This is an essay about the nature of hierarchy. In it, I want to delve into hierarchy’s most elementary forms: the way people avert their eyes or stand at attention, the sort of topics they avoid in formal conversation, what it means to treat another human being as somehow abstract, sacred, transcendent, set apart from the endless entanglements and sheer physical messiness...
Articles
Articles and publications
Many Seasons Ago”: Slavery and Its Rejection amongForagers on the Pacific Coast of North America
Anthropologists have traditionally classified foragers on the Pacific coast of North America into two major culture areas, characterized by strikingly different social and ethical systems. These are “California” and the adjacent “Northwest Coast.”
Neoveralism or the Beuracratizatiom of the World
Americans often find it difficult to talk about politics with people from other parts of the world. Consider three quotes culled, more or less at random, from world newswires around the end of December 2005. In Bolivia, newly elected president Evo Morales declared that in his victory “the people have defeated the neoliberals.”
Note worthy: what is the meaning of money?
It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible – what we call “the economy” – is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is.
Notes on Desire
“The idea that by seizing the object of your desire you would resolve the issue was actually considered a symptom of melancholia. The fantasies themselves are the realization of desire.”
Occupy and anarchism’s gift of democracy
As the history of past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running America more than the danger of true democracy breaking out. As we see in Chicago, Portland, Oakland, and right now in New York City, the immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality.
Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be
You can tell a lot about the moral quality of a society by what is, and is not, considered news. From last Tuesday, Parliament Square was wrapped in wire mesh.
Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, Occu- pyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
Occupy’s anarchist roots.
New York, NY — Almost every time I’m interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:
Occupy’s liberation from liberalism: the realmeaning of May Day
The US press seems to have decided that the Occupy movement is no longer a story. Pretty much no matter what we do. In New York, on May Day, something between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through the streets – we don’t know the exact numbers because most papers didn’t report the event at all, and therefore, didn’t bother to make estimates.
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like.
On social currencies and human economies: some notes on the violence of equivalence
In this essay I propose a category of ‘human economies’ to refer to those where the primary focus of economic life is on reconfiguring relations between people, rather than the allocation of commodities. Currencies that used to be labelled ‘primitive money’, but which are primarily used to effect this, would better be called ‘social currencies’.