<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/07/david-graeber-optimistic-anarchist-rebecca-solnit>
"David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on
fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every
time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his
death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless
energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out
as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was
also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his
radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around
him.
He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional
peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his
own society. Essays such as
Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence,
Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book
Bullshit Jobs came from
using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring,
or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011
bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social
arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.
He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation
was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among
countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or
technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been
dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear
narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial
innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a
single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as
ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a
source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t
have to be this way.
As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book
Pirate
Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the
present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was
concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this
society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as
well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have
escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments."
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
