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.
77 posts and 10 image replies omitted.>>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?
Any chance his work could make a comeback, especially now that DSA is winning victories and will need intellectuals specializing in the kinds of stuff he wrote about in order to craft their policies?
>>2898777Thiel was a sweaty disgusting mess even back then
>>2941673Hard to make a 'comeback' when it never went away.
Stop taking retarded bait OPs that start from a false premise at face value, you literal spaz.
>>2908921??? No. I just told you how he died.
His enemies are teaching his corpse to dance.
>>2910105Something very basic you understand when you start studying anthropology (or even just history) at a serious level is that there's no such thing as a human nature. People are very diverse and this should be very obvious on a Graeber thread. Anyone coming to talk to you about "human nature" is just trying to imply their ideology is the only one possible.
>>2941781shouldnt an anthrropologist like graeber know that then though, he clearly thinks "gift economies" are more natural and right than "debt"
>>2941744I’ve barely heard Graeber’s name mentioned since he died and after his posthumous work.
>>2941996Why do people talk about books more when they are new?
Truly a mystery for the ages, isn't it.
>>2941673Why would DSA care about what an anarchist anthropologist has to say?
>>2942033because they're both libs
>>2942037Graeber was heavily censored when he was alive.
>>2942629What was censored? Did he have a potty mouth? I fail to understand your point. Are you alluding to a secret doctrine that no publisher dared to print?
>>2942635He as relentlessly scrutinized for having been proven right. Both capitalists and Marxoids won’t admit this.
>>2943030lmao graeber was wrong about a ton of shit even on an editorial level, as in he regularly misunderstood or mischaracterized his sources
>>2943031What sources did he “mischaracterize” and why does that lead to his conclusions being wrong? Elaborate.
Why do anarchists always arrive at their conclusions from anthropology and not philosophy?
fuck, reading graeber in high school was such a moment for me. didn't shake my marxism but really convinced me how important it is to be open to other disciplines' contributions, his anthropology rlly legitimized the contemporary anarchism of occupy as a serious development
>Why does everyone in leftist circles hate him now?they do? the dawn of everything was his last non-posthumous publication and i rlly enjoyed it as a companion to kropotkin, unless you seriously consider meme takes like
>>2899015>the entire field of anthropology, hundreds of thousands of ppl, deboonked by daily wire-tier understandings>>2898813>the book is about how the past was egalitarian even though it argues the exact opposite>>2898819>contemporary social democracy, born of marxism, is anarchism… and marxists do much else? early 2020s black blocs at least closed down business districts for a day or two, more than can be said about the dozens of dozen-man marxist parties who went from protesting on fucking slip lanes to becoming ponzi schemes for rape
>>2898826had nothing to do w/assad's shocking incompetence in getting wagner'd by a diet taliban. for every excuse you can make for him, you could make a thousand for rojava
>transhistorical character of debtwhere the fuck do you people get this?
>>2899101>>2899217/thread, i actually think a lot of anarchist conceptions of the state are better than marxoids' equivalents but it always comes down to its class character. parasites die from stakes to the heart, not the head, and in that, the state can be a useful tool, but one that should be looked on with great suspicion
>>2952575… and yet the former runs rings around the latter because marxists would sooner read kant for a dozen vaguely useful sentences than a hau literary review or whatever
his seminal work is not Debt The First 5000 Years, it's actually Bullshit Jobs, and no one really wants to hear about how their job is bullshit right now, so naturally he fell out of favor. it's really that shrimple.
>>2952623>>2952623Where do you retards get 5vos shit from? If you don't know anything about the OP why not just move on instead of trying to just say random shit that just sounds right to you?
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