A gift from Graeber

April 11, 2021

David Graeber was an intellectual hero for me. Not for his depth and breadth of knowledge, nor his powers of reason, though those were surely impressive. Instead, what drew me to his ideas was his relentless humanity. I never met him, but he always felt a friend, or perhaps a comrade. If you knew his work at all, you knew he was fighting for the downtrodden, that he had your back. In an era of disinformation, his motives and messages were transparent. Sadly, David passed last fall, at the far too young age of 51.

This morning I awoke to a bit of Christmas in April. Jacobin posted a short essay Graeber penned shortly before his death which touches on one of the same themes I wrote about in Pandemic Capitalism, the illogic of remuneration in our current economy.

Below I've shared a couple of key paragraphs from the piece, but I encourage you to read the whole thing. But I'd love to make this thread into a bit of a memorial, so please come back and share a thought on the piece, a memory of Graeber, or whatever feels right. If enough of us take part, it could become a nice thing for others to commune with.

I’ll go first…

Thanks,

Chris

How about this: Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?

Why not instead, once the current emergency is declared over, actually remember what we’ve learned: that if “the economy” means anything, it is the way we provide each other with what we need to be alive (in every sense of the term), that what we call “the market” is largely just a way of tabulating the aggregate desires of rich people, most of whom are at least slightly pathological, and the most powerful of whom were already completing the designs for the bunkers they plan to escape to if we continue to be foolish enough to believe their minions’ lectures that we were all, collectively, too lacking in basic common sense do anything about oncoming catastrophes.

-David Graeber

Source

Before I cut this off, I thought I’d share the dedication page from the upcoming Wicked Problems Collaborative book.