On Sun Feb 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2025-02-16T16:46:44+0100, onf wrote:
> > > Surely this oversight has nothing to do with the ownership of most
> > > consumer debt [] by those occupying the commanding heights of our
> > > economies.
> >
> > Hm, that's really interesting. Do you happen to have any sources to
> > back this up?
>
> While my remark made a salty allusion to Yergin and Stanislaw's _The
> Commanding Heights_ (Free Press, 1999), a work more responsive to your
> question is David Graeber's _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ (Melville
> House, 2011; revised 2014).
>
> Graeber, now deceased, got punked on pretty solidly in the literary and
> economic press for making a howler of a mistake about a detail of tech
> sector history in the original edition. I don't recall the details, but
> it was something like crediting Steve Jobs with the development of
> Microsoft Windows--something about that silly to people in our field.
>
> The furor died down; no one pointing and laughing seems to have
> commented on whether the error made any difference to his thesis. My
> supposition is that discouraging relatively well-compensated tech
> workers from reading or considering the book at all was the true
> objective of the ridicule. We're better served by instead reading
> _Dilbert_ comics and embracing futility.
The problem with Graeber in general is that he is guided more by
ideology than a honest search for truth. And I'm not saying that
from a place of necessarily disagreeing with his ideology. It's
just that I believe that truth is important and bending it to serve
one's opinions tends to go wrong.
In particular, I read portions of his book The Dawn of Everything. He
sets it off by expressing a desire to transcend the limitations of
seeing the story of our origin as either Russeau or Hobbes (that is,
either romanticizing the past, or seeing it as utterly terrible,
respectively).
In one part he then ends up describing the Inuit custom of men
swapping wives as being sexually empowering for the women. (If I
recall correctly, that is. It's been a while since I read the book.
On the other hand, there were also other mistakes which I do not
recall the details of.)
Believe it or not, this has already been debunked by none other than
Theodore Kaczynski himself before the book was even written, in an
essay titled "The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of
Anarchoprimitivism" [1]. This has seen some criticism in response,
so I won't comment on the opinions expressed therein. What's relevant
is that he properly cites antropologic literature written by people
generally favorable towards the primitive peoples, which proves the
opposite of what Graeber claims, and this without even intending to
since Kaczynski wrote it years before The Dawn of Everything came out.
I quote the relevant part:
Among the Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived, husbands
clearly held overt authority over their wives [83] and sometimes
beat them. [84] Yet, through their talent for persuasion, wives
had great power over their husbands [...] However, Poncins may
have overstated the extent of Eskimo women’s power, since it was
not sufficient to enable them to avoid unwanted sex: Wife-lending
among these Eskimos was determined by the men, and the wives
had to accept being lent whether they liked it or not. [87] At
least in some cases, apparently, the women resented this rather
strongly. [88]
[88] Poncins, pages 112–13. See also Coon. page 223
(“often the wives lent say that they do not enjoy this”).
[The bibliography is listed at the end of his essay.]
This, to me, discredits Graeber. If I have to verify everything that
an author writes, let alone about his own field, I might just as well
entrust my research in said field to AI with its habit of making
facts up. The result might end up being the same.
> I'm slowly working my way through a new translation of Marx's _Capital_.
> Either this new translation is a breakthrough, or the reputed difficulty
> of its initial chapters has been overstated. It has darkly amused me
> to read claims of his about the "labor theory of value" in chapter 1
> that squarely contradict the words some people stuff in his mouth.
Unless you have already read it, I would suggest also adding The Society
of the Spectacle by Guy Debord to your reading list. You can get it from
your favorite shadow library, as usual.
> That reminds me of how the people who most frequently quote Adam Smith
> seem not to have read anything by him _but_ a list of quotes curated by
> someone else. I was at the U.S. Libertarian Party national convention
> in 2016; Smith's views on speculators and the East India Company would,
> I think, have baffled most of the people there, "free market" advocates
> to a man (and occasional woman).
Reminds of the amount of stuff Ayn Rand said that people happily
gloss over.
~ onf
[1]
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism
