David Graeber - Uma (in)certa antropologia.pdf

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Uma (in)certa antropologiaNotas sobre o tempo, o clima e a diferença

Arquivo da tag: David Graeber

David Graeber: Sobre o Fenômeno dos

Empregos de Merda15/01/2014 Uncategorized Capitalismo, Consumismo, David Graeber, Trabalho

Um texto do antropólogo David Graeber que explica porque é que em vez de diminuir, o horário de trabalhonão pára de crescer.

Nos últimos anos na Europa e nos Estados Unidos o horário de trabalho tem vindo a aumentar. Em Portugal a

jornada de trabalho para a Função Pública amentou das 35 para as 40 horas perante a passividade quase total

dos sindicatos oficiais. Em Espanha, a CNT e a CGT reivindicam há muito as 30 horas semanais. Há pouco mais

de 80 anos os economistas acreditavam que na viragem do século XX para o XXI, devido aos progressos tecnoló-

gicos (que continuam a verificar-se) o tempo de trabalho diário não ultrapassaria as 3 ou as 4 horas. O antropó-

logo anarquista e membro do Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber, explica a inutilidade dos empregos (e dos tra-

balhos) de merda criados nas últimas décadas. Que só servem para nos prender aos locais de trabalho, não pa-

ra produzir ou fazer quaisquer trabalhos socialmente relevantes.

David Graeber

No ano de 1930 John Maynard Keynes previu que, até ao final do século XX, a tecnologia teria avançado o su-

d Graeber | Uma (in)certa antropologia https://umaincertaantropologia.org/tag/david

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ficiente para que países como a Grã-Bretanha ou os Estados Unidos pudessem implementar a semana labo-

ral de 15 horas. Não faltam motivos para acreditar que tinha razão, dado que a nossa tecnologia actual o

permitiria. E, no entanto, isso não aconteceu. Em vez disso, a tecnologia inventou novas formas para que tra-

balhemos mais. A fim de alcançar este objectivo, foram criados novos trabalhos, que não têm, efectivamen-

te, nenhum sentido. Enormes quantidades de pessoas, especialmente na Europa e nos Estados Unidos, pas-

sam toda a sua vida profissional na execução de tarefas que, no fundo, consideram completamente desne-

cessárias. É uma situação que provoca um dano moral e espiritual profundo. É uma cicatriz que marca a nos-

sa alma colectiva. Mas quase ninguém fala disso.

Por que é que nunca se materializou a utopia prometida por Keynes – uma utopia ainda aguardada com

grande expectativa nos anos 60? A explicação mais generalizada hoje em dia é que Keynes não soube prever

o aumento massivo do Consumismo. Face à alternativa entre menos horas de trabalho ou mais brinquedos e

prazeres, teríamos escolhido colectivamente a segunda opção. É uma fábula muito bonita, mas basta ape-

nas um momento de reflexão para vermos que isso não pode ser realmente verdade. De facto temos assisti-

do à criação de uma variedade infinita de novos empregos e indústrias, desde a década de 20, mas muito

poucos têm alguma coisa a ver com a produção e distribuição de sushi, iPhones ou de calçado desportivo de

moda.

Então, quais são, precisamente, esses novos postos de trabalho? Um relatório comparando o emprego nos

EUA entre 1910 e 2000, dá-nos uma imagem muito clara (que, sublinho se vê praticamente reflectida no Rei-

no Unido). Ao longo do século passado, diminuiu drasticamente o número de trabalhadores empregados no

serviço doméstico, na indústria e no sector agrícola. Ao mesmo tempo, “a nível profissional, os directores, os

administrativos, os vendedores e os trabalhadores dos serviços” triplicaram, crescendo de um quarto a três

quartos do emprego total. Por outras palavras, os empregos no sector produtivo, tal como previsto, muitos

trabalhos produtivos automatizaram-se (ainda que se conte a totalidade dos trabalhadores da indústria a ní-

vel mundial, incluindo a grande massa de trabalhadores explorados da Índia e da China, estes trabalhadores

já não representam uma percentagem da população mundial tão elevada como era habitual).

Mas ao contrário de possibilitar uma redução massiva do horário laboral de maneira a que todas as pessoas

tenham tempo livre para se ocuparem dos seus próprios projectos, prazeres, visões e ideias, temos visto um

aumento do tempo de trabalho tanto no “sector de serviços” como no administrativo. Isto inclui a criação de

novas indústrias, como os serviços financeiros ou de telemarketing e a expansão de sectores como o direito

empresarial, a gestão do ensino e da saúde, os recursos humanos e as relações públicas. E estes números

nem sequer reflectem todas as pessoas cujo trabalho é fornecer serviços administrativos, técnicos, ou de se-

gurança para essas indústrias, para não mencionar toda uma gama de sectores secundários (tratadores de

cães, entregadores de pizza 24 horas) que devem a sua existência ao facto do resto da população passar tan-

to tempo a trabalhar noutros sectores.

Estes são os trabalhos a que proponho chamar de “empregos de merda.”

É como se alguém estivesse a inventar trabalhos apenas para nos terem ocupados. É aqui, precisamente,

que reside o mistério. E isso é exactamente o que não devia acontecer no capitalismo. Claro que, nos antigos

e ineficientes estados socialistas como a União Soviética, onde o emprego era considerado tanto um direito

como uma obrigação sagrada, o sistema criava todos os empregos que fizessem falta, (era este o motivo que

levava a que nas lojas soviéticas fossem “precisos” três empregados para vender um só bife). Mas, é claro,

este é o tipo de problema que é suposto ser corrigido com a concorrência dos mercados. De acordo com a te-

oria económica dominante, desperdiçar dinheiro em postos de trabalho desnecessários é o que menos inte-


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ressa a uma companhia que queira ter lucro. Mas ainda assim, e sem se perceber muito bem porquê, é isso

que acontece.

Ainda que muitas empresas se dediquem a reduzir o número de trabalhadores de forma cruel, estes despedi-

mentos – e o aumento de responsabilidade para os que permanecem -, recaem invariavelmente sobre os

que se dedicam a fabricar, transportar, reparar e manter as coisas.

Devido a uma estranha metamorfose, que ninguém é capaz de explicar, o número de administrativos assala-riados parece continuar a aumentar. O resultado, e isto acontecia também com os trabalhadores soviéticos,

é que cada vez há mais empregados que, teoricamente, trabalham 40 ou 50 horas semanais, mas que, na

prática, só trabalham as 15 horas previstas por Keynes, já que levam o resto do dia a organizarem ou a parti-

ciparem em seminários motivacionais, actualizando os seus perfis do Facebook ou fazendo downloads de ví-

deos e musica.

É claro que a reposta não é económica, mas sim moral e política. A classe dirigente descobriu que uma popu-

lação feliz e produtiva com abundante tempo livre nas suas mãos representa um perigo mortal (recordemos

o que começou a acontecer na primeira vez em que houve uma pequena aproximação a algo deste tipo, nos

anos 60). Por outro lado, o sentimento de que o trabalho é um valor moral em si mesmo e que quem não es-teja disposto a submeter-se a uma disciplina laboral intensa durante a maior parte da sua vida não merece

nada, é algo que lhes é muito conveniente.

Certa vez, ao contemplar o crescimento aparentemente interminável de responsabilidades administrativas

nos departamentos académicos britânicos, imaginei uma possível visão do inferno. O inferno é um conjunto

de indivíduos que passam a maior parte do seu desempenhando tarefas de que nem gostam nem fazem es-

pecialmente bem. Imaginemos que se contratam uns marceneiros altamente qualificados e que, de repente,

descobrem que o seu trabalho consistirá em passarem grande parte do dia a fritarem peixe. Não é que a ta-

refa realmente necessite de ser feita – há apenas um número muito limitado de peixes que é preciso fritar.

Ainda assim, todos eles tornam-se obcecados com a suspeita de que alguns dos seus companheiros possampassar mais tempo a talhar madeira do que a cumprirem as suas responsabilidade como fritadores de peixe

que, rapidamente, vamos encontrar pilhas intermináveis de inútil peixe mal frito, acumulado por toda a ofi-

cina, acabando, todos eles, por se dedicarem exclusivamente a isso.

Acho que esta é realmente uma descrição bastante precisa da dinâmica moral da nossa própria economia.

Estou consciente de que argumentos como este vão ter

objecções imediatas. “Quem és tu para determinar quais

os trabalhos que são ‘necessários’? O que é necessário,

afinal? És professor de antropologia, explica-me a ‘ne-cessidade’ disso? “. (E, na verdade muitos leitores de im-

prensa cor-de-rosa classificariam o meu trabalho como a

definição por excelência de um investimento social des-

perdiçado). E, em certo sentido, isso é obviamente ver-

dadeiro. Não há uma forma objectiva de medir o valor

social.

Não me atreveria a dizer a uma pessoa que está conven-


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cida de estar a contribuir com algo importante para a hu-

manidade, de que, na verdade, está equivocada. Mas o

que se passa com aqueles que têm a certeza de que os

seus trabalhos não servem para nada? -Não há muito

tempo atrás retomei o contacto com um amigo de escola

que não via desde os meus 12 anos. Fiquei espantado ao

descobrir que nesse intervalo de tempo, ele se tinha tornado poeta, e, foi vocalista de uma banda de rock in-

die. Inclusivamente, tinha ouvido algumas das suas músicas na rádio sem ter ideia que o cantor era meuamigo de infância. Ele era, obviamente, uma pessoa inovadora e genial, e o seu trabalho tinha, sem dúvida,

melhorado e alegrado a vida de muitas pessoas em todo o mundo. No entanto, depois de um par de álbuns

sem sucesso, perdeu o contrato com a editora e atormentado com dívidas e uma filha recém-nascida, aca-

bou, como ele descreveu, por “tomar a opção que, por exclusão, muitas pessoas sem rumo escolhem: a Fa-

culdade de Direito”. Agora é um advogado de negócios e trabalha numa proeminente empresa de Nova York.

Ele foi o primeiro a admitir que o seu trabalho era totalmente sem sentido, não contribuindo em nada para a

humanidade e que, na sua própria opinião, nem sequer deveria existir.

Chegados aqui há uma série de perguntas que podemos fazer. A primeira seria: o que é que isto revela sobre

a nossa sociedade que parece gerar uma procura extremamente limitada para poetas e músicos talentosos,mas uma procura aparentemente infinita de especialistas em direito empresarial. (Resposta: Se 1% da popu-

lação controla a maior parte da riqueza disponível, o denominado “mercado” reflectirá o que essa ínfima mi-

noria, e ninguém a não serem eles, acha que é útil ou importante). Mas, ainda mais, isto mostra que a maio-

ria das pessoas nesses empregos estão conscientes desta realidade. Na verdade, creio que nunca conheci

nenhum advogado corporativo que não achasse que o seu trabalho é uma estupidez. O mesmo é válido para

quase todos os novos sectores anteriormente mencionados. Há toda uma classe de profissionais assalaria-

dos que se os encontrarmos numa festa e lhes confessarmos que nos dedicamos a algo que pode ser consi-

derado interessante (como, por exemplo, a antropologia) evitam falar da sua profissão. Mas, depois de algu-

mas bebidas, é vê-los a fazerem discursos inflamados sobre a estupidez e a inutilidade do seu trabalho.

Há aqui uma profunda violência psicológica. Como é que podemos fazer uma discussão séria sobre a digni-

dade laboral quando há tanta gente que, no fundo, acha que o seu trabalho nem sequer deveria existir? Ine-

vitavelmente, isto dá lugar ao ressentimento e a uma raiva muito profunda. No entanto, é no engenho pecu-

liar da nossa sociedade que os governantes encontraram uma maneira – como no exemplo dos fritadores de

peixe – de garantir que a raiva é dirigida precisamente contra aqueles que realizam tarefas úteis. Parece mes-

mo haver na nossa sociedade uma regra geral segundo a qual quanto um trabalho é mais benéfico para os

outros, pior é a sua remuneração. Mais uma vez é difícil encontrar uma avaliação objectiva, mas uma manei-

ra fácil de ter uma ideia seria perguntarmo-nos: que aconteceria se todo este grupo de trabalhadores sim-

plesmente desaparecesse? Diga o que se disser sobre enfermeiros, empregados do lixo ou mecânicos, é ób-

vio que se eles desaparecessem numa nuvem de fumo, os resultados seriam imediatos e catastróficos. Um

mundo sem professores ou trabalhadores portuários não tardaria a estar em apuros e um mundo sem escri-

tores de ficção científica ou músicos de ska seria, sem dúvida, um mundo pior. Ainda não está totalmente

claro quanto sofreria a humanidade se todos os investidores de capital privado, lobyistas, investigadores, se-

guradores, operadores de telemarketing, oficiais de justiça ou consultores legais se esfumassem da mesma

forma. (Há quem suspeite que tudo melhoraria sensivelmente). No entanto, para além de um punhado de

bem elogiadas excepções, como, por exemplo, os médicos, a “regra” mantém-se com surpreendente

frequência.

Ainda mais perversa é a noção generalizada de que é assim que as coisas devem ser. Este é um dos segredos


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do êxito do populismo de direita. Podemos comprová-lo quando a imprensa sensacionalista suscita o res-

sentimento contra os trabalhadores do metro por paralisarem Londres durante um conflito laboral. O sim-

ples facto de que os trabalhadores do metro possam paralisar toda a cidade de Londres demonstra a neces-

sidade do trabalho que desempenham, mas é precisamente isso que parece incomodar tantas pessoas. Nos

Estados Unidos vão ainda mais longe; os Republicanos tiveram muito êxito propagando o ressentimento re-

lativamente aos professores ou aos operários do sector automóvel ao chamar a atenção para os seus salári-

os e prestações sociais supostamente excessivos (e não contra os administradores escolares e gestores da in-

dústria automóvel que são quem realmente causa os problemas, o que é significativo).

É como se eles nos estivessem a dizer: “mas sim, tens a sorte de poder ensinar crianças! Ou fazer carros! Fa-

zeis trabalhos de verdade! E, como se fosse pouco, tendes a desfaçatez de reclamar pensões de reforma e

cuidados de saúde equivalentes às da classe média!?”

Se alguém tivesse desenhado um regime de trabalho com o fim exclusivo de manter os privilégios do mundo

financeiro dificilmente podia ter feito melhor. Os trabalhadores que realmente produzem sofrem uma explo-

ração e uma precariedade constantes. Os restantes dividem-se entre o estrato aterrorizado e universalmente

desprezado dos desempregados e outro estrato maior, que basicamente recebe um salário em troca de não

fazer nada, em lugares desenhados para que se identifiquem com a sensibilidade e a perspectiva da classedirigente (directores, administradores, etc.) – e em particular dos seus avatares financeiros – a qual, ao mes-

mo tempo, promove o crescente ressentimento contra aqueles cujo trabalho tem um valor social claro e in-

discutível. Evidentemente que este sistema não é fruto de um plano inicialmente previsto, mas emergiu co-

mo o resultado de quase um século de tentativas e erros. E é a única explicação possível para o facto de,

apesar da nossa capacidade tecnológica, não se ter implantado ainda a jornada laboral de três ou quatro

horas.

“On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber, aqui http://www.strikemag.org/the-summer-of/

Traduzido pelo CLE a partir da versão espanhola. http://guerrillatranslation.com/2013/09/24/el-fenomeno-de-los-curros-inutiles/

David Graeber’s “The Democracy Project”

and the anarchist revival (New Yorker)07/05/2013 Uncategorized Anarquismo, David Graeber, OccupyA CRITIC AT LARGE

PAINT BOMBS

BY KELEFA SANNEH, MAY 13, 2013

Occupy resisted those who wanted to stop it and those who wan-


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ted to organize it. Illustration by Shout.

In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a

mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Gra-

eber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination,

which means that he spends a lot of time at political demons-

trations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered

down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd,he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders,

equipped with signs and megaphones. It seemed that they we-

re a�iliated with the Workers World Party, a socialist group

known for stringent pronouncements that hark back to the

Cold War—a recent article in the W.W.P. newspaper hailed the

“steadfast determination” of North Korea and its leaders. As far

as Graeber was concerned, W.W.P. organizers and others like

them could doom the new movement, turning away potential allies with their discredited ideology and their

unimaginative tactics. Perhaps they would deliver a handful of speeches and lead a bedraggled march, cul-

minating in the presentation of a list of demands. Names and e-mail addresses would be collected, and then,a few weeks or months later, everyone would regroup and do it again.

Graeber refers to march planners and other organizers as “verticals,” and to him this is an insult: it refers not

just to defenders of Kim Jong-un but to anyone who thinks a political uprising needs parties or leaders. He is

a “horizontal,” which is to say, an anarchist. He is fiy-two, but he has made common cause with a generati-

on of activists too young to have any interest in the Cold War, or anything associated with it. And, as he liste-

ned to speeches in Bowling Green, he realized that many of the people there seemed to be horizontals, too.

Working with some like-minded activists, on the opposite side of the park, Graeber helped to convene a ge-

neral assembly—an open-ended meeting, with no agenda and a commitment to consensus. Adbusters, a Ca-

nadian magazine, had called for an occupation of Wall Street on September 17th, which was six weeks away;

that aernoon, in Bowling Green, a few dozen horizontals decided to see what they could do to respond.

When the day came, Graeber and his allies had to fend o� two di�erent enemies: the people who wanted to

stop the occupation and the people who wanted to organize it. Occupy Wall Street succeeded, and survived,

in its original location—Zuccotti Park, halfway between Wall Street and the World Trade Center site—for ne-

arly two months, much longer than anyone predicted. It inspired similar occupations around the country,

creating a model for radical politics in the Obama era. And it became known, more than anything, for its

commitment to horizontalism: no parties, no leaders, no demands.

Inevitably, this triumph of horizontalism increased the prominence of a handful of horizontals, none morethan Graeber, who has emerged as perhaps the most influential radical political thinker of the moment. His

American academic career has been rocky: he was an associate professor at Yale but was never up for tenure,

and in 2005 the university decided not to extend his contract. (He now suggests that he was insu�iciently de-

ferential to Yale’s “hierarchical environment.”) By the summer of 2011, he was teaching anthropology at

Goldsmiths College, in London, while building a growing reputation in anarchist circles worldwide. His books

tend to end up as pirated PDF files, freely available on le-wing Web sites.

A few weeks before the rally in Bowling Green, Graeber published “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” a provocative

counter-history of civilization that has become an unlikely best-seller. He argued that the current American


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anxiety about debt, private and public, is merely the latest manifestation of an ancient obsession. He sought

to show that debt preëxisted money: people owed things to each other before they had a way to measure the

size of those obligations. In one of his most memorable passages, he considered the di�ering roles of debt in

a market society (where we “don’t owe each other anything,” except what we agree to) and in a nation-state

(where we all owe an insurmountable debt to the government, whether we agree or not). He called this di-

chotomy “a great trap of the twentieth century”—a false choice between the freedom of a consumer and the

obligations of a citizen. “States created markets,” he wrote. “Markets require states. Neither could continue

without the other, at least in anything like the forms we would recognize today.” This is the essence of Grae-ber’s ideology, and to a large extent the essence of Occupy: a commitment to fighting the twinned powers of

private wealth and public force. He has proposed a grand debt cancellation, to remind the world that a debt

is merely a promise—that is, a plan, and one that can be changed.

By the time the New York Police Department reclaimed Zuccotti Park, in November, the evictees were already

trying to figure out whether the occupation had been a success, and what “success” might mean. In the past

year, this debate has been taken up in a series of essays and books rehearsing the little indignities and big

ideas that characterized life in Zuccotti Park and other sites of occupation. Now comes Graeber himself, with

“The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement” (Spiegel & Grau). Like all revolutionaries, he is skil-

led in the art of wild extrapolation, starting from a small band of dissidents and imagining a world transfor-med. He doesn’t believe that a better future is inevitable. But like lots of people, not all of them radical or

even political, he does believe that the current arrangement is unstable, and that we may as well start thin-

king about what might come next.

“We are the ninety-nine per cent!” That was the rallying cry in Zuccotti Park, and beyond, although there is

some debate about exactly which member of the “we” came up with it. In his book, Graeber stakes a partial

claim, quoting an e-mail he sent to a group list on August 4, 2011, in which he proposed calling the occupati-

on the Ninety-Nine Per Cent Movement. The figure had been popularized by the economist Joseph Stiglitz,

who estimated that the richest one per cent of Americans earn nearly twenty-five per cent of the income and

control forty per cent of the wealth. “The ninety-nine per cent,” then, is everybody else. It was a great slogan,

because it linked the people in the parks to the people watching at home, suggesting a kind of class struggle

that even class-averse Americans could support.

What’s striking about this formulation, though, is what’s missing: any explicit reference to the one per cent. It

was a self-reflexive slogan for a self-reflexive movement, one that came to be known more for its internal po-

litics than for its critique of the outside world. Perhaps no one could say exactly what the Zuccotti Park occu-

pation wanted, but lots of people knew how it worked. There was “the people’s mic,” an ingenious system of

public address: short speeches were delivered one phrase at a time, with each phrase repeated, in unison, by

whoever happened to be standing nearby. And there was a small lexicon of hand signals, which Occupiers

could use to respond with approval, or disapproval, or extreme disapproval—the crossed-fists “block,” which

could bring any discussion to a halt.

In “We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation” (AK Press), a dely edi-

ted anthology, a wide range of Occupiers and sympathizers look back on those days in 2011. One New York

participant recalls the nerve-racking moment when she helped block the adoption of an o�icial declaration,

because she felt that the language downplayed the importance of race, gender, and other kinds of identity.

Marisa Holmes, a New York activist, describes how the occupation’s horizontal structure—composed of se-

mi-autonomous working groups, free-form discussions, and a spokescouncil—worked, for a time, and then

disintegrated. Graeber describes the encampments as “a defiant experiment in libertarian communism,” but


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the subtext of “We Are Many” is that this experiment was more inspiring as an ideal: the most enthusiastic

essays tend to come from people, like Graeber, who spent little or no time actually living in the parks.

Is it fair to describe the Occupy movement as anarchist? In “We Are Many,” Cindy Milstein, a longtime activist,

stipulates that radicals in Zuccotti Park were outnumbered by liberals, including those she deprecates as

“militant liberals.” But she argues that, even if the Occupiers weren’t all anarchists, they were nevertheless

“doing anarchism.” In Zuccotti Park and elsewhere, “doing anarchism” oen meant struggling not against

bankers, directly, but against local government and local police. (In New York, one galvanizing figure wasAnthony Bologna, a senior police o�icer who was disciplined aer video surfaced showing him squirting pro-

testers with pepper spray.) Perhaps this was a smart strategy: instead of arguing about economics and ideo-

logy, the Occupiers could a�irm, instead, their unanimous commitment to freedom of assembly. Occupy may

have begun with a grievance against Wall Street, but the process of occupation transformed the movement

into a meta-movement, peopled by activists demanding the right to demand their rights.

Karl Marx agreed with the anarchists of his day that the state should be destroyed. But he disagreed about

when. He was convinced that the state would become obsolete only aer the working class had taken it over,

thereby destroying the class system. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French philosopher who popularized the

term “anarchist,” thought that the idea of a revolutionary government was a contradiction in terms. “Govern-ments are God’s scourge, established todiscipline the world,” he wrote. “Do you really expect them to destroy

themselves, to create freedom, to make revolution?” Mikhail Bakunin, the prickly Russian agitator, sneered

at Marx’s idea of a workers’ state. “As soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people,” he wrote,

they “will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the

state.” In 1872, at a meeting in The Hague, Marx helped to expel Bakunin from the International Working-

men’s Association, formalizing a division that seemed no less stark, nearly a century and a half later, when

the horizontals broke from the verticals on an August aernoon in Bowling Green.

In delivering his brief for anarchism, Graeber asks readers to take into account the movement’s history of go-

od behavior. “For nearly a century now,” he writes, “anarchism has been one of the very few political philo-sophies whose exponents never blow anyone up.” This is a sly way of acknowledging that, a hundred years

ago, anarchists had a rather di�erent reputation. On May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square, in Chicago, police tri-

ed to halt a demonstration by striking workers, and someone in the crowd threw a bomb, which killed at le-

ast ten people, including seven police o�icers. Chicago had become a hub of anarchist politics, and although

the bomber was never identified, eight anarchists were convicted of being accessories to murder. In Europe,

anarchists carried out a series of spectacular attacks, including the assassinations of one President (French),

two kings (Italian and Greek), and three Prime Ministers (Spanish, Russian, and Spanish again). In the U.S.,

anarchism’s reputation was sealed for a generation by Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley,

in 1901; he had evidently been inspired by Emma Goldman, the prominent anarchist rabble-rouser.

Over the years, though, anarchists’ ferocious reputation has mellowed. The Occupy movement borrowed so-

me of its organizing tactics from the egalitarian groups that formed, in the nineteen-seventies, to try to stop

the construction of nuclear power plants. And the rise of punk helped give anarchism a new image: “Anarchy

in the U.K.,” by the Sex Pistols, was an ambiguous provocation; other bands, like Crass, used “anarchy” to

signal their commitment to a bundle of emancipatory causes, and their independence from the socialist or-

ganizations that dominated the British le. The connection to punk lent anarchism a countercultural credibi-

lity, and in 1999, when tens of thousands of activists materialized in Seattle, intent on shutting down a World

Trade Organization conference, raucous young anarchists were out in front; at one point, they smashed the

window of a Starbucks. The smashed window became an icon of resistance, and the chaos in the streets of


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Seattle galvanized a mobilization, known as the Global Justice movement.

Twelve years later, not all of Occupy’s supporters were happy to see anarchists playing a starring role. In a

contentious essay titled, “The Cancer in Occupy,” Chris Hedges called for a clean break. Hedges is a former Ti-

mes reporter turned socialist author and activist, and he published his essay on the progressive Web site

Truthdig, a few months aer the Zuccotti eviction. His main target was the “black bloc” phenomenon, in whi-

ch activists—oen anarchists—dress in black clothes, with black handkerchiefs obscuring their faces, the

better to cause mischief anonymously. Hedges accused black blocs of a “lust” for destruction, which he des-cribed as a sickness. “Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we

are finished,” he wrote.

In a deeply indignant response to Hedges, Graeber pointed out that black-bloc actions had been rare in the

Occupy movement. Much of Hedges’s concern seemed to arise from a single incident in Oakland, when a

black bloc smashed bank windows and vandalized a Whole Foods. Like many anarchists, Graeber doesn’t

think property damage is violence. And he believes that so-called “mobs” have their uses—in 2001, in Que-

bec City, he was part of a black bloc that succeeded in toppling a chain-link fence meant to separate activists

from the free-trade meeting they wanted to disrupt. He supports “diversity of tactics,” an approach that ur-

ges di�erent kinds of activists to stay physically separate (so as not to endanger each other) but politicallyunited. Above all, Graeber rejects what he calls “the peace police”: activists who try to control other activists’

behavior, sometimes in collaboration with the real police. His tolerance for confrontational protest stems in

part from his disinclination to empower anyone to stop it.

Graeber is more worried about the charge that modern anarchists are feckless, so he is keen to give anar-

chists credit for changing the world. He claims that the Global Justice movement weakened the W.T.O. and

scuttled the Free Trade Area of the Americas pact, which was the topic of those discussions in Quebec City.

And he credits the Occupy movement with preventing Mitt Romney from becoming President. (He underesti-

mates Romney’s own, invaluable contributions to this cause.) Graeber is pleased, too, to underscore the links

between Occupy and other popular movements around the world, from the Egyptian uprising to the ongoingdemonstrations of the Indignados, in Spain. He sees a global “insurrectionary wave,” united less by a shared

ideology than by a shared opposition to an increasingly global social arrangement.

The rehabilitation of anarchism in America has a lot to do with the fall of the Soviet Union, which lives on in

popular memory as a quaint and brutal place—an embarrassing precursor that modern, pro-democracy so-

cialists must find ways to disavow. Graeber sees “authoritarian socialists” not as distant relatives but as

longtime enemies; channelling Bakunin, he claims that the Marxist intention to smash the state by seizing it

first is a “pipe dream.” For anarchists, the major historical precursors are so fleeting as to be nearly nonexis-

tent: the Paris Commune lasted scarcely two months, in 1871; anarchists dominated Catalonia for about a

year, aer the Spanish revolution in 1936. The appeal of anarchism is largely negative: a promise that a di�e-rent world needn’t resemble any of the ones that have been tried before.

In a new book, “Two Cheers for Anarchism” (Princeton), James C. Scott, a highly regarded professor of anth-

ropology and political science at Yale (and, Graeber says, “one of the great political thinkers of our time”),

commends anarchism precisely for its “tolerance for confusion and improvisation.” Graeber did his anthro-

pological field work in the highlands of Madagascar, and Scott did his in Southeast Asia, but their conclusi-

ons were similar. Both of them encountered communities that lived more or less autonomously, finding ways

to resist or ignore whatever governments claimed jurisdiction over them. And both are eager to expand the

history of lived anarchism beyond Paris and Catalonia; it is, they argue, broader and more common than


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we’ve been taught.

“Two Cheers for Anarchism” conducts a brief and digressive seminar in political philosophy, starting from the

perspective of a disillusioned leist. “Virtually every major successful revolution ended by creating a state

more powerful than the one it overthrew,” Scott writes. Traditionally, this has been an argument against re-

volutions, but Scott wonders whether it might be an argument against states. He stops short of calling for

the abolition of government, which explains the missing cheer. Instead, he highlights everyday acts of petty

resistance: “foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting,and flight.” Most of all, he urges citizens to be wary of their governments, which is good advice, but rather de-

flating—Scott can make anarchism sound like little more than a colorful word for critical thinking.

Graeber shares Scott’s mistrust of grand prescriptions, but he thinks that he has found an alternative: prefi-

gurative politics, which holds that political movements resemble the worlds they seek to create. Instead of

planning a new society, revolutionaries must form a new society, and then grow. A hierarchical vanguard

party will never create broad equality, just as, he says, “grim joyless revolutionaries” can’t be trusted to in-

crease human happiness. From this perspective, all those seemingly insular procedural debates in Zuccotti

Park weren’t insular at all: how the movement worked would determine what it wanted. What Graeber wants

is a kind of decentralized socialism, with decisions made by a patchwork of local assemblies and coöperati-ves—at one point, he imagines “something vaguely like jury duty, except non-compulsory.” He argues that

serious economic inequality wouldn’t endure without a state to enforce it. “We are already anarchists, or at

least we act like anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require

physical threats as a means of enforcement,” he writes. “It’s a question of building on what we are already

doing, expanding the zones of freedom, until freedom becomes the ultimate organizing principle.”

Graeber is comfortable—perhaps too comfortable—with uncertainty. “We have little idea what sort of organi-

zations, or for that matter, technologies, would emerge if free people were unfettered to use their imaginati-

on to actually solve collective problems rather than to make them worse,” he writes, which seems an odd ad-

mission for a deeply committed unfetterer. (If we don’t know much about this “free” world, how do we knowit won’t be, in some ways, just as coercive?) Graeber talks about the way a new society would expand peo-

ple’s options, but he has acknowledged that a truly anarchist revolution would mean less production, and

less consumption. Humankind would be rid of “all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers,

lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians.” (Anthropo-

logy professors would appear to be safe.) Although Graeber likes to distance himself from his grim and joy-

less rivals, there is a trace of asceticism in his vision. Part of Graeber’s motivation for wandering down to Bo-

wling Green, back in 2011, was his opposition to what he calls “draconian austerity budgets” proposed by

Mayor Bloomberg. Graeber wants to demonize modern debt without demonizing debtors. Yet the language

of economic “austerity” finds a striking analogue in his vision of a post-debt society composed of people who

have learned, at long last, to live within their means.

Graeber believes that the Occupy movement wouldn’t have attracted as much attention if it hadn’t been for

the Tea Party movement, a few years earlier. Reporters sensed a parallel, and they wanted, he says, to make

“a minimal gesture in the way of balance.” He notes that the reporters moved on around the time it became

clear that the Occupy movement, unlike the Tea Party movement, was not going to become a force in electo-

ral politics. In fact, there is one anarchist who could be considered influential in Washington, but he wasn’t

among the activists who participated in the Occupy movement—he died nearly twenty years ago. His name is

Murray Rothbard, and, among small-government Republicans, he is something of a cult hero. He was Ron

Paul’s intellectual mentor, which makes him the godfather of the godfather of the Tea Party. Justin Amash, a


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young Republican congressman from Michigan and a rising star in the Party, hangs a framed portrait of him

on his o�ice wall.

Rothbard was an anarchist, but also a capitalist. “True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will

be anarchism,” he once said, and he sometimes referred to himself by means of a seven-syllable honorific:

“anarcho-capitalist.” Graeber thinks that governments treat their citizens “like children,” and that, when go-

vernments disappear, people will behave di�erently. Anarcho-capitalists, on the contrary, believe that,

without government, people will behave more or less the same: we will be just as creative or greedy or com-petent as we are now, only freer. Instead of imagining a world without drastic inequality, anarcho-capitalists

imagine a world where people and their property are secured by private defense agencies, which are paid to

keep the peace. Graeber doesn’t consider anarcho-capitalists to be true anarchists; no doubt the feeling is

mutual.

The split personality of anarchism demonstrates the slippery nature of anti-government arguments, which

can bring together a wide range of people who are deeply dissatisfied with the government we’ve got. In the

aermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the government bailouts and loans that followed, capitalists and

anticapitalists were oen united in their disapproval, and, when Graeber criticizes “collusion between go-

vernment and financial institutions,” he is speaking the shared language of the Tea Party and the Occupymovements. During those days in 2011, one of the politicians who expressed support for the Occupy move-

ment was Buddy Roemer, a Republican and a former governor of Louisiana, who was waging a long-shot

campaign to win his party’s Presidential nomination. “I think the Tea Party is onto something: special favors

for special friends,” he said, aer visiting the Washington encampment. “Hell, that’s what Occupy Washing-

ton, D.C., is saying—they’re saying the same thing.”

Despite a few attempts at outreach, Occupy and the Tea Party never found much common ground. It’s not

easy for a protest movement to shrug o� the logic of partisanship: the Tea Party was essentially a Republican

movement, and, if the Occupiers held low opinions of the Democratic Party, it was always clear that they dis-

dained Republicans much more. Even Graeber, for all his radicalism, still sees himself as an ally, however di-sa�ected, of liberal Democrats in their fight against the conservative agenda. In a recent online exchange, he

wrote about his frustration with the political establishment. “What reformers have to understand is that

they’re never going to get anywhere without radicals and revolutionaries to betray,” he wrote, and went on:

I’ve never understood why “progressives” don’t

understand this. The mainstream right understands it,

that’s why they go crazy when it looks like someone

might be cracking down on far-right militia groups, and

so forth. They know it’s totally to their political

advantage to have people even further to the right than

they so they can seem moderate. If only the

mainstream le� acted the same way!


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Despite his implacable opposition to state power, Graeber oen finds himself defending the sorts of govern-

ment program that liberals typically support, such as socialized medicine. There is a distinction, he argues,

between state institutions based on coercion, like prisons or border control, and those which could (in a

post-capitalist future) be run as voluntary collectives, like health care. Still, he is self-aware enough to be

amused by all the ways in which anarchists find themselves fighting, in the short term, for causes that would

seem to increase the role of government. Early in “The Democracy Project,” he describes being at a demons-

tration in London that protested government budget cuts and corporate tax breaks. He remembers thinking,

“It feels a bit unsettling watching a bunch of anarchists in masks outside Topshop, lobbing paint bombs overa line of riot cops, shouting, ‘Pay your taxes!’ ” Then he admits that he was one of the paint bombers.

At times, Graeber can sound like one of the orthodox Marxists he lampoons, eager to see the state wither

away—just not quite yet. It’s a common paradox. For years, American politicians have been promising to

bring the country a smaller, more streamlined state; President Obama was obliged to present his health-care

reforms as an opportunity to reduce, not increase, the federal budget. As the government expands, the calls

to shrink it grow louder; even many radicals, these days, decline to be counted as proponents of big govern-

ment. In a more fragile state, like Greece or Spain, anarchism oen adopts an apocalyptic tone: to be an

anarchist is to accept, or even to welcome, the cataclysm that all the politicians fear. But in America anar-

chism’s appeal surely has something to do with the seeming durability of our current arrangement, and theinexorable growth of the government that maintains it. Such is the power of a sprawling and sophisticated

state: the bigger it gets, the easier it becomes for us to imagine that we could live without it. ♦

A Radical Anthropologist Finds Himself in

Academic ‘Exile’ (The Chronicle of Higher Education)15/04/2013 Uncategorized Anarquismo, Antropologia, Cidadania, David Graeber, Educação,

participatividade, Política

April 15, 2013


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Pete Marovich for The Chronicle. David Graeber, an anthropologist who studies and participates in the radical

le�, finds fans of his work inside academe and out. Here he speaks with audience members during a talk at a public library in Washington, D.C.

By Christopher Shea

Who’s afraid of David Graeber? Not the dozens of D.C.-area residents who showed up on a recent night at the

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library to hear the anthropologist and radical activist talk about his new bo-

ok, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau). Aimed at the mainstream, the bo-

ok discusses Mr. Graeber’s involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement and the idea that principles

drawn from anarchist theory—a wholesale rejection of current electoral politics, for starters, in favor of

groups operating on the basis of consensus—o�er an alternative to our present polity, which he calls “organi-zed bribery” (or “mafia capitalism”).

On this warm spring evening the rumpled scholar was interviewed by a friendly and more conventionally te-

legenic writer, Thomas Frank. Graying leies and young liberals and radicals in the crowd alike seemed im-

pressed. Even the token skeptical economist in the audience framed her question respectfully, and C-Span

broadcast live.

Mr. Graeber is a star in the le-academic world. Indeed, it’s possible that, given his activism and his writings,

he is the most influential anthropologist in the world. He played a part in establishing the nonhierarchical

“organization” of the Occupy movement, in its early days in Manhattan, and his 500-plus-page Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011) struck scholars for its verve and sweep. It made the case that lending and

borrowing evolved out of humane, communitarian impulses in premodern societies—out of a free-floating

interest in the common weal—and only later became institutionalized actions spawning moral guilt and legal

punishment.

The book ranged from discussions of ancient Sumerian economics to analyses of how Nambikwara tribes-

men in Brazil settle their a�airs to the international monetary system. “An argument of Debt’ s scope hasn’t

been made by a professional anthropologist for the best part of a century, certainly not one with as much

contemporary relevance,” wrote the British anthropologist Keith Hart, of Goldsmiths College, University of


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London, in a review on his Web site last year. The book won a prize for best book in anthropology from the

Society for Cultural Anthropology in 2012 and according to his agent has sold nearly 100,000 copies in En-

glish alone.

But strikingly, Mr. Graeber, 52, has been unable to get an academic job in the United States. In an incident

that drew national attention, Yale University, in 2005, told him it would not renew his contract (which would

have promoted him from assistant professor to “term associate” professor). Aer a fight, he won a reprie-

ve—but only for two years. He never came up for tenure.

Foreign universities immediately sent out feelers, he says. From 2008 through this spring, Mr. Graeber was a

lecturer and then a reader at Goldsmiths College and, just last month, he accepted a professorship at the

London School of Economics and Political Science.

But no American universities approached him, he says, and nearly 20 job applications in this country (or Ca-

nada) have borne no fruit. The applications came in two waves: directly aer the Yale brouhaha and a couple

of years later, when he concluded he wanted to return to the States for reasons that were partly personal (a

long-distance romantic relationship, the death of his mother and older brother).

His academic “exile,” as he calls it, has not gone unnoticed. “It is possible to view the fact that Graeber has

not secured a permanent academic position in the United States aer his controversial departure from Yale

University as evidence of U.S. anthropology’s intolerance of political outspokenness,” writes Je� Maskovsky,

an associate professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in the Mar-

ch issue of American Anthropologist.

That charge might seem paradoxical, given anthropology’s reputation as a leist redoubt, but some of Mr.

Graeber’s champions see that leism as shallower than it might first appear. Anthropology “is radical in the

abstract,” says Laura Nader, a professor in the field at the University of California at Berkeley. “You can quote

Foucault and Gramsci, but if you tell it like it is,” it’s a di�erent story, she says.

Mr. Graeber “talks about possibilities, and God, if there’s anything we need now it’s possibilities,” she says.

“We are in tunnels. We are turned in. We are more ethnocentric than ever. We’ve turned the United States in-

to a military zone. And into this move-to-the-right country comes David Graeber.”

When he applied to Berkeley in the early 2000s and the department failed to hire him, “we really missed the

boat,” she says.

Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who had no di-

rect experience with any Graeber job search, agrees: “Whoever had a chance to hire him and didn’t missed

out on having the author of one of the most important books in recent memory on their faculty,” he wrote in

an e-mail.

‘Incredibly Conformist’

Mr. Graeber was at first reluctant to talk about his failed job searches, for fear of coming across as bitter and

souring future chances, but he decided to open up aer the LSE job became o�icial. As he recalled, the pla-


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ces to which he applied twice were the City University of New York Graduate Center, the New School, Cornell

University, and the University of Chicago. The others were Hunter College, Emory, Duke, Columbia, Stanford,

and Johns Hopkins—as well as the University of Toronto. He heard indirectly of colleagues at other universi-

ties trying to secure him a position, to no avail.

Responding to anthropologists’ frequent claim that they embrace activist scholarship, he echoes Ms. Nader:

“They don’t mean it”—at least when it comes truly radical activism.

“If I were to generalize,” Mr. Graeber says, “I would say that what we see is a university system which mitiga-

tes against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposi-

te, and I think this kind of conformism is a result of the bureaucratization of the university.”

He and his allies also suspect that false information emanating from his public fight with Yale, garnered se-

condhand, has hurt him.

When Yale announced it was not renewing his contract, students and some professors rallied behind him,

and he gave interviews suggesting that the decision was politically motivated. (The story made The New York

Times.) He had spent part of a sabbatical working with the Global Justice Movement, which has mounted

protests against such groups as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Perhaps surprisingly,

he did not take much part in the heated Yale debate over graduate-student unionization. He was, he likes to

say, “a scholar in New Haven and an activist in New York.”

During the dispute over his Yale position, he said, he’d been accused of not doing service work (though he

did all he was asked, he said), of being late for classes, and of being ill prepared to teach. Yancey Orr, a gradu-

ate student in religion at the time who took courses from Mr. Graeber and is now an assistant professor of

anthropology at the University of Alberta, says that charge is absurd: “He was easily the most helpful semi-

nar leader you could ask for.”

Being denied tenure at Yale is hardly unusual, but not getting rehired at Mr. Graeber’s stage is. Some profes-

sors Mr. Orr has talked to at institutions that failed to hire Mr. Graeber were under the impression that he

went nuclear over a tenure denial, but the situation was more complex, more unorthodox, says Mr. Orr.

The chairs of the departments to which Mr. Graeber applied who could be reached all cited confidentiality in

declining to talk about the decisions—or, typically, even to confirm he’d applied. But several denied that po-

litics would a�ect such decisions. “I can say without hesitation,” wrote James Ferguson, the chair of anthro-

pology at Stanford, in an e-mail, “that I personally would not regard Graeber’s political orientation as in any

way disqualifying, nor would I expect such views to be held by my colleagues.”

“As is known throughout the world,” wrote Janet Roitman, chair of anthropology at the New School, “the

New School prides itself for its longstanding tradition of radical politics; David would not have been the first

hire or tenured faculty member to pursue ‘radical’ political positions or to engage in activism.”

Some anthropologists, including Alex Golub, a contributor to the popular blog Savage Minds and an assis-

tant professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, suggested that a general dearth of jobs in the field would

be enough to explain Mr. Graeber’s run of bad luck—especially because the book that brought him fa-

me, Debt, had not been published at the time of the searches. (Though he’d published four others by 2009, as


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well as a much-read pamphlet, “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,” with Prickly Paradigm.) But Mr.

Graeber sco�s at that: “Gee, I applied for 17. Somebody got those jobs.” Moreover, Britain is not brimming

with anthropology jobs, either, yet he’s had little problem there.

“I believe it’s possible that his politics have helped him in some cases and hurt him in others,” says Mr. Mas-

kovksy, of CUNY, who in his American Anthropologist essay raised the issue of what Mr. Graeber’s academic

exile to England meant for the profession . “He has a huge following among graduate students because of his

protest work and because he links his protest work to the kind of anthropology he wants to do. But there’s ahuge gap between generating that kind of interest and respect, on the one hand, and job-hiring decisions. I

don’t know what makes people hire and what makes them not.”

On Collegiality

One charge that has dogged Mr. Graeber is that he is “di�icult,” an attribute that’s obviously hard to gauge.

Ms. Nader says she urged him to soen his rough edges—to send thank-you cards, even, when protocol sug-

gested it. (Mr. Graeber does not recall that counseling session on manners and says he always sends

thank-you notes.) But she finds it deplorable that scholars would value superficial clubbability over origina-

lity of thought; she decries the “‘harmony ideology’ that has hit the academy.” She also thinks the fact that

he “writes in English,” eschewing jargon, hasn’t helped him.

There is some evidence of Mr. Graeber’s contentiousness. During an online seminar about Debt on the blog

Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University,

said Mr. Graeber had—for example—provided insu�icient evidence that in the first Gulf War the United States

had attacked Iraq partly because Iraq had stopped using dollars as its reserve currency and turned to the eu-

ro. In Mr. Graeber’s response, he accused Mr. Farrell of “consummate dishonesty” and said he had failed to

engage with the argument and instead sought to show its maker was a “lunatic.” Mr. Farrell responded that

he was “very unhappy” with Mr. Graeber’s charges and tone.

From February to April 1, J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, baited

Mr. Graeber by setting up an automated Twitter stream that sarcastically recounted dozens of alleged (or ac-

tual) errors of fact in Debt. For example: “Learned that 12 Regional Fed Banks not private banks like Citi or

Goldman Sachs? Stay away until you do! #Graebererrors.” Mr. Graeber responded aggressively. At one point

he wrote, on Twitter, referring to Mr. DeLong’s work in the Clinton Treasury Department on the North Ameri-

can Free Trade Agreement: “I bet the poor guy had a rough time at 14. Tried to compensate by gaining power,

then look—destroyed Mexico’s economy.”

Mr. Graeber calls some of Mr. DeLong’s postings “libelous”—a virtual campaign of harassment. “He has been

on a crusade to hurt me in every way,” he says, growing angry.

“Yet these guys are considered mainstream and I’m the crazy guy who can’t get a job.” He adds, “I don’t even

write negative book reviews.”

Mr. Graeber, who says he gets along just fine with his colleagues in London—and, indeed, with most of his

former colleagues at Yale—has his own take on what scholars mean by “collegiality”: “What collegiality me-

ans in practice is: ‘He knows how to operate appropriately within an extremely hierarchical environment.’

You never see anyone accused of lack of collegiality for abusing their inferiors. It means ‘not playing the ga-


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me in what we say is the proper way.'”

In his American Anthropologist essay, CUNY’s Mr. Maskovsky said that the many graduate students who took

part in Occupy Wall Street might view Mr. Graeber’s di�iculty finding a job as a cautionary tale. Would their

advisers see their activism as, at the least, a distraction from their research?

Manissa Maharawal is one such student, at CUNY, a participant in Occupy now studying the activist projects

that emerged from it. She says she has received nothing but support from her advisers and doesn’t unders-tand the politics of academic hiring, but finds the Graeber situation perplexing—in a bad way. “His work is re-

ally good, he’s well reviewed, he’s become pretty famous in the last year,” she says. “I’m not sure what’s

going on. You can have all the boxes you’re supposed to check checked and still not get a job. It’s scary, for

sure.”


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