Why does everyone in leftist circles hate him now?
I remember when he had a whole cult around him in the early 2010s during Occupy and was a huge cheerleader for the Rojava revolution in the years that followed. His book Debt The First 5000 Years was a huge hit (and I mean HUGE, in the sense that you'd see it sold in both anarchist infoshops and mainstream booksellers like Barnes). He was instrumental in rewriting the historical narrative of class formation and the development of money and economic systems. A lot of Marxists didn't like that but they had zero means of debunking his work. When he died in 2020 there was an outpouring of love from leftists all over the world, for an anarchist intellectual who meant so much to people.
But now, I never see Graeber mentioned, ever. The only times I see him or his work brought up is to heavily chastise it, or attack him for his anarchist politics. Tankies hate him but can never prove him wrong. I have to ask why he's become nothing but a footnote in the history of leftist thought, especially when he was so celebrated 15 years ago.
57 posts and 6 image replies omitted.>>2898775I remember a Nrx guy on Twitter going through Graeber's Debt book and he loved it and joked that Graeber was a crypo-monarchist trying to crown pill normies because the kings were always throwing debt jubilees and the democratic liberals were always trying to turn people into debt slaves.
Also a funny thing from Debt is that it shows Marxists as the true reactionaries who want to RETVRN:
<The Sumerian economy was dominated by vast temple and palace complexes. These were often staffed by thousands: priests and officials, craftspeople who worked in their industrial workshops, farmers and shepherds who worked their considerable estates. Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy-one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it's to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel's weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley-on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It's easy to see that "money" in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments.For his last book Dawn of Everything I saw a lot of criticism about how it was idealist ahistorical nonsense, that it claimed hierarchy and domination was a choice, or that the authors didn't seem to understand that controlling resources let's you control other people. The "What is Politics" guy on Youtube has an ongoing series tearing it apart (he's some anarchist type I think). Haven't read it myself tho so I can't comment.
>>2902588Very interesting. So Graeber was basically the pseud of pseuds?
My understanding of Graeber is that he was essentially a neo-Kantian in denial; his Debt book claims that economic relations haven't ever really changed, since it's always been debtor-creditor, it's just the way we perceive them that's changed. Idealist nonsense and I'm glad Marxists are BTFOing him.
>>2898775All he did was try to re-make anarchism from scratch through anthropology, which turned out to have questionable results at best.
Really says something he has no notable former students.
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>>2902615And is it really useful to think cultural anthropology in itself can fully replace philosophy or political economy? It seems like every anarchist today simply appeals to anthropology when they want to argue some anarchist point.
>"Don't like transgender kids? Okay, well there's an obscure tribe in southeast Asia which has a concept of trans kids and socially transitions kids at age seven. Take that transphobes!" >>2902625I think anthropology and history is useful as far as it breaks with the philistinism of bourgeois ideology. Capitalism has narrowed and flattened everybody's social imagination and I think that the greatest strength of Graeber's work is the fact that he doesn't take the categories imposed by capitalism as a "natural" given.
>>2902588>Also a funny thing from Debt is that it shows Marxists as the true reactionaries who want to RETVRNMichael Hudson has written practically the same book titled The Destiny of Civilization (iirc there was direct cooperation between them), but came to radically different conclusions, basically what you are saying, that what Marx interpreted as the struggle between capital labour is simply the continuation of the age-old struggle between the nobility which always seeks further privileges over the people and the monarch which wants to subjugate the nobility and finds it necessary to ally with commoners against the nobles. In this formulation the party is basically the monarch (this is nothing new, Gramsci described the "party" as Machiavelli's "prince"), which explains why communism developed into despotic systems against the assumptions and beliefs of Marx and many early Marxists. Early communists also believed that in general communism is the extension of the Enlightenment liberalism the European ideal. Against this Hudson also gives a deep ideological explanation to the already existing anti-imperialism within Marxism and the enduring strength of Eastern socialism: Marxism is basically Eastern. To be more precise, Marxism champions the developmental process towards centralization, Eastern bureaucratic despotism, which has always been more complete in the East, while what made Europe special is that in every epoch it clung the right of property and property owners over everything else, basically Roman law, which leads to ancient (and early modern) slavery, serfdom and capitalism, and also the Roman Empire being ruled by a loose association of wealthy families (the reason why the term "Byzantine bureaucracy" exists is because until Constantine the Great the Roman Empire lacked a centralized bureaucracy), the Catholic Church failing/refusing to enthrone emperor who would rule over all of the former Western Roman Empire or becoming an empire themselves and in the end both Ancient Greek and modern parliamentary democracy, the latter of which thanks to its opposition to a one-party state and basically any centralized political authority allows capital and its lobbyists to direct access to political power. Seeing China's rise, their repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, the rehabilitation of Confucianism and the way many people on the West look up to China in the same way colonial elites identified with the West, it's hard to say that this "reactionary" communism and "orientalist" Marxism doesn't have merit.
>>2902588>i read a guy on twitter<i saw a lot of critiques>i seen a youtube video…. You people really don't fucking read books, do you?
>>2902596>>2902615Also didn't read the book award.
>>2902647Hudson is on the Graeber Indistute a lot doing talks, so i assume they were relatively close
>>2902647So basically he says that Marxism is just populism. Why did I read that vast tome of a post when you could have just given me a sentence long tldr
>>2902625sounds more like transthropology
>>2902643And how does that make anthropology superior to philosophy?
>>2902647I recently saw an interview with Hudson and Richard Wolff where I think Hudson said China is basically "doing" classical political economy a la Marx and Smith. He seems to have a very atypical view of these things, at least compared to how I personally usually hear people talk about this stuff.
>>2902825I don't really get it, why is Sahlins argument here racist, exactly?
>>2902643Anthropology simply tells you what exists, it doesn’t tell you what’s virtuous, moral, or healthy.
>>2902847No, that's the moronic part, the racist one is pic 1.
>>2902859To elaborate: for every culture that has aspects leftists would admire there’s other cultures where oppressive aspects are the norm. Which one is the more “authentic” expression of human existence? Tribal societies? Okay, what about tribes that are patriarchal where rape and pedophilia are commonplace? Tribes that murder disabled children?
>>2902859Correct. Is-Ought dichotomy. Thanks, Hume.
>>2902737I do read books but Debt was long and about a dry subject so I preferred to see what nuggets other people picked out from it.
>But now, I never see Graeber mentioned, ever.
I wouldn't draw from that the conclusion that he's "hated." Many leftists including myself have been arguing until we were blue in the face that identity politics coopted and sidelined more materialist narratives. If anything I expect Graeber to become back in vogue as material conditions worsen… idpol naval gazing was always a luxury.
>>2898775(continued)
>He was instrumental in rewriting the historical narrative of class formation and the development of money and economic systems. A lot of Marxists didn't like that but they had zero means of debunking his work. Who gives a fuck? There's something to be said about "directional truth", and Graeber was pointing in the right direction. We want to get people moving in the right direction. Theoretical details are secondary. This lack of pragmatism on the left is deeply troubling.
>>2903064>If anything I expect Graeber to become back in vogue as material conditions worsen… idpol naval gazing was always a luxury.Autistic and trans people are literally facing mass extermination under Trump. What do you mean by "worse?"
>>2902588Okay here are some pics from the Nrx twitter thread I saved. Conclusions he got from Graber's Debt that agrees with the far-right:
Kings cause freedom
Liberalism is utopian and autistic
Materialism is superstitious
China was always pro-market but anti-capitalist, and there's no contradiction there (Dengist horseshoe?)
Women had their chance in early civilizations but they couldn't cut it so were reduced to wards of males, just above children
Some other conclusions from other pics I don't feel like uploading now:
Caste systems are more tolerable to the population than debt peonage
Hobbes/liberalism is secular Protestantism (nothing new there)
Religion promoted freedom and anti-capitalism until liberals co-opted and destroyed them
Libertarians are even stupider and more utopian than liberals
Insecure power is bad
Roman property laws are incoherent unless you're a mind/body dualist (your mind owns your body, you're a slave to your mind?)
Not a big loss for music.
>>2902800I don't think it's superior. I think it has a use.
>occupy
>rojava
there's your answer burgerboy
>>2903864But not a greater or better use than philosophy or political economy, I hope.
>tfw died at 59
How the FUCK was he not able to make it to 60? RIP
>>2898826>(a specific form of idealism that led to figures like his anarchist progenitor Bakunin and later the Nazis to their antisemitism).The fuck are you talking about?
>>2902643>>2902859>>2902864Anarchist appeals to cultural anthropology are always tricky at best.
They will point to obscure cultures in certain parts of the world (usually Africa, Southeast Asia, or indigenous peoples of the Americas) that have features or practices that fit with the anarcho-communist conception of what the world ought to be, claiming that this is more proof ancomm is in our greater human nature. Yet, they never explain how those anarchistic cultural features can be applied to the modern, complex world. They never make an effort to fill in this massively huge gap between what cultural anthro shows vs. actual praxis for socialists in the West and elsewhere that isn't tribal.
>>2902647Wow dude
This Michael Hudson guy sounds like a hardcore fucking idealist and bourgeois philistine mutilating Marxian theory and promoting an idiotic transhistorical moralist petit bourgeois understanding of history ngl fam
>>2906531It was very sudden. He was in Italy and he got necrotic pancreatitis and died of internal bleeding. Very sad.
>>2908582He died of covid, from what I recall.
>>2907859>humans lived in a high trust gift based utopia until contaxt with foreigners caused comm9dity exchange and (((banks))) took overSound familiar?
>>2908939How did it go instead
>>2908979Exactly the same except there wasn't "gift based economy". There was no any economy because there was no surplus. There was nothing to gift. It was subsistence hunter gathering.
Primitive communism sucked.
>>2909111I'm AuDHD so give me the TL;DR or else you're ableist.
>>2909112I do too which is why I haven't read them either
>>2909085One of his big claims is that primitive communism never existed.
>>2910091So humans society always had surplus that was privately owned?
How does he criticize capitalist economists for being evil and wrong then go ahead and claim private property is human nature?
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