So I want to talk about something David Graeber touches upon in "the democracy project"

there is the possibility that the minority is correct and the majority is wrong. e.g. anticapitalists are the minority in today's world, and they are correct, but they are oppressed and kept impotent by the incorrect capitalist majority. thus democracy is an enemy and barrier to what's right

Do you have a critique of Graeber's argument of your own or are you just reposting the same debunked pamphlet that all ultracoms post?

Capitalists are never the majority, fam. Capitalists use state violence to protect themselves and their property from the proletarian majority. An empowered proletariat that acts in their collective self-interest would be socialist

I dunno why but I find his style hard to read.

it is very information heavy, but i tend to see that as a good thing even it requires a lot of retension

You haven't read a lot of books, have you? I mean, Debt is a decent anthropological take on the nature of debt, but it's no great philosophical work. It's pop-science.

That's him tracing the origin of democracy viewed as "majority vote backed by coercive force", aka the form of democracy most states (claim to) enact. The form of democracy he supports is one where people don't just vote on predetermined questions, but come together to collectively and creatively solve problems facing their community, without anyone violently objecting. Here's a tl:dr version of his ideas on democracy:
youtube.com/watch?v=5eR_95slEFw

AFAIK this is like the second(?) time I've posted it on Holla Forums, and I've never seen anyone else post it before. The first time I posted it, the arguments against it were formulated as follows: no, he's not a moralist; he doesn't say he is! The point being, of course, that he's accused of being a moralist precisely because he fails to bring forth a proper materialist origin-point not just of debt, but of anything that precedes, implies and enables something like debt. If you're internalized Marx to a basic degree, it's a very meh text.

Most of Graeber's work can be seen as building on Turner's (Terry) anthropological Marxism: applying the method seen Capital (value category, fetishism, etc.) to "anthropological economies", instead of the Marxist method which is incredibly structural: schema of productive modes.

Graeber in Debt and also his Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams, are really more like a book with a bunch of articles in it, yet as I said with this sort of Turnerian fusing of his method plus a realism that is critical. William Pietz, Mauss, Marilyn Strathern, et cetera, creatively applying it to Iroquois, Maori and other ancient societies, and criticizing political economists and other anthros.

I'd say read Turner's it's actually Marxist (less accessible than anything Graeber's ever written, tho still good). For anthropology (the modern discipline), I never thought I could be interested without the background, but it's surprisingly decent. Not Debt, but the other text of his I mentioned, is the best Graeber's done, though sadly overlooked.

But I'm overall fair, as I've said that other time and ITT: he does some of the more worthwhile activism, has good empirics and commentary on current events.

Congratulations you've become an ancap

That's nice, but what happens when people's interests collide? What happens when politics extend out of the commune? To me it just sounds like the anarcho version of liberal managerial democracy

wtf I hate democracy now

actual propertied capitalists (i.e. owners) might not be a majority but the general populace of the u.s. is overwhelmingly ideologically anticommunist
you're basically saying that anything done by proletariat is always socialism. what if the proletariat regards exterminating jews as its collective self interest and decides to act on that? is that socialism?

today's proletariat believes capitalism is in its self interest, so that's what they support and vote for. democracy is being used to enforce and perpetuate capitalism

Probably more than the average person on the streets, probably average-slightly above average than the average poster here I would say.

Why do you think anthropology is less valuable than philosophy? I would probably say they are of equal value or quite the opposite if push came to shove.

Its a historical/anthropological account, very well researched and sourced.

I understand that, it does seem though even in the case of consensus the consensus is garnered on the back of implicit threat

I'm still looking for this page reference. Have you actually read the book?

This is fundamentally not the case, in fact he describes in detail the exact material circumstances which gave rise to debt relations. Firstly, debts between communities members in tight night communities, debts of trust essentially arose because it was the most efficient method of distributing resources in a tight knit community, where largely people had specific jobs, besides farming, there would rarely be more than one metal worker of healer say, everybody had their part to contribute and knew they would receive in turn the other essential parts. Debts were never paid of course, in any other way than knowing the next time you needed the help of that particular member of the community, you would no doubt get it. This is in fact an oversimplification of Graebers much more nuanced argument, which contains archaeological and historical evidence of complex systems communities used, all of which imply a "debt" to the community that is continually paid in communal service.

Debts had to become codified when things began to scale up and societies became more integrated, with less trust, and so debt tokens were introduced, in many different forms, which could be passed around.

The fact that he also describes the spiritual and social conception of debt that these societies held does not mean his argument is a spiritual or social or moral one, merely that he describes in detail.

Your post basically sums it. As the old Moor told us: the ruling ideas of an epoch are the ruling ideas of the mode of production. When enough fed up workers in their minoritarian confines manage to bundle together and form a revolutionary movement, they have the subjective power to start imposing a real change that breaks with this hegemony of the ruling ideology, and this is by violent, self-despotic and imposing force (self-despotic, because this minority of revolutionary workers may internally organize itself democratically if that suits it). Its ultimate aim is the free association of individuals (an actual democracy, where ideas are no longer bound by the logic of commodity production), for which it needs to overcome the very chains that would otherwise define democratic consciousness.

Ok the it was me you where arguing with last thread re: Debt.
I'm pretty sure Graeber traces the origin of credit type debt as a perversion of the promises and "debts" we owe each other in human economies. (If that is "materialist" or not I'll leave up to you, but seeing he's one of the most prominent Marxian/anthropological value theorists alive it would surpise me if he didn't employ some form of materialism). I'll put try to find the passages in the book and come back at you. Also, slightly off topic but my reading of Graeber is that debt is inherent in the human condition as a way to ensure cooperation and each others reproduction, so the question is not if debt should exist or not, but who should owe what to whom and how it should be enforced.

In actual fact, Graeber's debunking of Adam Smiths conception of the origin of money, possibly the books primary claim, is an assertion of materially based argumentation against the projections of Adam Smith.

Also why do you value theoretical postulating over empirical data? You said this a while back but I didn't really query it.

I'll get back to this thread in a bit and answer you'll; wage-labour is calling me rn.

Making a cross on a peace of paper every 4 years is not democracy. The general population is raised in an environment of ignorance and dependency. We're trained to let those benevolent politicians make our decisions for us and not worry too much about politics. Changing this may require a minority acting with "violent force" as said, but the state of "democracy" under capitalism says nothing about the possiblity of democracy as such.

i fundamentally agree with you but i think this idea that the voting public has no agency and no effect on the politics of the day is wrong. powerful individuals and groups spend billions of dollars on elections and propaganda in an effort to get the people onto their side, so they must have some need for the proles. the people do have power (even if it's limited) and they use it to enforce and perpetuate capitalism and state violence. that means democracy is currently an impediment to change

Okay so to get the full thing read the whole chapter "The Mob Begin To Think and Rule", but for the specific section its page 185/186 of the Penguin published in 2013. Or, for the PDF, about 2/3 of the way through that chapter.

Here are some potato photos of the hard copy of the relevant section anyway

Because of US propaganda. They've been fed all their lives that communism is spooky Stalin stuff, but if you actually ask them what they want and let them decide things for themselves then the solutions they arrive at are inevitably anti-capitalist, because that is where their self-interests lie. The state and the ruling class have become adept at influencing public opinion, but that influence is only skin deep, and it disappears once the proletariat are empowered. History demonstrates that in a revolutionary situation the common "unenlightened" masses are the most radical revolutionary force. The solution to democracy isn't to have an enlightened dictatorship or a hippie commune, it's to empower the proletariat and to have them realise their own power.
They would be wrong in doing that but what is your solution? Do you think consensus politics will prevent the majority from enforcing their collective will? No it won't. The only way to prevent the majority from doing what they want is through state violence. Besides, anti-Semitic sentiment has been encouraged by the state for centuries in order to create a scapegoat in an easily exploitable underclass ("Debts dragging you down? Blame the jews!" "Crime on the rise? Blame the gypsies! Nevermind the fact that it was us who put them in that situation, they're the ones to blame!")

I don't think that, it's apples and oranges. But Debt isn't some great work of anthropology either; Graeber's not the first anthropologist to talk about money, and many of his points have been made before, such as the debunking of Smith's origin of barter.

What's your score solution OP, totalitarianism? Society as a greater whole requires coordination, which requires some sort of consensus and decision making. There was nothing inherently violent about direct democracy throughout history, IMO his analysis is nothing more than misguided interpretation.

Not to meme but you should read Bookchin. One of the larger themes he writes on is direct democracy. He makes a good argument that direct democracy, if it is carried out in town halls and with open community debates, is more than just majority rule. With community engagememt before voting you see historically lawmaking was more about compromise. And even if the minority still loses or doesn't get what they want, they are allowed to protest, make they're case, etc. given these circumstances democracy is inherently less violent as it channels people's energy into politicking. Conversly any other system, in which things are decreed by others requires violent force to carry out by the maker of the decree

In an effort to get politicians and the media on their side*

and Holla Forums has put them upside down for some reason

But he is the first to present a comprehensive account of the effect of this on history, right up to its effect on our contemporary economy

I'm not a pacifist I have no real problem with enforcing the democratic will with violence, provided I consider it sufficiently democratic in actuality

And a lot of his historical accounts are bollocks. History unfortunately doesn't fit well into cycles of credit and currency

such as

Does this mean that we can have a democratic revolution?

One of these pictures is right

i just can't agree with that, sorry. in my experience the average person sees increasing and securing their own wealth and status, and theirs alone, as their chief self interest. that's why they so despise the welfare state; they can't stand the idea that "my money" is taxed from them and given to "freeloaders" like single mothers or blacks. that's why they sympathise with capitalists, because it's in the capitalists that they (the proles) see themselves: productive and successful individuals, the "self-made man," forced to share their success with those who didn't work for it
that's really my ultimate point: what happens when people democratically choose to do the wrong thing?

This isn't wrong, but I wanted to point out that a large part of it is just natural reactions to the system they're in. I've heard people say things that sound like they came straight from the mouths of libertarian socialists or from some Marxist screed. They hate their bosses, so they want to do away with their bosses. They hate corporate, so they want to do away with corporate. They see how the government fucks them for the sake of these businesses that then go on to fuck them harder, do they want to do away with both. Most probably haven't ever picked up anything more left than The Sunday Times in their whole life, but you don't need to be immersed in communist theory to understand who is fucking you and how when you're on the very bottom.

Okay so this article is basically a complete crock of shit I'm sorry

Yes, probably the most prominent advocate of gift economies, in fact what the whole book ultimately argues for, sees no problem with exchange.

Also, why does this article rarely (if ever) actually quote or cite Graeber at any length and why are the first 2 cited soucres a blog and Jaconbin magazine? (the rest of the sources are scarcely better with many more blogs)

This is, basically a crass, misrepresentative and poorly sourced article.

also

A guy on an extended rant about Graeber supposedly loving exchange is hung up on intellectual property? Really? Also I am 100% sure he will have credited this if he did and I am on my way to check now

That's the thing though, is democracy is inherently less violent. You don't necessarily need violence is the vote represents the will of the people.
And as I was saying, townhall style direct democracy requires debate and compromise. Even the minority is more likely to get what they want, as opposed to our current representative republic style of voting. Highly recommend this work as a counterpoint:
dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/cmmnl2.mcw.html

To name one example, Rome. He uses the Roman Empire as another example a warlord state paying their soldiers with foreign loot, except the date where he says coinage was first created in Rome, 338 BC, was during the early Roman Republic, after the Latin Wars (where the losers were annexed into the republic, not enslaved), and well before the Pyrrhic and Punic wars that saw the Roman Republic become a great military power. There's a massive three-century gap that Graeber doesn't cover, and which contradicts his narrative.

Who is the average person to you? I've had plenty of conversations with workers where they with just a little prodding start sounding like radical anti-capitalists, and that's coming from some pretty "conservative" people. Workers know what their interests are, they just need a little encouragement. And again, revolutionary accounts show that the empowered proletariat is an extremely terrifying revolutionary force, to the point where "revolutionaries" have to start reining them in because they're "going too far" (take, for example, the French Revolution).
Then they do the wrong thing. What is the point of your question again? Democracy isn't inherently moral or amoral, but it is the only way to empower the proletariat

That exactly my point, famalam

Are you saying Rome was not warlord state? Does reffering to it as the Empire and not specifically the Republic actually change the content of what he says about it? The Republic was still a warlord state was it not? Seems like a semantic mistake rather than an actual hole in his narrative. Could you point to the section of Debt where the mistake is made maybe I would be interested to see it

Because as I pointed out in the last thread it's glaringly obvious the authors have never actually read Debt(at best they've skimmed through it and read some reviews). That you could actually publish such a thing without feeling the slightest bit of shame is beyond me.

also "annexing" is still looting, nice euphemism though

I mean, I don't want to enter into a circle jerk here, so I'll say no more about it after this, but it really is quite a terrible article. The style for one thing, whats with all the snide footnotes? Also his choice of language is so full of bile. Its like Graeber fucked his wife or something. It is also funny that he says Graeber stole ideas when the entire article is basically a rehash of a bunch of different similarly crass reviews. When I clicked on it I was expecting some big historical debunkation of the Graebers central thread, what I got was, basically a bunch of nothing, he says a load of things about Graebers argument without feeling the need to actually point to where Graeber said or implied such things, so even if they are valid critisms,the whole thing lacks any credibility. If you hadn't read the book yourself and were reading this review, you would get very little sense of the actual arguments Graeber makes, and would come away with a warped account of what it actually contains

I thought so, I just wanted to make it explicit, since to me "because that's where their interests lie" makes it sound like a conclusion they came to from a position "what's best for me?" to the exclusion of those that reach those ideas because they understand on some level how fucked the situation they and their co-workers are in.

My apologies if this is all redundant. Please excuse my autism.

Here's a picture of the Roman Republic after the Latin War. Rome is the red area. That's not an Alexandrian conquering spree, The Republic expanded gradually over the course of several decades, but it wasn't some mad, slave, and silver-fueled conquering spree as Graeber describes it. The Republic wasn't a warlord state, it was a city state similar to Athens, with a citizens levy, not professional soldiers. The Republic was different from the Athenian democracy in that it was an oligarchy, with a rich patrician class securing votes from a citizen proletariat through patronage (which Graeber a few pages before stated was typical of states that were militarily weak, which is blatantly false)

Also, annexing is not looting. The Latin cities were assimilated into the Republic or turned into client states or colonies. They weren't looted for their bullion

if the proletariat wants the wrong thing, then they shouldn't be empowered

t. Napoleon. Why are you a socialist again?

delusional fetishism

Sounds pretty warlord state to me.

Again, I read this book 2 years ago, so could you point me to the section you are reffering to so I could look at it again?

hmmmm. You seem awful imperialist

Don't be stupid. We both know most working-class people would cheer if people like you and me were hanged.

If we actually had democracy all debts would be cancelled and wealth/land redistributed. There's a reason the ruling class loathes the idea of it

Alexander's empire (Graeber's textbook example of a warlord empire) was a monarchy
Not a characteristic of warlord states, fam (hint: they have to have a warlord)
A lot of states expanded. Not all of them used bullion
Athens was not a warlord state, fam. Maybe you should read something about Athens, such as Bookchin's take on Athenian democracy (spoiler: he likes it).
In his account of Alexander's conquest of Persia, he described how the Macedonians used captured silver mines worked by slaves in order to pay his army. Rome did no such thing. They didn't even have an army to pay, they were citizen's levies, like Athens and like every city state. On that note Athens didn't fuel its economy through slavery, much of its population was free farmers (and free non-citizens, who weren't an underclass they just didn't have franchise). Sparta, on the other hand, was an economy fuelled by slavery, which is why it was so concerned with having the best citizen soldiers, to keep the slaves in line. Anyway, I digress.
Rome at the time it started minting was not a warlord state. It wasn't on a conquering spree. It was one of many warring states who sought to expand their influence. But the way they went about it was not at all how Graeber describes, and it does not fit into his narrative. It feels like Graeber took one historical society (Alexander's empire), and tried to shoehorn its conditions onto every other contemporary society, even though at closer analysis they didn't fit at all.
The axial age, the Mediterranean. Page 228

I never said that. Here's what I said:
Of course masses of people have been wrong, but unless you're a believer of socialism through enlightened despotism (ie. not a marxist), then you have to recognise the proletariat's role as a radical revolutionary force. A revolution is inherently violent - it is a mass of people exerting their will over a minority - same as democracy.

Rereading that, that was a stupid line. Democracy is explicitly amoral, it is neither good or bad.

I was quoting you, when you called it an oligarchy. What?

well what was it, a monarchy or an oligarchy? In any case, it is quite simple for a ruling patrician class to act as warlords.

So?

fam I was literally directly quoting you

but did expand territory and to all intents and purposes loot.

ill look at this probably a lot later on now

The Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Alexander's empire (the one that conquered persia), was a monarchy. Alexander was a king. I realize you're quoting me, fam, but what I said doesn't indicate that the Roman Republic was a warlord state. Rome was a city state similar to Athens, with the difference that one was an oligarchy (lead by rich nobles who secured votes through patronage) and one was a democracy (where every free citizen participated). Neither were warlord states, exemplified in Alexander's empire, and the nature of their societies were different in a way that doesn't really fit with Graeber's historical analysis. Graeber is a decent anthropologist but he isn't a historian.

if the proletariat is a potential revolutionary force, it's also a potential antirevolutionary force
exactly, which is what's happening now; a majority of useful idiots exerting their will over an enlightened minority

Looks interesting, anyone got a pdf?

This is literally the reason why I still consider myself a democrat despite the bad name some people give the term on here. I am a democrat in the sense of demos kratos; popular force. Not some hogwash fetishization of specific forms of organization or voting or whatever but advocating the direct armed self-rule of the people

I can just feel the liberal smugness

yes, as we all know, stupid people don't exist

Knowing something most people don't doesn't make you superior, faggot. Our job is to help the proletariat liberate themselves, not smugly rule over them "for their own good". An educated proletariat is an empowered proletariat, and vice versa. A state which disempowers the proletariat, even with good intentions, will just create a nation of sheep, ready for any demagogue to use for their own ends.

It's like you don't even know what communism is

Flag checks out

no one said anything about superiority. calling the masses stupid is just a statement of fact; whether that makes them inferior/superior is a meaningless value judgement
i thought you said they were already aware of what their interests are. why should they need our help if we don't know better than they do?
does not exist and cannot exist

this, if the proletariat are ever to self govern, the must know why and how.

Except the obvious implication of calling the masses stupid is that you need smart people to govern for them, which turns the masses into stupid sheep, and so on.
They are, when they're not being told what their "real" interests are by the ruling class. Let a worker think for himself for two seconds and the conclusion he will reach inevitably looks like socialism (see every revolution ever). That's why I keep talking about an empowered proletariat, one that is free from the ruling ideology and free to make decisions for themselves and act in their collective self-interest.
Read a fucking book

no, the implication is that they will continue to be stupid and impede change. i never said anything about governance
wow, such gullible, manipulable people really fills me with confidence about their potential
which? "future events that are yet to occur"?

Yes, and how are you then gonna enforce change, fam?
Fam, you are one of them. You think knowing a bit of theory makes you above class?
Any book. You're missing the fucking point. All it takes for a person to be educated is to start reading. How do you think people become socialists?

you're not. because you can't do it without popular support
i'm a capitalist/reactionary/rightist/conservative? nope
the irony is that i don't know any theory, yet i'm still not stupid enough to support capitalism or the ruling system
which the overwhelming majority will not
by using a small amount of basic critical thought and by not being a gullible, easily-led retard. unfortunately it seems that's expecting too much from my fellow man

FFS have you even read any theory. Do you know what proletariat and bourgeoisie means?
Huh, figures. So that's why everything you have said has been liberal garbage.
Here's the thing, fam: Unless you own a fucking business, unless you're a stockholder or a banker or a bourgeois politician, you're a worker. You're no different from the "stupid, uneducated masses". You're just as stupid, egotistical, and ignorant as everyone else. You're not special. You're not smarter or better because hang out on Holla Forums (especially since you haven't even read any fucking theory). Now stop being a faggot

...

Are you? I've been talking about the proletariat (as in, workers, that class who form the majority of people) this entire thread. Yet you seem to assume I'm talking about conservative boomers. Which is why I call you a liberal, because you have about as much class consciousness as the smug Hillary types. If you want to pretend to be smarter than everyone else at least have the fucking decency to be well-read

which are uniformly conservative and continually vote for anticommunist politicians
oh i see. because i don't suck the dicks of my fellow working class men (who hate me and my views and would happily see me lynched in the street) that means i'm not class conscious

Are you a conservative? No. Am I a conservative? No. How thick are you? You don't have property, you are a prole, now read a book and get yourself some class consciousness you intolerable faggot. Opinions are malleable, class is not. You have more in common with a conservative prole than you have with Mark Zuckerberg.

Explain that picture OP, please?

communism is unpopular and will never be accepted or championed by the masses. they see you and i as their mortal enemies. they have no class loyalty and will kill us if conditions allow it. you and i are powerless minorities who will die under capitalism and never see the change we hope for

It's the doggo revolution, fam. One day the Canariat will rise up and destroy their tyrannical human masters.

Forgot your flag, fam

Yes, since morality as a standalone concept is inherently useless in the first place. And if that's not obvious already, perhaps we're not memeing Stirner hard enough.

That's actually not all. It's also a way for the smaller chunks of population to be guaranteed safety in return for submitting to the will of the majority. It's a way to disagree without killing each other.

Wow rude