Our society is addicted to work. If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person.
Articles
Articles and publications
Trump talks about wrapping up the imperial program
The new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber was published by Ad Marginem and will be available at the non/fiction book fair, which starts tomorrow, November 30.
Turkey could cut off Islamic State’s supplylines. So why doesn’t it?
In the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it.
Turning Modes of Production Inside Out
Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery
Marxist theory has largely abandoned the flawed concept 'mode of production,' leading to a tendency to naturalize capitalist categories and dilute its radical edge. This article argues that a refined notion of the mode of production, focusing on human production and materialism, shows that capitalism—especially industrial capitalism—is more historically tied to chattel slavery than widely believed
Turning Modes of Production Inside Out Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery
Abstract: Marxist theory has by now largely abandoned the (seriously flawed) notion of the ‘mode of production’, but doing so has only encouraged a trend to abandon much of what was radical about it and naturalize capitalist categories.
Value as the importance of actions.
The theory of value presented in the next essay was developed in the 1980s (largely by anthropologists in the University of Chicago) and ‘90s (largely by myself) so it occurred to me, this being a new millennium and all, it might be helpful to the reader to provide something of an update. Something to demonstrate how this rather abstract theory can be useful for something.
Value the antropological theories of value
A Handbook of Economic
Anthropology, Chapter 27.
Value, politics and democracy in the United States
This article examines the role of values in the political discourse of the last decade in the US. It embarks from what many observers had described as a puzzle: the fact that significant parts of the American working class voted against their economic interests but in line with what they perceived to be their values.
Verraten und verkauft
Die Türkei hat die Kampfzone in Syrien nach Westen verlagert, nach Afrin, bis dahin eine Insel des Friedens
Völkermord mit Leopard
Es besteht kein Zweifel daran, dass die ethnischen Säuberungen, die auf türkische Streitkräfte und die mit ihnen verbündeten islamistischen Milizen zurückgehen, als Kriegsverbrechen einzustufen sind.
Wall Done
The single most dramatic moment of the protests in Quebec came on the first day of the summit, when the thousands of protesters who had marched through the city finally reached “the wall.”
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a moun- tain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing.