deuteronomic ruling’, which caused consternation among theologians and divided Christians for centuries: ‘Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury’, Deuteronomy 23: 20.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

The great transformation of human societies, in the leap from the logic of the sacred to the logic of equivalence, arises as we become more distant from the sacred (Figure 2.1). This process represents the autonomisation of the political and of civil society. Its material basis is the building of cities, from Sumer onwards; it achieves its formal representation through the invention of writing and numbers. According to David Graeber, a movement of concentrated human settlement in Mesopotamia after 2500 BC gave rise to slavery, the foundation of the market.8 Since its origin, the market has oozed violence. Slavery is the ultimate violence. Indeed, slavery strips human relations of all ethics. As Marx shows, wage labour was not so different in this regard, when it lacked the social rights later established in reaction to the violence of the market.

…

, in L’Homme, no. 162, April–June 2002, pp. 242–54. 3 Marcel Maus, ‘Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, Année sociologique (1923–24), republished in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 1973. 4 Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 5 This anthropological controversy is examined by Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘Alliance, filiation et inaliénabilité: le débat sur le don à la lumière de l’anthropologie de la parenté’, Sociétés politiques comparées, no. 11, January 2009. 6 Thomas R. Trautman, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 7 Stéphane Breton, ‘Monnaie et économies des personnes’, introduction to special issue of L’Homme, no. 162, ‘Question de monnaie’, April–June 2002. 8 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011. 9 On this point, see the contribution by Jean Andreau, ‘Cens, évaluation et monnaie dans l’Antiquité romaine’, in Aglietta and Orléan (eds), La monnaie souveraine, pp. 213–50. Part II: The Historical Trajectories of Money 1 Frank Hahn, Money and Inflation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. 2 See the introduction to Philippe Beaujard, Laurent Berger and Philippe Norel (eds), Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme, Paris: La Découverte, 2009. 3 Théret (ed.), La monnaie dévoilée par ses crises. 4 Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme, Paris: Arthaud, 1985. 3.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

Similarly, another worker explained that they ‘wanted to work outside and with a bicycle, because it’s my passion working with a bicycle’. For younger workers, the gig economy offers the potential – and it is important to stress that this is a potential, as we discuss further later in the book – for different ways of working. This is particularly important considering the rise of what David Graeber (2018) has called ‘bullshit jobs’, forms of work that appear to be meaningless busywork. The desire to escape from these kinds of jobs provides a ready supply of labour power to be put to work in new ways. In low- and middle-income countries, even relatively highskilled workers have tended to be quite constrained by the boundaries of their local labour markets.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

Although, amusingly, it later dived as investors realized the company itself would not profit that much from the game, given it was developed by Niantic (and draws on data from Google, who also incubated the company). Presumably, investors had not checked this in advance. There is also evidence that the refusal of work in relation to videogames is going beyond work avoidance in the workplace. David Graeber has observed that many people in the Global North are now working what they call “bullshit jobs.”36 As Jane McGonigal has explained: “Games provide a sense of waking in the morning with one goal: I’m trying to improve this skill, teammates are counting on me, and my online community is relying on me.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Bentoism Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality How Ideas Work Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind John Higgs, The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain Economics Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Updated and Expanded) Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century E.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business
by Edward Tse
Published 13 Jul 2015

“revolutionized how Chinese people live, learn, work and play”: See Jack Ma, “Jack Ma on Taking Back China’s Blue Skies,” HBR Blog Network, November 11, 2013, available at http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/jack-ma-on-taking-back-chinas-blue-skies/ (accessed September 1, 2014). a centuries-long rejection of free-market economics: For a discussion of this rejection, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), pages 259–260. Chapter 2: Wide Open that target was raised to 60 million: See Josh Horwitz, “Xiaomi Is Well on Track to Sell 60 Million Smartphones in 2014,” TechInAsia.com, October 8, 2014, at https://www.techinasia.com/xiaomi-is-well-on-track-to-sell-60-million-smartphones-in-2014/ (accessed November 5, 2014).

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

L. Woloski. It was translated for me by Benoit Hochedez. The letter was made famous (among money nerds, at least) by Jevons. Details of the potlatch come from Davies. The Caroline Humphrey quote on barter is from her article “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” published in the journal Man. David Graeber made much of the myth of barter in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Norms of gift giving and reciprocity in traditional cultures have been widely discussed, perhaps most famously in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. The details about different types of proto-money in different cultures come from Paul Einzig’s Primitive Money.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

Suppose the marginal tax rate on this category of workers was 25 Â�percent in 1975. Their marginal net wage was therefore $6. This marginal net wage (and hence, supposedly, the material incentive to work) could be preserved in 2013 while raising the marginal tax rate to 62.5 Â�percent! 49. Cole 1949: 147. 50. Townsend 1968: 108. More provocatively, David Graeber (2014a) makes the same point as follows: “I always talk about prisons, where Â�people are fed, clothed, they’ve Â� got shelter; they could just sit around all day. But actually, they use work as a way of rewarding them. You know, if you Â�don’t behave yourself, we Â�won’t let you work in the prison laundry.

…

As Andy Stern (2016: 147) puts it: “The Â�people Â�running Â�unions, unfortunately, have not been creative enough, to date, in responding to the challenges of a changing economy, as evidenced in their slow response to Uber, Airbnb, and other disruptive ventures, and in the difficulties unions Â� have faced while trying to orÂ�gaÂ�nize freelancers.” 32. In David Graeber’s (2014b) forceful formulation: “I’m thinking of a Â�labor movement, but one very difÂ�ferÂ�ent than the kind Â�we’ve already seen. A Â�labor movement that manages to fiÂ�nally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines Â�labor as caring for other Â�people.” 33.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better
by Andrew Palmer
Published 13 Apr 2015

For more on the history of money, a plug here for Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order (London: Allen Lane, 2011), by my colleague Philip Coggan. 2. Vincent Bignon, “Cigarette Money and Black-Market Prices During the 1948 German Miracle” (EconomiX Working Papers from University of Paris West–Nanterre la Défense, 2009). 3. For a retelling of the history of credit and money, see David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). 4. K. V. Nagarajan, “The Code of Hammurabi: An Economic Interpretation,” International Journal of Business and Social Science (May 2011). 5. See, for example, Hal Hershfield et al., “Increasing Saving Behaviour Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self,” Journal of Marketing Research (2011). 6.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

The cacao beans must have worked well as money: they were observed still being used as ‘small-change’ money in Central American markets in the mid 1850s. And, as the final confirmation that they were real money, they were counterfeited: fraudsters would extract the chocolate from inside the beans and replace it with mud of an equivalent weight! Debt What did these currencies, from barley to gold and from cocoa to sterling, measure? David Graeber makes a case for a simple answer: debt (Graeber 2011b). He observes that the difficulty in the ‘chartalist’ position (from the Latin charta, or token) is to establish why people would continue to trust a token, rather than a commodity, as society develops and points out that the chartalist version of currency (see the later discussion about the Irish bank strike) means providing sufficient token claims against different commodities, whether those are cocoa beans, sea shells, copper axes or anything else.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

The driver of the American car used to drive an entire economy, but now the driver will be passive, and what will the culture become? This new orientation would have seemed deeply strange to our ancestors, but we are trying to talk ourselves into seeing this obsession with digitalized information as normal. Anthropologist David Graeber expressed the point nicely when referring to his attempt to watch one of the Star Wars installments: Recalling all those clumsy effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, the tin spaceships being pulled along by almost-invisible strings, I kept thinking about how impressed a 1950s audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to immediately realize, “actually, no.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott
Published 21 Aug 2017

Adams, Michael Dietler, Gordon Hillman, Karl Jacoby, Helen Leach, Peter Perdue, Christopher Beckwith, Cyprian Broodbank, Owen Lattimore, Thomas Barfield, Ian Hodder, Richard Manning, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Edward Friedman, Douglas Storm, James Prosek, Aniket Aga, Sarah Osterhoudt, Padriac Kenney, Gardiner Bovingdon, Timothy Pechora, Stuart Schwartz, Anna Tsing, David Graeber, Magnus Fiskesjo, Victor Lieberman, Wang Haicheng, Helen Siu, Bennet Bronson, Alex Lichtenstein, Cathy Shufro, Jeffrey Isaac, and Adam T. Smith. I am particularly grateful to Joe Manning, who, I found, anticipated a good part of my argument about cereal grains and states and whose intellectual large-spiritedness extended to allowing me to poach his title, Against the Grain, as the first element of my own.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

There were no representatives, no officials, and few of the mechanisms of “organization” that Robert Michels identified as sliding naturally toward the empowerment of the few over the many. The commitment to this process was so total it was done even at the cost of efficiency. Meetings took a very long time; decisions could not be made quickly and efficiently. But that’s the whole idea. “You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature,” David Graeber, a radical anthropologist who’s been active in planning Occupy Wall Street since its inception, told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. The occupiers, Graeber said, wanted to “create a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as ‘democracy’ by the U.S. government.”

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

But when jobs are cast within the bureaucratic and commercialized sphere of hyper-capitalist relations, even brain surgeons sometimes wonder what their worth is, especially when forced to cut costs, meet targets and generate process efficiencies in those public healthcare services that still remain in the West. This is where David Graeber’s (2013) otherwise insightful notion of ‘bullshit jobs’ is problematic. He suggests that there are wide swathes of occupations that are not really necessary since they do not really add anything to the public good (e.g. management consultants, derivative traders, etc.). The problem is, however, that this is the very worldview that informs the neoliberal gaze.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 1 Jan 2013

The first and most important point to be made by a movement against the annexation of democracy by the finance markets is that legitimacy is not on the side of the money factories: after all, why should the promissory notes they produce be allowed to eat up the lives of ordinary people? Here David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years has done invaluable preliminary work. The idea that it is only right and proper for all debtors to pay off what they owe is a myth that serves to moralize global finance markets under cover of the morality of everyday life – and to make opposition to their demands appear immoral.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Special thanks go to James, Costas Lapavitsas (whose work has inspired so much of my thinking), Michael Jacobs and George Eaton, who read the book in its early form and provided comments. I would also like to thank Leo Panitch, Joe Guinan, Sarah McKinley, Christine Berry, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Ann Pettifor, David Graeber, Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Adam Tooze, Laurie MacFarlane, David Rowland, Sahil Dutta, Fran Boait, Richard Kozul-Wright, Mark Seddon, Scott Lavery, Jeremy Green, Ewan McGinety, Nicholas Shaxson, John Christensen, Michal Rozworski, Leigh Phillips, Miriam Brett, Zack Exley, Waleed Shahid, David Adler, Sarah Jaffe, Hilary Wainwright, Will Stronge, Cat Hobbes, Ronan Burtenshaw, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Laura Pidcock, Richard Burgeon, Jon Trickett, and Dan Carden — all of whom have offered me help and advice, or influenced my thinking.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Shifting to ‘reproductive’ work such as caring for relatives or work in the community could be expected to have beneficial environmental effects, because it would mean a shift to resource-conserving activities away from resource-depleting ones. Shorter working hours in jobs are correlated with smaller ecological footprints.33 And basic income would allow people to reject or spend less time on what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit’ jobs that they find hateful or meaningless.34 As mentioned in Chapter 2, basic income would also make it easier for governments to impose carbon taxes and other environmental measures designed to curb pollution and mitigate climate change, by compensating people for the extra costs of the goods and services affected or for livelihoods lost or disrupted.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

One of the things that is troubling from Gorz’s perspective is the sheer pointlessness of many modern forms of employment. Huge proportions of the labour market are devoted to the production, marketing and distribution of consumer goods with superficial differences, limited functions, and short life spans. In his polemic against the rise of ‘bullshit jobs’, David Graeber also points to the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. On top of this, we can consider the huge numbers of people whose role is to provide administrative, technical or security support for these industries, as well those thousands of jobs in the service industries – from dog-washers to home cleaners and 24-hour pizza deliverymen – which only exist because the workers who pay for them are so hellishly busy working (Graeber, 2013).

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Yes, running a business is rewarding for the CEO, but what about the workers? Worker exploitation is one of the oldest charges levied at capitalism, and it persists through the current day. For instance, in a recent Times Literary Supplement review of books about work, Joe Moran summed it up bluntly: “These books are about the misery.” David Graeber, in his recent highly popular book, says it all in the title: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Jeffrey Pfeffer, from the Stanford School of Business, calls his latest book Dying for a Paycheck, even though there is established evidence that unemployment is worse for your health than working.1 I’d like to suggest that productive work is one of the most fulfilling sides of our lives.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Crowe, Sam Gill, Rita Issa, Alistair Alexander, James Jackson, Saara Rei, Jules Mueller, Shaun Chamberlin, Alice Thwaite, Max Haiven, Cassie Thornton, Phoebe Tickell, Jutta Steiner, Monika Bielskyte, Stacco and Ann Marie, Nathaniel Calhoun, Steve Grumbine, Simon Youel, Joel Benjamin, Simka and Manu, and Glen Scott. Special thanks to my family, who held me from afar. Special thanks to Scott Lye and Jeff Cavaliere for keeping my body intact amidst the writing, and to Jürgen Carlo Schmidt for helping me to keep my soul intact. Special thanks to Sophia, who inspired the proposal. My respects to the late David Graeber, who passed away before I could ask him to endorse the book. Thanks for inspiring us. Finally, a special thanks to the earth, for continuing to roll into the rays of the sun, and for providing a home for us all. Notes 1. The Nervous System worked with the Berlin-based open data company OpenOil: See ‘How complex is BP?

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power
by Rose Hackman
Published 27 Mar 2023

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007). 14.  Shankar Vedantam et al., “Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Human Relationships,” NPR, January 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships. 15.  David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, updated and expanded ed. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2014); L. Randall Wray, “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2050427; Bill Maurer, “How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money,” October 14, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375173. 16.  

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

© 2011 David Graeber First Melville House Printing: May 2011 Melville House Publishing 145 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 mhpbooks.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Graeber, David. Debt : the first 5,000 years / David Graeber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-1-61219-098-3 1. Debt–History. 2. Money–History. 3. Financial crises–History. I. Title. HG3701.G73 2010 332–dc22 2010044508 v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright 1 On The Experience of Moral Confusion 2 The Myth of Barter 3 Primordial Debts 4 Cruelty and Redemption 5 A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations 6 Games with Sex and Death 7 Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization 8 Credit Versus Bullion, And the Cycles of History 9 The Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) 10 The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD) 11 Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450–1971) 12 (1971-The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined) Notes Bibliography Chapter One ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL CONFUSION debt • noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

You need to be clear with yourself about what you are afraid of, why you are afraid, and whether you care enough to dance with that fear because it will never go away.” Just Kids by Patti Smith: “This is the single best audiobook ever recorded by Patti Smith. It is not going to change the way you do business, but it might change the way you live. It’s about love and loss and art.” Debt by David Graeber: “I recommend it in audio because David is sometimes repetitive and a little elliptical but in audio it’s all okay because you can just listen to it again.” TIM: “Which of these, going from Zig to Pema and onward down to debt with David, which of these do you think I should start with, or which one would you suggest I start with?”

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Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books Godin, Seth: Makers; Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud), Snow Crash; The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson), Dune (Frank Herbert), Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) AUDIOBOOKS: The Recorded Works (Pema Chödrön), Debt (David Graeber), Just Kids (Patti Smith), The Art of Possibility (Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander), Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale (Zig Ziglar), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Goldberg, Evan: Love You Forever (Robert Munsch), Watchmen; V for Vendetta (Alan Moore), Preacher (Garth Ennis), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Goodman, Marc: One Police Plaza (William Caunitz), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

In “Stone Age Economics,” Marshall Sahlins provides an interesting and insightful description of economic exchange as a cultural phenomenon, characterizing different forms of economic exchange during the Stone Age, and making the somewhat counterintuitive claim that these were the original affluent societies. Although some of his claims have been disputed by subsequent research, that claim itself is less important and interesting than the descriptions of models of exchange. Readers interested in a deeper history of exchange (and money) should also read David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). 9. I discuss a small fraction of the history of trust in economic exchange in greater detail in chapter 6. 10. I focus on the United States because, to my knowledge, its historical economic data on employment is most extensive. In Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), see his table A-4.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. Sadly, Keynes’s predictions did not come true. Although productivity did indeed increase, the system—possibly inherent in a market economy—did not result in humans working much shorter hours. Rather, what happened is what the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber describes as the growth of “bullshit jobs.”* While jobs that produce essentials like food, shelter, and goods have been largely automated away, we have seen an enormous expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration (as opposed to actual teaching, research, and the practice of medicine), “human resources,” and public relations, not to mention new industries like financial services and telemarketing and ancillary industries in the so-called gig economy that serve those who are too busy doing all that additional work.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

Tribal societies simplified barter by selecting one rare and valuable commodity to trade all others against. Such commodity-based money, like seashells or gold, is nobody’s debt, a feature that has special appeal to people who see debt as the root of all evil, or at least the financial kind. The countervailing theory, espoused by anthropologists like David Graeber, argues that debt preceded money, and that from the start most money was tradable debt.6 The economists’ theory sounds plausible, but the anthropologists appear to have the facts on their side in the form of tribal societies’ behaviour, past and present. Man did not live in a garden of Eden trading seashells; life was indebted, as well as nasty, brutish and short.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia
Published 20 Mar 2024

I’d seen a beautiful essay by Vauhini Vara on the death of her sister co-written with OpenAI’s GPT software, but nothing it had created on its own stood out. Ted’s view was that LLMs were useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’. AI-generated text was not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he conceded. ‘But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that – that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,’ he said. ‘That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.’

Private Equity: A Memoir
by Carrie Sun
Published 13 Feb 2024

Nor does he give me his classic rhetorical question plus a death stare. Nor, surprisingly, does he say no. He responds instantly: “Well, I’d have to do something worth writing about first.” Adjust the size of the bets. I must change my life. PART THREE In the future, as the bits get pieced back together, who knows what will come into view? —DAVID GRAEBER AND DAVID WENGROW, The Dawn of Everything Second Quarter I sat in a window seat on my journey (back) to the west. To měiguó, America, the beautiful country. I had spent the past week taking my first solo vacation: two nights in Shanghai, five nights in Hangzhou, where my parents vacationed after they got married and Mom said she and Dad were once the happiest.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

Occupy Wall Street wasn’t the best tactic available to reach a political goal. The Occupy movement succeeded because several thousand people decided, for their own personal emotional reasons, that they really wanted to be one of those guys. I’m not alone in this analysis. Two fairly important thinkers, anthropologist David Graeber and author Daniel Quinn, came to this conclusion independently and wrote about it online. Occupy Wall Street wasn’t a political formation, it was an affiliation narrative, a metastory that structured the world so that people who associated themselves with it – identified with its protagonists, to be literary about things – were part of a great and just collective, with noble aims and brave methods.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

” [64] Herb Keinon, “Trajtenberg Oversees First Meeting of ‘Rothschild Team,’” Jerusalem Post, August 9, 2011, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Trajtenberg-oversees-first-meeting-of-Rothschild-Team. [65] Image by Rafimich,Wikipedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Daphne_Leef_ %D7%93%D7%A4%D7%A0%D7%99_%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A3.jpg. [66] David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots,” Al Jazeera in English, November 30, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html; Nathan Schneider, “Thank You, Anarchists,” The Nation, December 19, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/165240/ thank-you-anarchists# ; “Translating Anarchy: Interview with Mark Bray, OWS Organizer and Author of the New Book Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” OccupyWallStreet, September 12, 2013, http://occupywallst.org/article/translating-anarchy-occupy-wall-street/

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World
by Michal Zalewski
Published 11 Jan 2022

Obligations and account balances, perhaps measured in customary units such as bushels of grain, could be agreed upon and then tracked within communities. And indeed, financial ledgers of this sort are known to have existed throughout antiquity, at least as far back as Mesopotamia around 3,000 BCE—and quite possibly appearing far earlier than that.4 In a popular book titled Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), author David Graeber puts forward a thesis that ledger-based debt obligations were the natural foundation of early systems of trade, and that coin emerged much later and to serve a narrower need. Graeber’s theory is backed up by far stronger evidence than the barter parable—and its implications for our present-day understanding of money are significant too.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
by Devon Price
Published 4 Apr 2022

Undiagnosed Autistics are not able to apply for disability, and recipients must have their eligibility reevaluated on a regular basis (between every six to eighteen months).[28] Processing and investigating disability benefit cases is incredibly costly. It is for this reason that writer and anthropologist David Graeber suggested in the book Bullshit Jobs that it would be far less expensive and far more socially just to simply provide a baseline, universal basic income to all people, with no strings attached. While replacing all social welfare programs with universal basic income is probably not a wise move, based on the available data,[29] a less restrictive, more generous approach to providing disability benefits would clearly improve disabled people’s quality of life.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

I particularly like the premise considered in Charles Stross's novel Rule 34 (New York: Ace Books, 2011), that “the singularity” is born from the accumulation of global e-mail spam becoming sentient. 54.  See Cory Doctorow's novelization of gold farmers’ plight and struggle in For the Win (New York: Tor, 2010). 55.  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville Publishing, 2011) revived popular interest in debt as primary in the social ontology of money. See also Marcel Mauss's The Gift (originally published in 1925), which remains a reference for the anthropology of finance, Marcel Mauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

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For example, Ian Berry, “Monsanto to Buy Planting Technology Company,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304707604577422162132896528. 21.  Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (Vaya Entertainment, 2008). 22.  From a private Facebook post by Christopher Head. 23.  For example, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, David Graeber writes: “Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse.

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed
by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)
Published 15 Nov 2012

As a result, even after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Nobel Prize1 winning economists have been known to make statements such as “I’m all for including the banking sector in stories where it’s relevant; but why is it so crucial to a story about debt and leverage?” (Krugman, 2012). The historical reality The problem with the idea that money emerged ‘spontaneously’ from barter is that, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber, “there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not”. (2011, p. 29)2 As Graeber explains, the historical and anthropological evidence indicates that before the existence of money people did not engage in barter trades with each other. Rather, goods were freely given with the caveat that the person receiving them would have to return the favour at some point.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Khinchin, “Teoria prosteishego potoka” (Mathematical Methods of the Theory of Mass Service; more literally, Simple Stream Theory), Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta Steklov. 49 (1955): 3–122. 26. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 94. 27. The field of institutional economics offers pragmatic approaches to observed irrationalities in individual and group actions. A few standard references in the literature include Thorsten Veblen’s heterodox position in “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

That modern capitalist economies increasingly gravitate towards monotonic, value-less jobs goes a long way towards understanding why affluence (as measured by the metrics that the New Optimists prefer) is not offsetting the dissatisfaction and alienation seen in societies that equate work with self-worth. Anthropologist David Graeber describes the glut of these occupations in the aptly named Bullshit Jobs: A Theory: Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they’re doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers — as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

People do all sorts of hard and frustrating and even unpaid and unpleasant things that aren’t fun, like tending to the dying or managing a classroom of unruly children or writing a book about gamification. They do these things for lots of reasons. Because it’s satisfying. Because it’s their calling. Because it lets them express themselves. Not because it’s fun. As David Graeber wrote in Bullshit Jobs, “The need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.” It is cruel to coerce workers into a funhouse distortion of play. Fairly paid, meaningful work can be its own reward.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

Those kinds of physical, repetitive, completable activities tickle an essential part of the human brain—the one that we needed to survive all those millennia in the natural environment. In other words, nourishing the maker frees the thinker. And more about that happiness: in 2018, anthropologist David Graeber published the bestselling Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, in which he argued that half of the jobs modern people hold today are “pointless” because they produce nothing but busywork. America’s service economy depends on layer upon layer of middlemen and administrators who only increase the complexity and cost of basic systems, like health care, at the expense of true wealth- and stability-generating industries, like manufacturing.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

If we shift our priorities away from the space of algorithmic digital platforms and once more to the physical world, in which everything is not instantly evaluated in terms of engagement, we might find ourselves building not only better culture but better communities, relationships, and politics as well. The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet. There is no pure form of culture that happens outside of technological influence, nor is there a singular best way to consume culture.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

Capitalists can be taught that interest, but whether they will condescend to learn the lesson is up to them.31 Power, after all, is the ability to refuse to learn.32 As we have seen in the current crisis, such ability may require no more than being big enough for one’s demise to be a threat to the community at large. Coming to the end of my comment, I would also like to put in a word for not entirely abandoning concepts like socialism or even communism.33 As to the latter, David Graeber in his book on the anthropology of debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) has succinctly pointed out the generically communist foundations of economic life, even in advanced capitalism. Concerning socialism, to me the concept is indispensable for connoting the counterpart of – posses sive-consumerist – individualism, reminding us against the grain of today’s ‘cult of the individual’ that, once again citing Marx, man is the only animal that can individualize only in a society.34 What other concept is there in any case for the more communal, more other-regarding and more collectively responsible way of life that we today seem to need more urgently than ever, a life with much less licence to externalize the costs of private pleasure-seeking to the rest of the world?

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

Gox in early 2012 and joined in the conversation on the forums and chat channels. When he wasn’t playing with Bitcoin, he devoured several books on the history of money, most significantly Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a cult favorite in the Occupy Wall Street movement and in certain transgressive corners of Wall Street. The book, by anthropologist David Graeber, argued that historians and economists have wrongly assumed that money grew out of barter. In fact, Graeber argued, and Wences came to believe, barter was never common and money was actually an evolution of credit—a way of tracking what people owed to each other. People used to just keep a mental tally of what they owed each other, but money provided a way to expand the system more broadly among people who didn’t know each other.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

Although it would be impossible to thank them all, I would like to thank the most influential authors to whom I owe a great intellectual debt. These include Lord Adair Turner, W. Brain Arthur, Doyne Farmer, Andreas Antonopoulos, Satyajit Das, Joyce Appleby, Yanis Varoufakis, Patrick O’Sullivan, Nigel Allington, Mark Esposito, Sitabhra Sinha, Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, Andy Stern, Alan Kirman, Neel Kashkari, Danny Dorling, David Graeber, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Vitalik Buterin, Andy Haldane, Gillian Tett, Martin Sandbu, Robert Reich, Kenneth Rogoff, Paul Beaudry, Michael Kumhof, Diane Coyle, Ben Dyson, Dirk Helbing, Guy Michaels, David Autor, Richard Gendal Brown, Tim Swanson, David Andolfatto, Paul Pfleiderer, Zoltan Pozsar, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, César Hidalgo, and Robin Hanson, among others.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

Debt is not always unsavoury. There is clearly some logic to the claim that the rich economies in particular are (even now) living in a ‘debt-fuelled’ consumerism and we’ll explore that logic later in this book (Chapter 6). But debt is a social institution with a very long pedigree, as anthropologist David Graeber demonstrates unequivocally in Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Debt provided the most primitive means of exchange. Money itself evolved from debt-based exchange.13 Lending and borrowing money is certainly an intrinsic feature of the modern economy. A properly functioning financial system plays a vital role in ‘smoothing’ both our income and our spending patterns over time.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

Way more than the vagaries of communal living and making is just the devastating segregation of the way a group like this forms: stratifying and further isolating ourselves especially along the lines of class and education level—and not because anyone is barred entry, but because even these ideas and desires are classed, are modified by our own backgrounds, feelings, or experiences of power and access. At some point that season, we got really into anarchism again, for the first time since we were teenagers. Somewhere in the hang of returning to Against Me!’s discography and other early-aughts music that came out of the Battle of Seattle, and stumbling into David Graeber’s work, and beginning to reflect on the communities that had always meant the most to us, a different understanding of anarchism formed than the one marked by the crust punks of our younger days. It wasn’t so much like swearing allegiance to an ideology or dropping out of participation in electoral politics—it’s just that I remembered or discovered for the first time (I’m not sure which) that anarchism or anarchist thinkers possessed the most compelling vision of the future for me, whether or not it was actionable or the makings of sound policy.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

That kind of money can be called “past-oriented money.” The accounting, past-oriented, concept of money is concrete, which makes it cognitively natural. It is easier to think about a concrete number of sheep than about something abstract like statistics predicting the prospects of bundled derivatives.* *Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Chelsea House, 2010), proposes that debt is as old as civilization. However, simple debts are still representations of past events, rather than anticipations of future growth in value; the latter is what we call “finance.” Modern future-oriented concepts of money only make sense in a universe that is pregnant with possibility.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

There are several thinkers today that can be put in the same category. If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf. Their works have contributed to our thinking for this book. Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania (Berkeley, 2010), p. 61. 36Ibid., pp. 90–93. 37Quoted in Lizzie Wade, ‘Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital’, Science (21 June 2018). 38Quoted in Richard Lee, ‘What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources’, Man the Hunter (Chicago, 1968), p. 33. 39James C. Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 66–7. 40Turchin, Ultrasociety, pp. 174–5. 41Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 27–9. 42For an extensive historical overview, see David Graeber, Debt. The First 5,000 Years (London, 2011). 43Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 139–49. 44Ibid., p. 162. 45Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’, in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London, 1962), pp. 469–91. 46Quoted in Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders (Ipswich, 1982), Chapter 5. 47James W.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Each of the hundred-odd quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the noun and the verb date from after 1541, but during the sixteenth century most of the commercial uses of the word show hostility toward it. An act of 34–35 Henry VIII (that is, 1542) noted that “sundry persons consume the substance obtained by credit of other men.” Shame on them (the scolding has lasted down to populist assaults on credit, such as the anthropologist David Graeber’s book in 2011, and the Syriza Party in Greece in 2015). But by 1691 Locke is using neutral, businesslike language: credit is merely “the expectation of money within some limited time.” Roger Holmes has pointed me to Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (1994).12 He well summarizes their evidence: They point to the change in funerary monuments (“marmorialized gentlemen”) from those of the sixteenth to those of the later seventeenth century.

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(One can reflect that cheating can characterize nontrading life with people, too, even if wholly “integrative”—family life and tribal life, for example, of which the Hebrew Bible also gives many nasty examples—but the subject here is indignation about the trading life.) The prophet Amos (fl. 750 BCE), for example: Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, . . . skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales.13 So always. The anticapitalist anarchistic anthropologist David Graeber, an Occupy maven, spends 534 pages in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) grumbling that “arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.”14 His sole intellectual tool is Amos-like indignation against sellers and bosses and owners and creditors.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Wilson (1978), On Human Nature, Harvard University Press. genetic science is flawed Anne Innis Dagg (2004), “Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology, Black Rose Books. Douglass North Douglass C. North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 54. no money would David Graeber (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House. Terrence Deacon Terrence W. Deacon (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain, W.W. Norton & Co., 384–401. far more philandering Simon C. Griffith, Ian P. Owens, and Katherine A. Thuman (2002), “Extra Pair Paternity in Birds: A Review of Interspecific Variation and Adaptive Function,” Molecular Ecology, 11:2195–212.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

Joaquin Ramirez Cabanes (Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1943), 106. 2 Andrew M. Watson, ‘Back to Gold – and Silver’, Economic History Review 20:1 (1967), 11–12; Jasim Alubudi, Repertorio Bibliográfico del Islam (Madrid: Vision Libros, 2003), 194. 3 Watson, ‘Back to Gold – and Silver’, 17–18. 4 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011). 5 Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), 15. 6 Szymon Laks, Music of Another World, trans. Chester A. Kisiel (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1989), 88–9.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT said in a statement: Claire Cain Miller, “Google Appoints Its Most Senior Woman to Run YouTube,” The New York Times, February 5, 2014, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/google-appoints-its-most-senior-woman-to-run-youtube/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Slide five showed: Doerr, Measure What Matters, 166. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 18: Down the Tubes an anthropologist: David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Atlas of Places, 2013, https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her co-worker said: Alex Morris, “When Google Walked,” New York, February 5, 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/can-the-google-walkout-bring-about-change-at-tech-companies.html.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

Arthur, for whom Hegel-type dialectics entirely replace monetary theory and economics (‘Money and Exchange’, Capital and Class 30:3, 2006); for a telling response see Thomas Sekine, ‘Arthur on Money and Exchange’, Capital and Class 33:3, 2009. 15 Discussion in this section draws heavily on Costas Lapavitsas, Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit, London: Routledge, 2003, ch. 3. 16 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan E, London: Methuen, 1904, vol. 1, ch. 5. 17 This point is often missed by anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists who discuss the origin of money and criticize ‘economic theory’ for relating money to direct exchange. Thus, David Graeber makes a typically withering attack on Smith for assuming a ‘primitive’ society and an imaginary state of barter out of which money presumably emerges (Debt: The First 5000 Years, New York: Melville House, 2011, ch. 2). There is, of course, little doubt that Smith’s image of barter among ‘primitives’ is fallacious and a product of its time.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

See Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon (New York: Seven Stories, 2001). 106 See John Halloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto, 2002). 107 On identity politics, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially 156-91. 108 On the resurgence of anarchist groups, see David Graeber, “For a New Anarchism,” New Left Review, 2nd ser., no. 13 (January-February 2002): 61-73. 109 Here we should also add the various forms of electronic resistance and hacker movements that strive to make common the enormous resources controlled in electronic networks and thwart the new, sophisticated forms of control that use cybernetic technologies.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

Clark and Camille Martin, eds., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Thought of Elisée Reclus (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004) 61 Clark, ‘Municipal Dreams: A Social Ecological Critique of Bookchin’s Politics’, Social Ecology after Bookchin, ed. Andrew Light (New York: Guilford Press, 1998) 62 See Clark, ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm: On Bookchin’s Critique of the Anarchist Tradition’, forthcoming in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 63 See David Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, 13 (January-February, 2002). See also his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004) 64 See Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006); Zerzan, Running on Emptiness, op. cit., p. 162 65 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

…

It demonstrates not only that another world is possible, but that it already exists, has existed, and shows an endless potential to burst through the artificial walls and divisions that currently imprison us. An exquisite contribution to the literature of human freedom, and coming not a moment too soon.” —DAVID GRAEBER, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Direct Action: An Ethnography Wobblies and Zapatistas offers the reader an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Yet most people find fulfillment and meaning in their work, whereas time-use studies show that the unskilled, who have seen their prospects in the labor market deteriorate, spend much of their time in front of the television, despite many studies showing that there is a negative correlation between television consumption and individual well-being.35 Contrary to the anthropologist David Graeber’s witty essay on “bullshit jobs,” in which he claims that most people spend their working lives doing work they perceive to be meaningless, large-scale survey evidence shows the exact opposite.36 And a wide range of studies across many countries and periods of time has consistently shown that people who work are happier than those who do not.37 As Ian Goldin puts it, “Individuals gain not only income, but meaning, status, skills, networks and friendships through work.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Within any rentier institution, the gains flow disproportionately to the small handful of individuals who create, capture or protect from competition or impairment the all-important rent-generating assets: for instance, the ‘quants’ who design exotic new financial instruments; the oil industry executives who sign the licensing deals with the politicians of resource-rich states; the lawyers who secure patent approval for a blockbuster new drug; the ‘rain-makers’ who win ten-year outsourcing contracts. Indeed, the rise of rentier capitalism is the only credible explanation that we have for the fact that, as David Graeber has recently observed, lawyers and accountants account for ‘an extraordinarily high percentage of the working population’ in the UK, numbering some 150,000 and 312,000, respectively.63 For lawyers and accountants are quintessential, indispensable purveyors of balance-sheet capitalism. The former serve to secure the value of rentiers’ assets, litigating against any perceived or actual threat of devaluation.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

They have also created more demands for enterprises to provide essential information to the government and to the citizens on the products and the services that they sell. These requirements inevitably lead the enterprises and some individuals to object that they are being overregulated, and that these demands are unreasonable and costly. However, as the anthropologist David Graeber put it in a recent book, perhaps with some exaggeration, public and private bureaucracies have become largely indistinguishable, and it is an illusion to believe that the rules that are created apply, or apply equally, to everyone (see Graeber, 2015). The rules often end up benefiting some (often those with more money) over others.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

C r e di tor s a n d De btor s There has always been a tension between the convenience of having a fixed, unchangeable yardstick of value and the desire of creditors and debtors to have a money which suits their own interests. This is the 27 H i s t ory of E c onom ic T houg h t class-struggle theory of money. In the industrial age, the conflict between capitalists and workers overlapped the older conflict between creditors and debtors without ever replacing it. To historical sociologists like David Graeber, much of the history of the world can be interpreted in terms of the struggle between creditors and debtors. Whatever the loan or wage contract says, there is always a risk in an uncertain world that promises will be devalued or revalued; hence the intensity of the conflict to control the value of the promises.10 The state has only a limited incentive to guarantee the value of money.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Hume maintains the effect was only temporary and that by the reign of Tiberius interest had returned to 6 per cent. 55. Hume, Selected Essays, p. 48. 56. Silver, ‘Modern Ancients’. 57. Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 2. 58. Csabai, ‘Chronologische Aspekte’. 59. On the myth of barter see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, 2011), pp. 33–62. 60. William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016), p. 41. 61. Mieroop, Ancient Mesopotamian City, p. 187. 62. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), p. 31. 63.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

So if money is a form of debt—a claim upon society, perhaps—to whom and by whom is this debt payable? Is debt-free money, and even a debt-free monetary system, a worthwhile goal or simply a theoretical error? DEBT’S UNTOLD STORY In his magisterial history of the subject, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), David Graeber begins by positing a fundamental distinction between old-style credit and interest-bearing credit. Debt is a fundamental feature of all human relations; it is foundational to most of the obligations that social life ordinarily involves. This is old-style credit: in English, for example, “thank you” derives from a phrasal verb meaning “I will remember what you did for me.”

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

CHAPTER 12 1 Louis Uchitelle, “Fed Fears Wage Spiral That Is Little in Evidence,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 2008. 2 David Frum, “The Vanishing Republican Voters,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 2008. 3 Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 296–97. 4 See Timothy H. Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 36. 5 Peter G. Peterson, “The Morning After.” 6 George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (1981; out of print), and David Graeber, Debt (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 377–78. 7 Albert Hunt, “Reagan Offers Lesson for Obama on Tax,” Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 10, 2011. 8 Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang, “Tax Policy Feeds Gap Between Rich, Poor,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2011. 9 Bruce Bartlett, “The Fiscal Legacy of George W.

Hunger: The Oldest Problem
by Martin Caparros
Published 14 Jan 2020

Then there are the worst-case scenarios: that they will organize and rebel. They are, obviously, a bother: Dead weight. (The disposable ones also have their own “soft” version: the millions and millions who do perfectly useless jobs, defined as those jobs whose disappearance would only affect the same structure where that work is carried out. David Graeber, professor at the London School of Economics, says, “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”14 Employees—an infinite number of employees—in all kinds of service companies, employees of state bureaucracies, all kind of managers, lawyers, public relations people, salesmen, receptionists, secretaries, journalists, and so many others of us who are there so that nobody realizes that we don’t have any real place in the chain of production, that if we all occupied a real place we could all work just ten or fifteen hours a day, that we are really as disposable as the peasants in Bihar—except in some countries where things are a little more complicated.