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.
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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
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.
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.
Whole bunch of Guardian pieces
Way over a dozen pieces in The Guardian
Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?
Three years ago the world watched a ragtag band of men and women fighters in the Syrian town of Kobane, most armed only with Kalashnikovs, hold off a vast army of Islamist militants with tanks, artillery and overwhelming logistical superiority.
Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?
In 1937, my father volunteered to fight in the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic.