David Graeber

Before there was money, there was debtEvery economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists—David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins—explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition.Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia—not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial—Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world, from the BaKongo to the Aztec to the Shilluk to the eighteenth-century pirate kings of Madagascar and beyond. Richly delivered with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of Graeber and Sahlins, this book opens up new avenues for the anthropological study of this fascinating and ubiquitous political figure.

Τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2014 πραγματοποιείται μια δημόσια συζήτηση ανάμεσα σε δύο εκ διαμέτρου αντίθετες προσωπικότητες. Ένας δισεκατομμυριούχος επενδυτής, συνιδρυτής της Paypal και της Palantir, πρωτοπόρος στη δημιουργία κατασκοπευτικού λογισμικού σε συνεργασία με μυστικές υπηρεσίες, χρηματοδότης της εκστρατείας για την εκλογή του Τραμπ το 2016 -ο οποίος δηλώνει φιλελεύθερος- συνομιλεί με έναν ιδιαίτερα δημοφιλή και πολυμεταφρασμένο αναρχικό και ανθρωπολόγο για τις ματαιωμένες προσδοκίες και για ένα μέλλον που παραμένει σκοτεινό. Ο Ντέιβιντ Γκρέμπερ συναντά τον Πίτερ Τιλ σε μια ανοιχτή συζήτηση-σύγκρουση που φέρνει αντιμέτωπες τις αντιλήψεις δυο άσπονδων κόσμων.

From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms?To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today—takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages.He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilizations were organized and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature. He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn't?This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.

The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies--vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire.In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, and the culmination of ideas that he explored in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archeologist David Wengrow).Graeber explores how the proto-democratic practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.

A bold rethinking of the most powerful political idea in the world—democracy—as seen through the lens of the most transformative political movements of our time and the story of how radical democracy can yet transform America Democracy has been the American religion since before the Revolution—from New England town halls to the multicultural democracy of Atlantic pirate ships. But can our current political system, one that seems responsive only to the wealthiest among us and leaves most Americans feeling disengaged, voiceless, and disenfranchised, really be called democratic? And if the tools of our democracy are not working to solve the rising crises we face, how can we—average citizens—make change happen? David Graeber, one of the most influential scholars and activists of his generation, takes readers on a journey through the idea of democracy, provocatively reorienting our understanding of pivotal historical moments, and extracts their lessons for today—from the birth of Athenian democracy and the founding of the United States of America to the global revolutions of the twentieth century and the rise of a new generation of activists. Underlying it all is a bracing argument that in the face of increasingly concentrated wealth and power in this country, a reenergized, reconceived democracy—one based on consensus, equality, and broad participation—can yet provide us with the just, free, and fair society we want. The Democracy Project tells the story of the resilience of the democratic spirit and the adaptability of the democratic idea. It offers a fresh take on vital history and an impassioned argument that radical democracy is, more than ever, our best hope.

Anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent years—against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large “spokescouncil” planning meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture.Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, “objective” perspective is impossible, Graeber writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political implications.David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who teaches at the University of London. Active in numerous direct-action political organizations, he has written for Harper’s Magazine and is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, and Possibilities.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews."The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovksy and a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.

Today's capitalist systems appear to be coming apart - but what is the alternative? In a generation or so, capitalism may no longer exist as it's impossible to maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet. David Graeber explores political strategy, global trade, violence, alienation and creativity looking for a new common sense.

Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

“If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber is the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the basis for understanding our own.” —Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago“Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable.”—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University In this new collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology . Written in an unpretentious style that uses accessible and entertaining language to convey complex theoretical ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground, including the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions in rural Madagascar, and the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests. But they’re linked by a clear to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken, or might take in the future. Anarchism is currently undergoing a worldwide revival, in many ways replacing Marxism as the theoretical and moral center of new revolutionary social movements. It has, however, left little mark on the academy. While anarchists and other visionaries have turned to anthropology for ideas and inspiration, anthropologists are reluctant to enter into serious dialogue. David Graeber is not. These essays, spanning almost twenty years, show how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy. David Graeber has written for Harper’s Magazine , New Left Review , and numerous scholarly journals. He is the author or editor of four books and currently lives in New York City. In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

David Graeber’s influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics.Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

สิ่งหนึ่งที่ใครก็ปฏิเสธไม่ได้คือ การขบคิดเกี่ยวกับกษัตริย์นั้นเป็นเรื่องน่าสนุก นั่นคือสาเหตุว่าทำไมผู้คนจำนวนมากถึงชอบแต่งตัวเลียนแบบกษัตริย์ หรือไม่ก็เล่นเกมที่ทำให้พวกเขาสามารถสวมบทบาทเป็นกษัตริย์หรือราชินีได้ หรือแม้แต่การมีหนังสือและเรื่องราวมากมายเกี่ยวกับกษัตริย์ที่ผู้คนชอบอ่านกัน หากมีหนังสือมากมายแล้ว เหตุใดเราสองคนถึงจะมาเขียนเรื่องกษัตริย์อยู่อีกเล่า จะด้วยเหตุผลกลใดก็แล้วแต่ คำถามส่วนใหญ่ของเราก็คือ ทำไมเรื่องราวเกี่ยวกับกษัตริย์และราชินีถึงดึงดูดและน่าสนใจ เราสนใจใคร่รู้สิ่งใดในเรื่องราวของพวกเขา และอะไรที่เราคิดว่าน่ารำคาญหรือแม้แต่น่าสะพรึงกลัวเวลาที่พวกเขาวนเวียนอยู่รอบตัว พวกเขามีที่มาจากไหน และเพราะเหตุใดกษัตริย์ถึงไม่เคยหายไป มันเป็นไปได้หรือไม่ที่เราจะเก็บรักษาแต่ความเทิดทูนบูชากษัตริย์และราชินีไว้ โดยเพิกเฉยต่อกลิ่นคาวคลุ้งอันมีที่มาจากหนึ่งในพวกเขาหรือทั้งโคตรเหง้าหนังสือเล่มนี้เป็นหนังสือที่รวบรวมและสาธยายคำถามและคำตอบมากมายที่จะช่วยให้เราสามารถเข้าใจรากเหง้าที่มาของสิ่งเหล่านี้ แต่มันก็เป็นหนังสือที่เต็มไปด้วยความบันเทิง ด้วยเหตุที่ว่ากษัตริย์และราชินีทั้งหลายก็ล้วนแล้วแต่น่าตลกขบขัน เราจะได้เห็นกันต่อไปว่า อะไรจะเกิดขึ้นเมื่อใครบางคนทำอะไรก็ได้ตามที่ใจต้องการ และคนอื่น ๆ พยายามที่จะวางกลยุทธ์ทุกอย่างเท่าที่จะเป็นไปได้เพื่อไม่ให้เกิดความฉิบหายตามมา... เราทั้งสองคนหวังว่าผู้อ่านจะสนุกสนานกับหนังสือเล่มนี้เฉกเช่นเดียวกับที่พวกเราสองคนสนุกสนานกับการเขียนมันขึ้นมานิกาและเดวิด

Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and descendants of slaves. Anthropologist David Graeber arrived for fieldwork at the height of tensions attributed to a disastrous communal ordeal two years earlier. As Graeber uncovers the layers of historical, social, and cultural knowledge required to understand this event, he elaborates a new view of power, inequality, and the political role of narrative. Combining theoretical subtlety, a compelling narrative line, and vividly drawn characters, Lost People is a singular contribution to the anthropology of politics and the literature on ethnographic writing.

Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently.What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika’s then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit—because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be—and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are, what it is to be human, and what’s possible when we make way for wonder.Cities Made Differently exists in two versions, one for reading and thinking, the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

"Occupy Wall Street!" Mit diesem Aufruf besetzt im September 2011 eine Gruppe von Aktivisten den Zuccotti-Park im New Yorker Finanzdistrikt. Sie wollen friedlich gegen die Finanzmärkte und Banken, die ungerechte Verteilung der Vermögen sowie die Untätigkeit der Politik demonstrieren. Was steckt hinter dieser Bewegung, die in kurzer Zeit Millionen Menschen rund um den Globus mobilisiert? Was steckt hinter den Guy-Fawkes-Masken der Besetzer? Was steckt hinter ihrem Mut und ihrem Zorn? Der Vordenker und Aktivist David Graeber berichtet aus erster Hand, wie alles begann, wie die Bewegung stark werden konnte und warum dies erst der Anfang ist.

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ‘agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.

Poslednjaja i izdannaja uzhe posmertno kniga amerikanskogo antropologa Devida Grebera (1961-2020) - rezultat ego ekspeditsii na Madagaskar, kuda on otpravilsja, buduchi aspirantom Chikagskogo universiteta. V svoej rabote Greber rezko kritikuet evropotsentrichnyj vzgljad, soglasno kotoromu "dikie narody" mogut stat tsivilnymi tolko v rezultate gramotnogo upravlenija evropejtsev. Eta kniga - smelaja popytka vernut antropologii i etnografii ee iznachalnuju poisk alternativnogo vzgljada na razvitie obschestva i kultury. Greber "dekoloniziruet Prosveschenie", dokazyvaja, chto istoki idej ravenstva, svobody i spravedlivosti stoit iskat za predelami "zapadnoj tsivilizatsii". On odnoznachno utverzhdaet - te samye vymyshlennye egalitarnye "piratskie korolevstva" vrode Libertalii tak ili inache suschestvovali na samom dele. Na primere Konfederatsii betsimisaraka Greber opisyvaet ustrojstvo realnogo proekta "obschestva buduschego", o kotorom lish fantaziroval Tomas Mor i drugie avtory utopij.

مع مطلع القرن الجديد، تجدّدت آمال البشر، التي أجهضها القرن العشرون، في المساواة والحرية والعدالة الاجتماعية.توالت الحركات الجماهيرية الكبرى من انتفاضة فلاّحي الزاباتيستا في المكسيك، إلى حركات مناهضة العولمة، وثورات العالم العربي.رفع المشاركون راية الأناركية، التي تجمع بين أفضل ما في الليبرالية وما في الشيوعية. فأصبح الموقف الثوري الصريح مُشبّعا بتوجّه أخلاقي بارز، مع نزعة طوباوية مرحة، وديموقراطية مباشرة. رفعوا شعار السلمية، والتنظيم الأفقي الطوعي، وصارت الثورة أفعالاً يومية صغيرة يمكنها، حين يُضاعفها ملايين الناس، أن تُغيّر العالم.ويرسم هذا الكتاب ملامح هذه القيم التي رأينا الناس يمارسونها فعلا، عن وعي أو عن غير وعي، بقلم سيندي ميلستين الناشطة الأناركية البارزة، وديفيد جريبر المُشارك في مناهضة العولمة وأستاذ الأنثروبولوجيا الذي يُعدّ ألمع مفكري هذا الاتجاه الآن.

Τα τελευταία είκοσι περίπου χρόνια, γίναμε μάρτυρες των σαρωτικών αλλαγών στη διάρθρωση της κυριαρχίας των υπερεθνικών και τοπικών ελίτ, όπως και της ανάδυσης νέων κοινωνικών κινημάτων. Είδαμε να τίθενται σε αμφισβήτηση και να καταρρέουν, από τα κάτω, καθεστώτα που έδειχναν ακλόνητα στη βόρεια Αφρική, ενώ και στον δυτικό κόσμο τα κινήματα των πλατειών έθεσαν σε κίνηση, για πρώτη φορά τόσο μαζικά, την κριτική στη "δημοκρατία" και στην κοινωνική σχέση που λέγεται κράτος.Ο Ντέιβιντ Γκρέμπερ πιάνει το νήμα από εκεί που το άφησε στα "Αποσπάσματα μιας αναρχικής ανθρωπολογίας", αναζητώντας τις εκκινήσεις αυτών των πολιτικών και κοινωνικών διεργασιών. Με βλέμμα πιο διεισδυτικό, εντρυφεί στα περάσματα που διανοίγουν τα νεότατα κοινωνικά κινήματα στα οποία είναι ενεργός, στους προβληματισμούς και στις αντιλήψεις τους, και περισσότερο από το να καταφεύγει σε έτοιμες λύσεις και συνθηματικές ευκολίες, αναζητά τη διασύνδεση εκείνη μεταξύ θεωρίας και πράξης που θα διευκολύνει την ανάδυση ενός ουσιαστικού κινηματικού μετώπου που θα αφήσει οριστικά στο βάθος της ιστορίας τις πρωτοπορίστικες εκείνες αντιλήψεις που συνωστίζονται ανάμεσα στον οικονομισμό, στον ηγεμονισμό και στον αυταρχισμό.

The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.

Finora la ricerca antropologica si è chiesta non perché la burocrazia produca assurdità, ma perché la gente lo ritenga normale. Qui Graeber va oltre e mette in discussione le istituzioni burocratiche – dagli ospizi per gli anziani agli apparati di polizia – rilevando come in ultima istanza la loro legittimità si basi sempre sulla minaccia della forza. L'iper-burocrazia, con la sua pretesa di disciplinare le relazioni umane attraverso schemi categoriali semplici, uccide la capacità di inventare nuove forme di socialità, creando «zone morte dell'immaginazione» dove si installa la stupidità burocratica. Infatti è proprio questa incapacità di capire le esigenze e i punti di vista delle persone concrete che porta all'inefficienza, e dunque all'incapacità di governare i fenomeni complessi. Fenomeni nei quali certamente rientrano i nuovi movimenti radicali, di cui Graeber abbozza un'etnografia costruita da vicino e dall'interno, concentrandosi sui due maggiori aspetti l'attività distruttiva dei Black Bloc e l'attività creativa incarnata dai grandi pupazzi. E ci spiega anche perché allo sguardo miope delle istituzioni coercitive questi due aspetti siano indistinguibili.Contiene "Dead zones of the imagination" (2006) e "On the phenomenology of giant puppets" (2012)

David Graebers Vermächtnis»Die ultimative heimliche Wahrheit der Welt besteht darin, dass wir selbst die Welt gestalten und sie genauso gut anders gestalten könnten.«Kaum jemand dachte so frei, kaum jemand schrieb so geistreich gegen den Kapitalismus und die aus ihm erwachsene Unfreiheit David Graeber gehört zu den radikalsten Denkern der letzten Jahrzehnte. Dieser Band versammelt 18 so überraschende wie intellektuell anregende Texte zu seinen wichtigsten Themen – die Essenz seines Schaffens und sein geistiges Vermächtnis.Warum akzeptieren wir Ungleichheit? Wieso sehen wir gesellschaftliche Hierarchien als gegeben an? Und warum nehmen wir die Ausbeutung durch den Kapitalismus einfach so hin? Der international anerkannte Anthropologe und Bestsellerautor David Graeber machte es sich zur Lebensaufgabe, die Widersprüche unserer Gesellschaft und deren Wurzeln schonungslos zu offenbaren. Durch seine scharfsinnig verfassten und gegen den Strich gebürsteten Publikationen hat er ein ganz neues Denken in die Mitte der Diskussionen getragen und unzählige Debatten befeuert. Diese Sammlung seiner bedeutendsten und teils bislang unveröffentlichten Essays sprüht förmlich vom Geist, der unwiderstehlichen Suggestion und dem überraschenden Witz Graebers. Die Auswahl, ergänzt um Interviews mit Thomas Piketty und Hannah Appel, umfasst alle Themen seines bedeutenden Antikapitalismus, soziale Ungleichheit, radikale Demokratie, Anarchie und grenzenlose Freiheitsliebe.