Notable/frequent guests include Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Edward Snowden, Vandana Shiva, David Graeber, Greta Thunberg, and so many more not listed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Now!
"Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion," as David Graeber explained so well. "If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police? ...Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?" https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/#anarchism#DavidGraeber
"[A] great embarrassing fact ... haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft."
"The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as 'cowardly acts' the very next morning. On the face of it, this is odd. After all, there’s no lack of bad things one can find to say about Mohammed Atta and his confederates—take your pick, really—but surely 'coward' isn’t one of them. Blowing up a wedding party using an unmanned drone might be considered an act of cowardice. Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts."
"Giovanni Arrighi has noted that after the South Sea Bubble, British capitalism largely abandoned the corporate form. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had instead come to rely on a combination of high finance and small family firms—a pattern that held throughout the next century, the period of maximum scientific and technological innovation."
“[I]t’s possible to act like an anarchist – to behave in ways that would work without bureaucratic structures of coercion to enforce them – without calling yourself an anarchist, or anything else. In fact most of us act like anarchists – even communists – a lot of the time. To be an anarchist, for me, is to do that self-consciously, as a way of gradually bringing a world entirely based on those principles into being.”
#DavidGraeber to Jo Lateu on acting like an anarchist
reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow right now
It's basically an anthropolical and archeological look at the beginning of humanity using new research from the past couple decades and it has really informed me on what pre-agricultural societies would have looked like in just the 4 chapters I've read so far
I highly recommend it even if you disagree with their conclusions, it's riveting stuff
"The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? "
"Writing as part of Jarvis Cocker’s Big Issue takeover before his untimely death earlier this month, David Graeber explains his confusion about why we’d destroy the planet if we don’t have to.
(...)
Our society is addicted to work. If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person. As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time....."
"One of the arguments against allowing women to vote in the [US] constitutional debates was it’s unfair to unmarried men because a married man would have two votes: himself and his property. This runs right through American history. It isn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court officially determined that women are people, peers, who can serve on federal juries."
"[In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber is] pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our artificial traditions, which exclude lots of what happened and reshape the rest into fitting into convenient frames for existing power systems."
Most of you will have seen recent news media reports of an Hamas attack on Israel, resulting in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issuing a formal declaration of war:
One more posthumous book by #DavidGraeber. Is he the Tupak of nonfiction?
"As questions of decolonisation rub up against the legacy of Enlightenment thinking in the West, anthropologist David Graeber argues in his posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (to be published early next year) that Enlightenment ideas themselves are not intrinsically European and were indeed shaped by non-European sources."
"Meanwhile, free-market enthusiasts—the sort of people who elsewhere in the world are referred to as “liberals”—began casting about for a new name. The one they ended up fixing on was libertarian—a term they borrowed from the Left. The result is that it is even more difficult for Americans to talk to anyone else about politics, since, in the rest of the world, libertarian still largely retains its traditional meaning as a synonym for anarchist."
"Not only does the history of New York show that politicians can rarely get elected running against community; it also shows that, once the process of social triage is already accepted as a fait accompli, politicians can often quite readily win elections on law-and-order tickets, promising to protect middle and working-class citizens from the chaos and violence that such policies invariably unleash."
"In Europe, Great Britain, easily the most assiduous in carrying out free-market reforms, now has living standards lower than Ireland’s, while Finland, which of all European countries has the largest share of its economy dedicated to social welfare programs, has, according to the World Economic Forum, now replaced the United States as the most economically competitive nation on earth."
"The essence of the neoliberal position in fact bears stunning similarity to Stalinism—that is, to the very arguments used by Marxist revolutionaries in the 1920s and 1930s to justify the creation of a bureaucratic state. One might summarize it like this: 'Science has shown that there is only one possible way forward, and it is the same for any society on earth...”
People who bang on about what an economic basketcase #Venezuela is thanks to Chavizmo, might need to be reminded that as of 2009;
"Argentina and Brazil paid off their entire IMF debt; soon, with the help of Venezuela’s petrodollars, so had the rest of Latin America. (Between 2003 and 2007, Latin America’s total debt to the IMF declined by 98.4 percent. They basically owe nothing.)"
"Where Walter Benjamin claims that, since history is written by the victors, every document of civilisation is a document of barbarism, Graeber and Wengrow seek to re-write certain foundational documents. However, while Benjamin writes against the grain in the name of the oppressed, the proletariat, Graeber and Wengrow appear to do so in the name of ‘freedom’."
“When people ask me what sorts of organization could exist in an anarchist society, I always answer: any form of organization one can imagine, and probably many we presently can’t, with only one proviso—they would be limited to ones that could exist without anyone having the ability, at any point, to call on armed men to show up and say ‘I don’t care what you have to say about this; shut up and do what you’re told.’”
anniversary of David Graeber's passing, when David Wengrow will present the 3rd annual lecture in honour of his memory: THE THIRD FREEDOM
Co-hosted - free/online - by @RojavaUniv@LSEAnthropology@BUAPoficial@CIIS_anthro Register here: rb.gy/f5ezb
In “The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters,” the #anthropologist Nurit Bird-David described an interesting social institution among the Nayaka, a forager society in southern India. Bird-David calls this “demand sharing.”
“Nayaka give to each other, request from each other, expect to get what they ask for, and feel obliged to give what they are asked for. They do not give resources to each other in a calculated, foresighted fashion, with a view to receiving something in return, nor do they make claims for debts.”
This reminds me of a common theme in David Graeber’s work: the idea of what he called “everyday communism,” a baseline of human sociability.
If you were to come across a drowning child whom you could easily save, you’d probably act to do so, even without any expectation of payment. If you saw someone walking closely behind you while you were entering a door, you’d probably hold it open for them.
That is, if the need is great enough or the cost is low enough, most people will readily share without reward.
@HeavenlyPossum if I could remember just one thing #DavidGraeber taught me, I'd pick how insanely wide the possibility space for human societies is. Honestly, any claims that something is "natural" or "evolved" for humans mostly make me irritated these days (and don't even get me started on "evolutionary psychology"), particularly if they dovetail with current society a tad too well. If humans evolved towards anything in particular, surely it must be adaptability itself. No way we could have spread across entirety of the planet otherwise.
That is not to say we don't have any natural urges, because of course we do. But there are many of them, and societies can boost or suppress them in so many combinations, it's barely a limitation on what's possible.