Thursday, December 10, 2020

On Bullsh*t Jobs | David Graeber | RSA Replay

In 2013 David Graeber, professor of anthropology at LSE, wrote an excoriating essay on modern work for Strike! magazine. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” was read over a million times and the essay translated in seventeen different languages within weeks. Graeber visits the RSA to expand on this phenomenon, and will explore how the proliferation of meaningless jobs - more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union than latter-day capitalism - has impacted modern society. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get


DEBT: The First 5,000 Years While the "national debt" has been the concern du jour of many economists, commentators and politicians, little attention is ever paid to the historical significance of debt. For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors' children into slavery. By the same token, for the past five thousand years, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. Enter anthropologist David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (July, ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2), which uses these struggles to show that the history of debt is also a history of morality and culture. In the throes of the recent economic crisis, with the very defining institutions of capitalism crumbling, surveys showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the country's banks should not be rescued—whatever the economic consequences—but that ordinary citizens stuck with bad mortgages should be bailed out. The notion of morality as a matter of paying one's debts runs deeper in the United States than in almost any other country. Beginning with a sharp critique of economics (which since Adam Smith has erroneously argued that all human economies evolved out of barter), Graeber carefully shows that everything from the ancient work of law and religion to human notions like "guilt," "sin," and "redemption," are deeply influenced by ancients debates about credit and debt. It is no accident that debt continues to fuel political debate, from the crippling debt crises that have gripped Greece and Ireland, to our own debate over whether to raise the debt ceiling. Debt, an incredibly captivating narrative spanning 5,000 years, puts these crises into their full context and illuminates one of the thorniest subjects in all of history. ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People, and Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. This talk was hosted by Boris Debic on behalf of the Authors@Google program.



David Harvey in conversation with David Graeber Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 6.30 pm Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance. DAVID HARVEY is the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. DAVID GRAEBER is Reader in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also worked extensively on value theory, and has recently completed a major research project on social movements dedicated to principles of direct democracy, direct action, and has written widely on the relation (real and potential) of anthropology and anarchism. He is currently working on a project on the history of debt.





Red Plateaus

We're proud to present this talk by David Graeber and David Wengrow, entitled The Myth of the Stupid Savage: Rousseau's Ghost and the Future of Political Anthropology. Originally presented at the PPA+ Conference at the University of Amsterdam in May 2019. 

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David Graeber: A Celebration of His LifeStreamed live on Sep 27, 2020

David Graeber’s life and work leaves an indelible mark on thinkers and activists from London through New York, from Rojava to Quebec. To celebrate his life and work Novara Media are hosting a live stream with academics, activists, and politicians who have been influenced by, and who were an influence on, his intellectual endeavours and activist pursuits. With: Molly Crabapple John McDonnell David Wengrow Dani Ellis Debbie Bookchin Aaron Bastani Grace Blakeley Alpa Shah Jeremy Corbyn Hosted by Ash Sarkar Subscribe to Novara Media on YouTube ⇛ http://novara.media/youtube Support our work ⇛ https://novaramedia.com/support



David Graeber is funny •Sep 7, 2020

Liquid Knowledge
David had a way of communicating ideas considered radical that made them sound like common sense. And with an unassuming sense of humor. -Beka Economopoulos




Longplayer Conversation 2014: David Graeber and Brian Eno


The 2014 Artangel Longplayer Conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber took place 7pm, Tuesday 7 October 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society, London SW7. Longplayer is a thousand-year long musical composition conceived and composed by Jem Finer. The Longlayer Conversations began with a meeting in 2005 between New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson and Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing; they continue to take place in the context of this project. Watch, listen to or read about previous Artangel Longplayer Conversations here: artangel.org.uk/projects/2000/longplayer/conversations/ Find out more about Longplayer here: artangel.org.uk//projects/2000/longplayer/about_the_project/about_the_project


 


David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream Time

  01.19.2012 


The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all. David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for 2011: to promote his new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House), learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. He's done well on the first, failed the second, and the third may be on the way, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement that Graeber helped initiate. He teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is also the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and Direct Action: An Ethnography, among other books. David Graeber gave this talk in the School of Visual Arts theater on 19 January 2012 at 7. Q&A begins at 52:24 http://artcriticism.sva.edu/?post=dav... http://www.londonreviewofgames.org

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