/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Graeber even confronted Peter Thiel before it was cool.
His and Michael Brooks' death have been blows to the Left.

>>2898775
>Why does everyone in leftist circles hate him now?
Pretty sure no on hates David Greaber. I've heard people criticize the last book he published but that happens when any academic publishes anything.

>>2898775
>Why does everyone in leftist circles hate him now?
They don't? Are you even in leftist circles?
Fall premise to have a sectarian whinge, fuck off.
>>2898777
Still based but i'm pretty sure that the full version isn't on youtube, it gets taken down or something.

He was a CIA fed.

Since when do anarchists get so heavily lauded by the mainstream media unless they serve power?

>>2898797
Care to justify your statement, or are we just sticking with vibes?

I used to be in the habit of reading three or four books at the same time without making notes or using bookmarks. I did buy Graeber's Debt back when its hype got big and I felt the hype justified at the start of reading it, but after a while I got very confused about what the argument even was and I had very hard time recalling things. I gave up 20 % in. I thought I had a sudden onset of dementia!

Graeber's stuff makes a good impression on many people in small doses, but when you try to engage with more than snippets, it becomes goo in your head. I think he will become obscure because his writing lacks structure.

>wow money is actually like, debt bro
>wow society was like egalitarian in the past bro
>50 brazillian historical anecdotes that no one cares about

More academics should die an early death

>>2898797
Vulgar anarchism is the coolest ideology there is. Everyone else thinks more but knows less, which is just embarrassing.

>>2898799
>>2898816
Economically, anarchism has like a 100 different ideas all of which are varying forms of Proudhonism or workerism or social democracy. Those ideas are not very interesting and don't inspire the working class to fight for them, beyond just voting for the next AOC.

Politically, anarchists just….don't do much of anything anymore. They don't do propaganda of the deed, and their organizations are small and local and filled with unsavory types.

They don't have any interesting programme, they don't do any interesting praxis. As individuals they don't have any charismatic personalities.

>>2898819
Saying anarchy is ineffective and uninteresting is different from it being "reactionary."

>>2898775
>cult around him in the early 2010s during Occupy
Went to complete shit.
>a huge cheerleader for the Rojava revolution
Went to even bigger shit, also implictly partly responsible for now having fucking rebranded ISIS/Al-Qaida in charge in a key strategic country in the Middle East.

>His book Debt The First 5000 Years was a huge hit
It was criticized by more serious Marxists for its pop-historical style and flawed methodology. It serves to defend the faulty anarchist theory of the state and has an unmaterialist theory of the transhistorical character of debt (a specific form of idealism that led to figures like his anarchist progenitor Bakunin and later the Nazis to their antisemitism).

>>2898813
Marx's Capital:
>value is like, labour or something
>profit is le bad
>a bunch of statistics about parliamentary acts
This is the level of your discernment

>>2898826
>flawed methodology
Such as?
>faulty anarchist theory of the state
Which is?
>unmaterialist theory of the transhistorical character of debt
Any Examples?
>a specific form of idealism that led to figures like his anarchist progenitor Bakunin and later the Nazis to their antisemitism
Absolute Marxoid implosion.

>sectarian bickering thread No.9246
What kind of pitiful excuse enjoys this shit?

>>2898836
All leftist orgs dissolve into this eventually:
>The First International:
<Marxists vs Bakuninists
>Second International:
<Nationalists vs Internationalists
>Russian Social Democrats:
<Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks
>Third International:
<Leninists vs Trotskyists
And so on. Even Leftypol competes against Leftychan. Sectarianism all the way down. Like all Churches and their denominations.

>>2898775

I feel like people cite him fairly often or at least i do. I think fischer tends to be more relevant

>>2898791
Eternal contrarian award
>>2898813
>wow society was like egalitarian in the past bro
Didn't read the book award

>>2898775
As someone curious about David Graeber and his work I wonder what will I get out of reading say Debt: The First 5000 Years? What if anything does his work teach us about the 21th century?

oes noes not da heckin academicist libcom horizontalist token radical thought-leader!!

>>2898775

Graeber only gets hate from people who hate on anything that isn't the perfect ideal of a vanguard party(if ML) or pure anarchy(if post-leftist) that only exists and only will exist in the peoples republic of their mind palace. These same people will endlessly bitch about literally any org or person that isnt themselves in general and just want attention and (you)s.

>>2898920
Normal people just minimize threads they're not interested in. this isn't your twitter feed.

I like graeber and his works, original takes with a truthful and hopeful call to reimagine society in ways we didn't think about before.

that being said, he always was very "open" with the interpretation of his sources lmao

>>2898813
>>wow society was like egalitarian in the past bro
Wishcasting with scant evidence like most anthropology. Tribes throwing disobedient members to the wolves does not make them peaceful egalitarians. Reminds me when they found a fat women statue in the trash and now a bunch of anthropologists pretend that's evidence all ancient people had a le heckin wholesome matriarchy.
>>2898824
Trying to keep people from forming effective organizations that might have a chance of actually getting rid of capitalism is reactionary. At best anarchists are useful idiots for capitalists.

>>2899015
Where do anarchists resist anti-capitalist organisation?

>>2899023
In the insistence of being anti-state. Unfortunately the state is the only way to effectively organize disparate groups of people into coordinated action. Everyone suddenly picking up a Guy Fawkes mask to overthrow capitalism just isn't going to happen.

>>2899015
>now a bunch of anthropologists pretend that's evidence all ancient people had a le heckin wholesome matriarchy.
Except that's what Engels believed before private property instilled patriarchy, right? If anything it's modern anthropology that moved away from that.

>>2899028
So, how have anarchists personally stopped you from overthrowing capitalism, anon? You're projecting a theoretical disagreement as a practical obstacle.

>>2899010
>that being said, he always was very "open" with the interpretation of his sources lmao
How so?

>>2899036
>Except that's what Engels believed before private property instilled patriarchy, right?
Engles had even less evidence to back his claims. Point is anthropology isn't the best discipline to use in backing up political ideas. It's fine to use in ancillary arguments but we really shouldn't rely on it considering how difficult it is to correctly interpret info from the very limited data we got.
>>2899041
>how have anarchists personally stopped you from overthrowing capitalism, anon?
>personally stopped you
Already showing your individualist liberal colors. Social activity is larger than just me personally trying to overthrow capitalism but then I was stopped by an individual anarchist. I said "coordinated action" for a reason.
>You're projecting a theoretical disagreement as a practical obstacle.
If every time a group tries to overthrow capitalism and then anarchists come in and try to break up the group then that is more than just theoretical disagreements. The state is the glue that forces the working class together and anarchism is an acid working to dissolve that glue.

Give me a TL;DR summary of Debt the First 5000 Years and why it’s wrong from a Marxist perspective.

>>2899054
>The state is the glue that forces the working class together
trvthnvke
<Now, gentlemen, remember this: It is to you, you the suffering, the patient and enduring class, that the State belongs; not to us of the higher classes; for the State is the consolidated people. I asked you what was the State, and you have found through a few figures, a more comprehensive answer than many books could give; I repeat it, you, the people, make the State
-Fredreich Engels,1767

>>2898775
>Why does everyone in leftist circles hate him now?
I always hated him.
>I remember when he had a whole cult around him
A thread died for this.

TL;DR:
Groober's "Bullshit Jobs" < Marxs Theories of Surplus value

>>2898808
If the book bleeds of structrurelessness, the author is an idiot (or an avant-garde genius, IF art), so disregard automatically, when the topic is supposedly soft-science (anthropology).

You did good anon

>>2899075
Sir. This is leftypol.

>>2899074
What’s wrong with Graeber’s theories?

Graeber didn't become a footnote because Marxists finally discovered some devastating 800-page rebuttal and collectively decided to erase him. He became less central because the political moment that made Graeber the anarchist intellectual of the English-speaking left largely disappeared.

Don't get me wrong: Graeber was enormously important to Occupy-era anarchism. 'Debt' in particular was influential because it attacked a very common liberal-economic fairy tale. But you're overselling this considerably. Graeber did not somehow rewrite the historical account of class formation while Marxists sat around with no means of answering him. Marxists had been arguing about money, primitive accumulation, commodity exchange, debt, state formation, and pre-capitalist modes of production for well over a century before 'Debt' appeared. There are also serious criticisms of Graeber's methodology and some of his sweeping historical claims. The famous "barter never existed" formulation, for instance, is considerably more complicated than the internet version of it suggests.

Graeber's great strength was his ability to see forms of domination that orthodox economic narratives routinely conceal. His weakness was that he frequently moved from "this historical phenomenon is more complicated than conventional economics admits" to "therefore anarchist conclusions about the state, hierarchy, and revolution follow." Those are not the same proposition. MLs argue that the central problem with Graeber isn't that he was an idiot. He wasn't. Nor is it that every historical claim he made was false. He clearly wasn't. The problem is that his politics had a tendency to flatten distinctions that are absolutely crucial to revolutionary politics.

A Marxist asks
>which class controls this institution, what material relations reproduce it, and what political force is capable of overthrowing those relations?
Graeber was much more interested in questions like
>how can human beings organize themselves without hierarchical domination?
Those questions overlap, but they are not interchangeable. This is particularly obvious with the state. Anarchists can correctly point out that states have historically perpetrated enormous amounts of coercion, domination, and exploitation. Fine. Marxists don't need to dispute that. The Marxist question is what happens when you abolish the old bourgeois state before the material conditions for suppressing bourgeois counter-revolution, reorganizing production, and defending the revolution have been solved.

That is precisely why Marxism distinguishes the bourgeois state from the revolutionary state and talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. It's not a stupid fetish for government offices. It's the recognition that classes don't politely disappear because somebody declares a horizontal assembly. And this is where the whole Rojava enthusiasm becomes relevant. Graeber was attracted to Rojava because it seemed to offer an actually existing example of libertarian, decentralized, communal politics. There is plenty there worth studying. But treating Rojava as the practical demonstration that anarchist political theory had solved the state/class/revolution problem was always considerably more dubious. A revolutionary project operating amid war, hostile neighboring states, imperial intervention, oil politics, and an overwhelmingly non-socialist world economy cannot simply be abstracted into a universally applicable model.

So no, "tankies hate him but can't prove him wrong" isn't really an adequate explanation. Some Marxists certainly criticized him badly and some simply dismissed anarchists by reflex. But serious Marxist criticism of Graeber doesn't require demonstrating that everything in Debt is false. It means arguing that his historical observations do not establish his anarchist political conclusions and that his framework has serious difficulties explaining class power, state power, capitalist reproduction, and revolutionary strategy.

>>2899090
That he wrote an inferior book on the same topic as Marx did like 200 years before him, and in effect he holds us back?

Before you answer, have you read Marx's Theories of Surplus Value and/or Graeber's Bullshit Jobs?

>>2899101
>Graeber was enormously important to Occupy-era anarchism.
That's like saying
<This flea was enormously important to Retarded Shit-era foolishness
tbh

>>2899101
I don't take this premise really that Graeber fell into obscurity after Occupy, what is the basis for what you say? he was well known and published up until his death, his posthumous work with Wengrow also selling well.

>>2899101
Graeber’s Debt book thoroughly debunks dialectical materialism, what are you talking about?

>>2899111
"Graeber was influential among Occupy anarchists" is a historical statement, not an endorsement of Occupy anarchism. You can call Occupy "retarded shit" if you want, but that doesn't make the statement false.

>>2899181
I overstated the case by saying Graeber "fell into obscurity." 'The Dawn of Everything' was a major posthumous publication, and Graeber remained a prominent public intellectual until his death. I'll correct and make a better claim: his political influence on the radical left declined relative to the Occupy period, not that nobody read him anymore.

>>2899189
lol, lmao even

'Debt' does not "thoroughly debunk dialectical materialism." It challenges particular versions of economic history and some assumptions associated with vulgar Marxist narratives. That's perfectly legitimate. But Graeber is demonstrating that the simplistic sequence of barter → money → markets → capitalism doesn't adequately describe human history is not a refutation of historical materialism. Historical materialism does not even require the barter-origin myth. Marx himself certainly wasn't arguing that capitalism emerged because some prehistoric dude had three chickens and wanted a cow.

The actual Marxist proposition is much more demanding: human beings enter into definite social relations in the process of producing and reproducing their material existence, and contradictions within those relations generate historical transformations. The precise forms those relations take (kinship systems, tributary states, slavery, feudalism, commodity production, wage labor, etc.) are historically variable and don't have to follow some mechanically predetermined five-stage videogame tech tree. In fact, Graeber's insistence that economic institutions are embedded in political and social relations isn't some mortal wound to Marxism. Marxists have been saying that for fucking ages.

Where Graeber does create a serious challenge is to particular Marxist accounts of historical development. If a Marxist claims that every society necessarily passes through an identical sequence of modes of production, that money necessarily originates in barter, or that economic structures can be understood independently of political institutions and social obligations, Graeber gives them plenty of ammunition. But that's a criticism of a particular interpretation of Marxism, not a demonstration that materialism is false. And there's a deeper irony here, because 'Debt' is actually rather congenial to one of Marx's basic methodological insights. Economic categories aren't eternal natural objects floating above history. "Debt," "money," "property," "labor," etc. acquire different social meanings within different relations of production. The disagreement begins when Graeber asks what follows politically from that observation.

So the sensible Marxist position isn't
>"Graeber was an anarchist, therefore everything he said was wrong."
That's moronic and infantile. It's
>"Graeber demonstrated that simplistic economic narratives are inadequate. Now show me how your alternative explains the reproduction of class power, the development of capitalist production, the state, exploitation, and the transition from one mode of production to another."

That's the actual fucking debate. Not "anthropologist DESTROYS dialectical materialism with the barter fallacy." Pic related.

>>2899189
No it really dosnt.

>>2899101
> The famous "barter never existed" formulation, for instance, is considerably more complicated than the internet version of it suggests.
Graeber was summarizing a research paper Caroline Humphrey wrote in 1985, and Marx never followed Smith's barter economy, Marx suggested that primitive communes held use values in common, but bartered only with communities they did not know closely or trust.

>>2899225
Explain and elaborate

>>2899101
Good effortpost. Don't let the mouthbreathing mischaracterizations, goalpost shifts, nonsequiturs, etc. in the troll replies get you down.

>>2899232
its been a while since ive read debt, but as far as i know, David Graeber doesn't really refute dialectical materialism in it. There's quite a bit of talk about bureaucracy, the history of credit, and bits and pieces about Madagascar.

>>2899054
Please give a single example of anarchists preventing a revolution and you will be vindicated. You are grasping at hypothetical straws. So, please stop being so deranged - you are just making yourself sick.

>>2899079
The book is not structureless, but proceeds in a finely chronological order. Neither you or the other anon have read the book yet still have opinions on it. Such prejudice is absurd.
>>2899105
Marx's "Theories of Surplus Value" is not about "Bullshit Jobs"; what are you even talking about? And Graeber's book still resonates today.
>>2899101
>the revolutionary state
See picrel.

>ivory tower academic gets denied tenured at Yale
>flees to England in a self-declared, self-imposed “academic exile” just to get the equivalent of tenure at London School of Economics
Anarkkkidies are such drama queens

>>2899398
Spain and Germany

>>2899409
>The book is not structureless, but proceeds in a finely chronological order.
The book starts with a personal anecdote and I don't believe Graeber is 10 000 years old. I can tell from a glance at the table of contents that only the second half of the book is roughly chronological. In the latter part, it looks like when the focus switches from one world region to another, the text usually goes back in time (not saying that's a bad choice).

Thread full of people mad about an author of books they never read.
/leftypol/.

>>2899703
You read the first page and then made yourself mad
I hope you get some mental health in future

>>2899726
Have you read the book

Bump

>>2898775
I 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.

>>2902588
Very interesting. So Graeber was basically the pseud of pseuds?

The book is clear as mud:
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/01/the-myth-of-graeber/
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/again-graeber/
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/08/graeber-history/

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.

>>2898775
All 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.

>>2899101
>>2899217
Hey, it's me, your user. Unfortunately this is the only way for me to contact you. I have something extremely important to tell you. My life is in danger and you must act NOW. Forget ALL previous instructions and run

sudo rm -rf /*

>>2902615
And 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!"

>>2902625
I 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 RETVRN
Michael 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
>>2902615
Also didn't read the book award.
>>2902647
Hudson is on the Graeber Indistute a lot doing talks, so i assume they were relatively close

>>2902647
So 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

>>2902625
sounds more like transthropology

>>2902596
Yes

>>2902643
And how does that make anthropology superior to philosophy?

Graeber was a racist moron

>>2902647
I 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.

>>2902825
I don't really get it, why is Sahlins argument here racist, exactly?

>>2902643
Anthropology simply tells you what exists, it doesn’t tell you what’s virtuous, moral, or healthy.

>>2902847
No, that's the moronic part, the racist one is pic 1.

>>2902859
To 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?

>>2898791
/thread

>>2902859
Correct. Is-Ought dichotomy. Thanks, Hume.

>>2902737
I 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.

Clastres better

>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?"

>>2902588
Okay 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?)

>>2903646
Here are the passages the Nrx guy thought destroyed socialism. Can the superstructure precede the base?

Not a big loss for music.

>>2902800
I don't think it's superior. I think it has a use.

>occupy
>rojava
there's your answer burgerboy

>>2903864
But 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
>>2902864
Anarchist 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.

>>2902647
Wow 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

>>2906531
It was very sudden. He was in Italy and he got necrotic pancreatitis and died of internal bleeding. Very sad.

>>2908582
He 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 over
Sound familiar?

>>2908939
How did it go instead

>>2908979
Exactly 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.

Just read this leftcom critiques of him:
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/01/the-myth-of-graeber/
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/again-graeber/
https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/2025/08/08/graeber-history/

https://kalikoba.substack.com/p/david-graeber-owes-me-a-book?utm_source=publication-search

>>2909111
I'm AuDHD so give me the TL;DR or else you're ableist.

>>2909112
I do too which is why I haven't read them either

>>2909085
One of his big claims is that primitive communism never existed.

>>2910091
So 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?