Top 3 David Graeber Books

For an anthropologist to decide on anarchism is something like considering that everything is lost. David Graeber pointed out that there is no form of government possible for human beings in society, with a supposed holistic vision that anthropology points to on human behavior. We can then deduce that democracy is even worse than the cliché that it is the least bad of the systems of social organization.

Graeber may have been right about the fact that we currently seem to submit to underground dictatorships of systems economic oligarchic under the guise of equal opportunities and other slogans. Whether such raw anarchy meant readjusting everything towards some sort of equality, I doubt. That in anarchy, with no rules other than hope in kindness and good fortune, there may be some overcoming of old failed paradigms, perhaps.

The point is that Graeber was not as anarchist as it is painted. But still he had that I don't know what ideological with new proposals and interesting approaches to consider. This is how his books start, his best legacy...

Top 3 Recommended Books by David Graeber

In Debt: An Alternative History of Economics

The debt system at the macroeconomic level is something like an abyss over a fiction. Money is nothing and the houses of cards of world economies are built on that nothing. Who knows best how to sell their motorcycle will have more capacity to borrow. The matter has some macroludopathy. And yet, essential elements such as the welfare state are built on fictions like this...

Every economics book makes the same assertion: money was invented to solve the growing complexity of barter systems. This version of the story has a serious problem: there is no evidence to support it.

Graeber exposes an alternative history to the appearance of money and markets, and analyzes how debt has gone from being an economic obligation to a moral obligation. Since the beginning of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods, even before the invention of currency. It is today, after five thousand years, when for the first time we find ourselves before a society divided between debtors and creditors, with institutions erected with the sole will of protecting the lenders.

In Debt is a fascinating and pertinent chronicle that dismantles ideas embedded in our collective consciousness and shows us the ambivalent attitude that exists towards debt, as an engine of economic growth or as a tool of oppression.

In Debt: An Alternative History of Economics

Shit Jobs: A Theory

Earning your bread by the sweat of your brow was a full-fledged threat. Something that all past and future exploitation systems were built on. The class struggle never ends, not even after establishing rights after the labor catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution. If it is not exploited here, it is exploited there. If it cannot be abused directly, it can be done in a less obvious way.

Finding that decent job that points towards self-realization seems like a chimera in most cases. Effort, self-improvement and the capacity for entrepreneurship do not always make sense in the face of unequal skills, the privatization of educational systems and other obstacles that are on the rise every day.

And then there is the million-dollar question about the real meaning of work as the backbone of society, and David was on these, looking for answers...

Does your work make any sense to society? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful and provocative essay titled "On the Phenomenon of Shitty Jobs." The article went viral. After a million views online in seventeen different languages, people are still debating the answer.

There are millions of people - human resource consultants, communications coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers - whose jobs are worthless, and they know it. These people are stuck in shitty jobs. Forget Piketty or Marx; It is Graeber, one of today's most influential anthropologists and activists, who says loud and clear that much of what is done in a wage-slave economy is a form of employment so meaningless, so unnecessary, or so pernicious that even Not even the worker himself is capable of justifying his existence, and despite this he feels compelled to pretend that this is not the case.

The social critique pursued by the book is strong and sharp, especially when it introduces such fine-grained categories as "sloppy jobs," which certain employees do to, say, keep old machines running and save the company from buying new machinery. It is not without its logic, since, as Orwell said, "a population that is busy working, even on totally useless tasks, does not have time to do much else." Hence, as Graeber concludes, what we have is permanent shit.

Shit Jobs: A Theory

The Dawn of Everything: A New Human Story

Do we evolve or involute? Sometimes it is difficult to know if our passage through the world means advancing towards something with greater meaning in different aspects such as integration, solidarity, equality... Because beyond small victories and staging of awareness, reality points in the opposite direction.

For generations we have seen our most remote ancestors as primitive, naive and violent beings. We have been told that it was only possible to achieve civilization by sacrificing freedoms or by taming our instincts. In this essay, the renowned anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate that these conceptions, which emerged in the eighteenth century, were a conservative reaction of European society to the criticism of indigenous intellectuals and that they do not have an anthropological and archaeological guarantee.

In tracing this false line of thought, this book argues that prehistoric communities were much more changeable than has been thought; an approach that dismantles the most deeply rooted founding narratives, from the development of cities to the origins of the State, inequality or democracy.

The dawn of everything is a new history of humanity, a combative text that transforms our understanding of the past and opens the way to imagine new forms of social organization. A monumental work that questions the ideas of thinkers like Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari. Because the assumption that societies become less egalitarian and free as they become more complex and "civilized" is nothing more than a myth.

The Dawn of Everything: A New Human Story
5/5 - (11 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.