by Steven Shaviro | External link

THE LATE DAVID GRAEBER was one of the few people in the English-speaking world of the early 21st century who could rightly be described as a public intellectual. An anthropologist who taught at Yale University, Goldsmiths’ College, and the London School of Economics, Graeber was also a political activist and an astonishingly prolific author. He described himself as a left anarchist and was heavily involved in the Occupy movement of the early 2010s. In addition to his more academic publications, Graeber wrote best-selling books that appealed to general readers. In these texts, he discussed such topics as how people become oppressed by accumulating debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years [2011]), the frustrations of having to deal with bureaucracy (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy [2015]), the way that many jobs feel meaningless and unnecessary to the people who perform them solely because they need the money (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory [2018]), and the history of alternative forms of political organization in the ancient world (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity [2021], co-authored with David Wengrow).

Graeber died in 2020, but he left behind a vast body of written work, some of which remains unpublished, and much of which appeared in obscure publications that are not easily available. This new volume, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …, collects 18 essays and interviews that were previously published either online or in volumes from small presses. Here these pieces are brought together in a major-press edition for the first time. The volume’s title comes from an earlier book by Graeber: in The Utopia of Rules, he wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Such rhetoric is typical for Graeber: a phrase that sounds grandiose (“the ultimate, hidden truth”) is brought down to earth, since the “secret” really consists of things that we already do on an everyday basis. Graeber is unusually optimistic for an anti-capitalist activist: he seeks to remind us that we ourselves have ultimately constructed the forms and institutions that oppress us, which means that these structures of social and economic life have no necessity to them but can be reorganized in multiple ways. Some of these ways may in fact be substantially better than anything we have now.

I personally tend toward pessimism; the world we live in, with looming ecological breakdowns and an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, seems headed for full-blown catastrophe. But I know that such a worldview leads only to fatalism and inaction; you can’t change anything if you have already given up in advance. Graeber’s optimism is a therapeutic shot in the arm for people like me. Defenders of our current wretched capitalist reality like to say that human beings, because they are not perfect, cannot create a perfect world. The obvious response to this, of course, is that, given that people have selfish and malicious tendencies, it is crazy to promote a system like capitalism in which our worst and most vicious impulses are extravagantly rewarded, while any hints of our better nature are discouraged, or even punished.

In one of the briefer essays in this volume—“Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!”—Graeber points to acts of common decency that most people perform spontaneously: things like waiting in line to get on the bus instead of pushing everybody else aside, or belonging to “a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent.” If you do these things, as most people tend to do, then according to Graeber, you are already more than halfway to anarchism. The point is to build on these general forms of behavior instead of appointing leaders who tell everybody else what they are supposed to do. Precisely because people are not perfect, and in particular because we tend to be abusive when we have power over others, we need to establish situations in which, right from the beginning, we already accept one another as equals.

Graeber’s arguments are charmingly seductive, even when I do not entirely accept them. The world would indeed be a better place if Donald Trump did not have any more power than the other eight billion of us. But even then, I suspect that he would still be a highly toxic person and a danger to anyone who came into contact with him. Perhaps I am being a bit unfair. Most of the essays in The Ultimate Hidden Truth are far more focused and specific than “Are You an Anarchist?” For instance, several chapters recount incidents from Graeber’s own life. In “I Didn’t Understand How Widespread Rape Was. Then the Penny Dropped,” he writes about the life of his mother. In the Depression, she had “a factory job sewing brassieres.” But her union decided to put on a Broadway play about workers’ issues, and Graeber’s mother had huge success as the female lead. Once the play’s run was over, however, she returned to the factory. She might have been able to pursue an acting career, but she didn’t because, as she told her son, “some of us were willing to sleep with producers. I wasn’t.” This memory anchors Graeber’s discussion of rapes committed by powerful men like Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Harvey Weinstein; this leads him in turn to reflect more generally on how such abuses are so common that our first impulse when we hear about them is usually “telling the person it happened to, ‘Well, what else did you expect?’”

In another essay, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” Graeber recounts all the bureaucratic red tape that he needed to deal with in order to arrange end-of-life care for his mother. The experience of endlessly filling out forms, and then endlessly doing them over and over again (because of minor errors, or because the forms themselves are self-contradictory and hence impossible to fill out fully), is something that most people in our society have to face sooner or later. In this sense, Graeber’s essay covers all-too-familiar ground rather than surprising us with something different and new. But such is precisely Graeber’s overall point: “Why, then,” he asks, “are there not vast ethnographic tomes about American or British rites of passage, with long chapters about forms and paperwork?” Anthropologists claim to study the contours of everyday life in different human societies. But when it comes to our own society, however important a role bureaucratic paperwork may play, “there just aren’t that many interesting things one can say about it. […] A Geertzian ‘thick description’ of a mortgage application, for example, would not really be possible, no matter how dense the document.”

Graeber notes that we can find works of literature dealing with the absurdities of bureaucracy by authors ranging from Franz Kafka to Stanisław Lem, from Ismail Kadare to José Saramago, from Jorge Luis Borges to Joseph Heller. But he rightly worries that anthropology, as a discipline, does not seem able to deal with it. Graeber speculates that this may have to do with the underlying “structural violence” that bureaucracy ultimately relies upon, as well as with the position of academia as a power structure that also presupposes and depends upon such violence and, as a result, is systematically blind to it. Graeber moves deftly and convincingly from details of everyday life to dazzling generalizations about the sort of world we live in. But his discussion also includes warnings about how such generalizations need to be distrusted, because they might be violent and oppressive themselves in the way that they accumulate and subsume particulars. What I find most brilliant and beautiful about these discussions, therefore, is the way that Graeber reflects back upon his own arguments. The problem with trying to focus upon things like bureaucratic paperwork is that these things “seem to repel any attempt to give them value or meaning. They are spaces […] where interpretive labor no longer works. […] They repel the imagination.” Our dialectical cleverness is defeated by such circumstances. Yet Graeber is also intensely aware that if we let ourselves be repelled by things like this, then “we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.”

Many themes from Graeber’s previous work are covered more briefly in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World … I have already mentioned his treatment of bureaucracy. He also discusses financialization—and debt in particular—and the struggle against it that was a major point for the Occupy movement from 2011 onwards. Graeber has sometimes been taken to task (by myself as well as others) for distancing himself from Marxism. It is true that he sees class conflict in the context of other formations of power in contemporary society, rather than seeing surplus-value extraction and class formation as the ultimate bedrock of capitalist society today, as Marxists tend to do. But here, Graeber states: “I don’t think I ignore [the basic tenets of Marxism], […] I actually take them rather for granted.” Graeber’s difference from traditional Marxism is that he does not see Marxist analysis as what French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser called the “last instance” of social formation and social struggle (though Althusser admittedly was somewhat reserved on this formulation himself). Instead, Graeber says that he works in the “juncture between Marxian and Maussian traditions.”

The latter of these refers to the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who studied the exchange of gifts as the foundation of social organization and power relations in so-called “primitive” (that is to say, non-Western and noncapitalist) societies. A society grounded in gift exchange rather than commodity production may well be extremely unequal, but the relation of social and political power to wealth and debt is quite different from the one that obtains in the modern capitalist world. Nonetheless, Mauss’s insights are still relevant to our own society today; they help us understand why affluent people so often like to make extravagant displays of their wealth rather than simply reinvesting that wealth in order to increase it. While the story that Donald Trump uses a golden toilet bowl may only be an urban legend, such a practice would be entirely consonant with his general tendency to aggrandize himself by indulging in ostentatious displays of wealth.

The two longest essays in The Ultimate Hidden Truth are also the two that cover the most new ground in comparison to Graeber’s previous writings. The volume opens with “There Never Was a West: On the Incoherence of the Notion of the ‘Western Tradition,’” in which Graeber takes on the all-too-common claim, at least among mainstream commentators, that democracy and pluralism are somehow uniquely Western concepts and values, originating in ancient Greece and culminating in the contemporary countries of North America and Western Europe. Graeber points out, as many before him have done, that the democracy of ancient Athens only applied to a small group of free men and excluded women and slaves. But he goes on to show that the very claim of Western uniqueness is entirely incoherent and false. For one thing, this schema simply ignores the two millennia that passed between the era of ancient Greece and the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is an exceedingly long period, during which ideas of human rights and democracy were almost entirely absent from Europe.

For another thing, the schema relies on European philosophical texts and entirely ignores inconvenient questions about what actual practices were followed in Europe for 2,500 years. For still another thing, many societies around the world have relied upon decisions made through the process of public discussions and deliberations leading to an eventual consensus, rather than through competitive voting and the election of formal representatives who wielded power. Finally, values of individual liberty, at least some degree of equality, religious tolerance, and so on, existed in other parts of the world long before they became adopted by the West. In the United States itself, these values and practices existed among Indigenous groups such as the Iroquois Confederacy, and upon pirate ships scouring the Atlantic, long before they were adopted into the nation’s founding principles. All in all, democratic practices involving “popular self-governance” existed outside of “the coercive apparatus of the state,” and arguments that see the state as the foundation of liberty, democracy, and human rights have gotten things entirely backward.

The volume’s closing essay—“What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”—is even more groundbreaking and innovative. Here Graeber writes about the importance of play, not merely for human beings but for animals more generally. The neo-Darwinian synthesis of mid-20th-century biology claims that evolution is entirely driven by ruthless competition among organisms (or even among “selfish genes” on a micro level), each seeking to maximize its own chances for survival and its number of offspring. This is a metaphor taken from neoclassical economics and applied, willy-nilly, to the biological world. According to such theories, “competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak [are] taken to be the prime directives of the universe.” Applied to biology, such a theory “offer[s] an explanation of behavior in rational terms”; even if an animal is not actually rational, it must be understood “as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest.”

Now it is doubtful that this sort of theory even correctly applies to human beings engaged in economic activities of production and exchange; see what I said above about Marcel Mauss and golden toilets. Of course human beings compete as much as they cooperate, but human competition itself often takes performative, dramatic, and even grotesque forms that are scarcely remunerative. Human beings may be capable of rationality, but we are not the rational utility maximizers that neoclassical economics takes us to be. Furthermore, the prevalence of play activity across the animal kingdom shows us that animals do not live by rational calculation alone either. Graeber insists that “life is an end in itself.” Indeed, “to exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.” Both human beings and other living things are often engaged in “having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it.” Extending Cyndi Lauper’s sentiment, we may say that all living organisms “just wanna have fun.”

Building upon these observations, Graeber goes so far as to suggest that, perhaps, “there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality.” This is itself, however, only a playful suggestion; Graeber admits that he does not have sufficient evidence to argue for it in any rigorous way. But he insists, rightly as far as I am concerned, that “such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.” A truly naturalistic, bottom-up understanding of existence needs to account for things like play (or, for that matter, art and speculation) without appealing to gods and demiurges—but also without simply explaining these things away.

David Graeber covers a lot of ground in his writing—all the way from autobiographical reminiscences, through historical and ethnographic research, to ecological and even cosmological speculation. But the reason that he is both delightful and instructive to read is because he has such a knack for explaining, in appealingly commonsensical terms, subversive ideas that have the power to enliven and liberate us but that have largely been excluded, for that very reason, from any notion of “common sense” in our usual social, political, and economic understandings. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World … offers us a sprightly introduction to Graeber’s ideas and encourages us, in our own turn, to question accepted pieties.