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Replying to
Yes, your first order of business will be arguing among yourselves to sort out the No True Graeberland problem 🤣 100:1 odds against a group getting out of that discussion with enough coherence left to do anything. “Real Graeberism has never been tried” is the future here.
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Replying to @vgr
This wouldn’t be Graeberland! I’m graeberland you’d have bookkeeping and obligations would be governed by reciprocity (including the counts from bookkeeping!) he doesn’t simply argues for the farthest opposite of the current systems he denounced.
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One must not speak ill of the dead, but from a brief, unpleasant interaction which ended with him blocking me, he was impossible to talk to when alive if you disagreed even slightly. It’s been >1 year since he died, and he’s back in zeitgeist with a posthumous book, so fair game.
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My summary take: Disliked Debt. A bad-faith sloppy polemic with 1 essay worth of insight bloated into a fat book. The bullshit jobs phrase was clever but the argument was bad. Did not read bureaucracy book. Only thing I liked was his essay on play
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Do not intend to read new book. Reviews I trust suggest it’s the same sort of shaky, melodramatic polemic that Debt was. But I do think there is a really high burden of proof resting on those intent on elevating him to sainthood to demonstrate that his ideas have real merit.
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I’m not inclined to charitable views of Graeberism, and Graeberites who’ve reacted to my stuff over the years have not been charitable to me, so mutual hostility I guess 😆 But at least we share the left-libertarian quadrant and agree that right-authoritarianism is the worst.
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Clarification: by “demonstrate that his ideas have real merit” I mean via superior governance of a real society over a longish period. Not arguments in a book. Like at least a large village or small town for say 20 years. A dozen twenty-somethings living in a house ain’t it.
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In general I’ve reached a point of put-up-or-shut-up expectations with all novel political ideologies. There’s only 2 kinds: 1. Those too dangerous to be even allowed a chance to experiment 2. Those that can only hurt willing participants in experiments
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For Type 2, we really do need a lot more sandbox regions that allow experiments. Not weird uninhabited islands, but mainstream existing communities. An ideology that can only take root on virgin political territory is useless until we invent warp drives and terraforming engines.
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Claiming historical examples that predate a political ideology as evidence for the validity of that ideology isn’t political science. It’s historical revisionism. If there are novel normative elements to Graeberism you need new experimental evidence for it, not retcons.
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Replying to
I guess I have to read it again, with an active search for “ought” content. My recollection is only of the “is/was” arguments. Could you recommend something to read immediately prior, that would help emphasize its polemic essence to me this time around?
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