This is a real blow. I’ve been reading his stuff for years. Here’s a link [1] to his stuff in The Baffler from 2012 to 2016, but there’s much more available – I’ve .pdfs of his writings that I saved from many sources. I’ll update this later if I can find the original, live links.[1} https://thebaffler.com/authors/david-graeber

Edited to add: Actually, Wikipedia has a pretty good linked list of his articles, and a quick title check with mine seems to suggest that it is comprehensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber#Articles

Further edited to add: A short (180-page) book by Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, is a lovely example of his thoughtful writing style. It’s nicely summed up in Wikipedia [1].

It is available to buy from many good book stores, and it is also at Amazon. However, you can download it as a .pdf here [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

[2] https://b-ok.cc/dl/2643480/a4be9e

@dang – please delete this comment if it breaks any HN rules.

Really saddened to hear this.I’ve only recently started digging into his work and I can only imagine how it’ll impact my worldview for years to come.

For those unfamiliar with his work, here are some essays I recommend as a start:

1. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

2. What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-hav….

3. How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened) https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

I just clicked your link to “What’s the point if we can’t have fun?” and read the whole thing without really intending to (I told myself I was just gonna bookmark it).In many ways, the pieces I’ve read of Graber’s have gone over my head (someone down-thread mentioned “Debt” taking them months to read because every two pages was original enough to ponder for days at a time).

But what stands out to me was how much fun I always have reading him. Often, I’m laughing – and I’ve read other anthropologists and can say that, for instance, Clifford Geertz wasn’t exactly humorous.

I’m not trying to be trite here. I believe that, whatever your beliefs, your character and personality can be revealed in your writing in a way that stands alone, apart from whatever argument you might be making. I never met Graeber, but from his writing, he always seemed like a person I’d enjoy the hell out of having dinner with. Salute to a real one!

David’s work has had a big impact on me, I’m so sad, I can’t even get my thoughts together. He has some good interviews and talks on youtube as well, do check it out.1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxshXRDlxRo 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn78MhPmbCc 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YynqVvgZYI

buy and read Debt: the first 5000 years. It is an eye opening perspective on world history.His Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is also one I always wished to read a follow up on.

But also be sure to read critiques of Debt written by economists.Here’s one by Noah Smith: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-…

Thanks for linking that. It does a good job of drawing out some of the feelings I had when I read Debt. On the one hand I’m very glad I read the book. I found it very enlightening in terms of various aspects of history and anthropology, as well as enlightening about various leftist ideas. On the other hand I can’t say I came away feeling like I had read a “correct analysis” or that I really understood any better how anything worked. (I’m quite surprised to see so much praise for it on HN actually and such little challenge, the sad news about the passing of its author notwithstanding.)[EDIT: There are also some good counterpoints to Noah Smith’s critique in the comments, for example https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt…]

I’m not as down on Noah Smith as many, but this is honestly a pretty bad review.He basically admits to having trouble understanding it owing to it being disorganized (a point he repeats frequently). But then he complains about people who criticize him for not making good faith attempts understanding what they’re saying. Then he spends way too much of it trying to criticize anyone who would tell him it’s bad and even spends an entire paragraph talking about how he suspects Graeber is a public intellectual who bristles at criticism before going on to pre-emptively bristle at any potential criticism of his review.

Not his best work, to be sure.

From that reply:“While markets are one thing, capitalism is quite another, though, as it’s marked by the power imbalances of wage labor, something not found in all previous incidences of commerce…”

Upvote for dissembling markets from capitalism.

But I really wish the peanut gallery would also separate corporatism from capitalism.

There’s nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor.

> There’s nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor…. excepting of course for that particularly comprehensive work on Capitalism that very clearly argues that ‘surplus’ value can only be created from the exploitation of labor and any group that accumulates that surplus is effectively stealing it from labor.

edit: only on HN would a comment acknowledging the existence of Marx earn you downvotes on a post about David Graeber

We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I’m one of those weird lefties that loves markets, capitalism, competition, etc. So long as we are clear-eyed about it and actively counterbalance winner-takes-all.

> We hopefully have learned a few thing since.I think we’ve mostly learned that Marx was right.

You seem to be thinking of Marx from the sort of popular fiction of someone that protests capitalism as some great injustice. Marx’s logic, at least in Capital, isn’t that Capitalism is a moral evil, or that Capitalists are bad people (in fact he argues pretty clearly that the moral character of individual capitalists is irrelevant).

Marx’s central point is that Capitalism is a system filled with internal contradictions that will continually manifest themselves as crises. These crises will continue until the system finally becomes unstable an collapse. Marx’s vision of course was that it would collapse into socialism, but his utopia solutions can be viewed quite independently from his theory of capital.

Marx predicted a fairly large portion of our world today: the increasing globalization of capitalism, growing interdependence of labor and capitalist classes, increasing fragility of the labor class, the development of the credit system and financial system to temporarily resolve some of these contradictions.

If there is a good critique of Marx it is that he failed to predict the ecological and environmental damage that capitalism would bring. He failed to fully understand the way that these contradiction work with resource use.

Thank you for bringing up the point that Capitalists aren’t evil, or that Capitalism should be rejected for moral reasons, I think many people miss that.But I’m not sure we can talk about a central point in Capital. Capital is a description of a system based on private commodity production, for exchange. It has many points, and one of them is the one you mention about the inevitable replacement of the capitalist mode of production with communism, and it comes at the end of Vol 1. Funnily enough, I believe it’s the only point he asserts without arguments, and it’s, as we know, thoroughly wrong.

If I had to highlight one important point from Capital, I think Marx’s explanation for why the mass poverty of workers is an inescapable necessity for the capitalist mode of production would get my vote (chapters 4, 5, 6 of volume 1). It’s an argument he was the first to develop, and that many people still refuse to acknowledge.

You are very right to point out that Capital does indeed predict many phenomena that we see today. In general, Capital holds up as a description of how the capitalist mode of production works.

Thanks for posting this so I didn’t have to.I think if contemporary dialogue about Marx focused more on Capital and less on The Communist Manifesto we’d have less confusion about what Marx was trying to say.

I think it’s perfectly okay to agree with his concept of dialectical materialism and also disagree with the statist solution put forth in the manifesto.

Exactly, the communist manifesto is a short throwaway propaganda pamphlet that is for some reason held up as the apex of his work. Whereas Das Kapital, a mammoth 3-volume serious academic undertaking, and his real magnum opus, is ignored.