The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty. Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921. Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes” (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.
Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.” He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”
Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.
Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:
“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).
The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets. But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia. As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.
Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).
The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020). Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.
David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University. Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992. Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation. Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs. Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.
Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.
Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.
Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos
Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.
Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/
I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.
David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the devastating impact of 1990s shock therapy in Russia to Russian reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 and NATO’s incorporation of new members in central and eastern Europe. As a response in real time to the full-scale invasion of a nation of 40 million people by a nuclear-armed great power, however, it is analytically inadequate and misleading and politically and ethically flawed.
Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti.
This is a provisional text David Harvey prepared for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. He allowed us, nevertheless, to publish it here because of the escalating Russia-Ukraine crisis.
One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics
back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management
(1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate proposes to abolish the
tedious, repetitive, and pointless jobs associated with bureaucratic and
hierarchical capitalism, and create instead leaner horizontal, collectivist, and
autonomous structures, based on meaningful, self-directed, and relationally
expanded workers’ actions. I thought to myself: “These bloody managers are
appropriating even creativity!” Indeed, that was the beginning of what
Boltanski and Chiappello (2005) later called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’.
The same charismatic spirit of capitalist reformation echoes in David Graeber’s
Bullshit Jobs (2019) despite it being an attempt to actually eliminate
it.
Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is based on the article ‘On
the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, published in 2013 on the blog of Strike!
magazine, an umbrella of militant left-wing organizations, which is now closed.
The original Strike! page received more than one million hits, and
within a week, was translated into a least a dozen languages. In 1930, John
Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced
sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have
achieved a 15-hour work week. And yet it
didn’t happen. Instead, David argues, “technology has been marshalled, if
anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more” and more importantly, on
effectively pointless jobs. Crowds of people, in Europe and North America in
particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly
believe do not really need to be performed. This situation creates deep moral
and spiritual damage, “it is a scar across our collective soul” David argues.
Yet no one talks about it. Keynes’ promised utopia resurged briefly in the
1960s – remember Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the working-class (1980)? Yet,
it never materialised.
The standard line today is that Keynes didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism, which rebooted the productive economy, in tandem with the financialization of poverty. Instead, David links the proliferation of bullshit jobs to the explosion of the financial economy. The turning point was the economic deregulation of the 1980s, associated with the new spirit of capitalism, when “the children of the 1960s, used their ideology of cultural liberation, to break the unions and implement the regime of flexible production”. And yet, as I have highlighted in my opening paragraph, flexible production was precisely the result of the managerialist orchestration of expanded and more meaningful tasks for the workforce, and of the sense of expanded agency associated with such “job expansion” – the delusional experience of the new financialised subjects – which Bullshit Jobs advocates as a means against financial capitalism. Moreover, finance, and the new forms of extractivism associated with it, generates not just bullshit jobs, but also a feudal social system, based on a weirdly sadomasochist protestant work ethics in which the performance of boring and useless jobs and of actions totally separated form real life leads to salvation and economic remuneration whereas the jobs with higher social value are systematically devalued and underpaid. The aim of Bullshit Jobs is to show that neoliberalism is a political project, of the dystopian kind, and not an economic one. In fact, unlike classical capitalism, which was about profit and sound economics, financial capitalism is inherently inefficient and bureaucratic, as is shown by its declining rate of growth worldwide.
By showing that capitalism is a cultural and ideological
social construction, which we unconsciously reproduce every day, Bullshit
Jobs opens a potential space of collective refusal. By understanding the
performative dimensions of economics, we can appreciate that, if we decide so,
we can produce a different society, first, by eliminating bullshit jobs. The
policy of Universal Basic Income is a possible means to such end.
On the difference between bullshit jobs and shit jobs
Bullshit jobs
involve being paid by someone else either on waged or salaried basis for jobs “that
are so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee
cannot justify its existence”. They are jobs of smokes and mirrors. They are
white collar jobs, full of perks and status, honour, and prestige. But those who
perform them knows they are meaningless. In fact, the job holder must pretend
their job is important. So, bullshit jobs always contain a degree of falsity
and pretence. “The lives of bullshit workers are based on lies”. Shit jobs are
the opposite of bullshit. They are jobs that are needed but are not well paid.
Jobs that are of benefit to society. They are blue collar and paid by the hour.
Undignified, but meaningful. Typically, they consist in the ‘reproductive jobs’
of looking after people, which involve care, empathy and emotional labour (Graeber
2019, 14). Bullshit
and shit jobs cut the private public divide, in the same way they equally
flourish under capitalism and under socialism.
There are five types of bullshit jobs:
Flunky jobs exist only or primarily to make
someone else feel or look important. They are the jobs of the servants,
clients, sycophants, the entourage of those at the top of the feudal retainers.
David writes: “imagine that a crowd of indigent, runaways, orphans, criminals,
women in desperate situations and other disparate people gather around your
mansion…. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them
to minor task to justify their existence…. Such roles tend to multiply in
economies based on rent extraction” (Graeber 2019, 29). Flunkies are modern
versions of servants and maids, which David notes, have disappeared in the north
Atlantic world.
Goonies are people whose jobs have an
aggressive element: telemarketers, corporate lawyers, lobbyist. Working in advertising,
marketing and publicity, goonies are always dissatisfied, even if their jobs
tend to earn them six-figure salaries.
Duct tapers are workers who make
up for inefficiencies in the system. For instance: IT workers inputting
information into excel spread sheets; programmers making different hardware
compatible or female administrative assistants, who end up doing a lot of work
for their (male) bosses, and with their affective labour, soothing their egos.
Box tickers prepare reports and reproduce the
bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring, surveillance, and performance assessment
of work bureaucracies.
Taskmasters are the managers who formulate the
strategic mission, assess business performances, compose grids of career progression,
and keep the bullshit system alive.
Humorously parodying the kind of pointless categorizations
that populate the bullshit workplace, David’s classification is loose and
unground. On a closer inspection, it turns out that most bullshit jobs he
mentions are in fact, shit jobs. Take for instance the IT workers who fix and
repair programs or make different platforms compatible – the duct tapers. They
may be bullshit jobs, but they are central in the reproduction of value under
platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). The workers for the Amazon Mechanical Turk,
a crowdsourced platform for so-called “post-human intelligence tasks”, which
outsources small and alienating digital work are paid an average of 15 dollars
per day, for anything between two and ten hours work, 100 hits per day. Platform
capitalism is the productive side of finance, the new site of capitalist value
creation and extraction, fully entangled with global industrial production,
their digital infrastructures and automation systems. Amazon, Facebook and
Google and their shareholders don’t think these jobs are bullshit and won’t let
these jobs go without a fight. Or
think of the Flunkies such as porters, security
guards, maids, freelance care workers.
These ‘shit shit jobs’ are neither blue collar nor white collar but
pertain to an unregulated and highly exploitative service economy, which also
proliferates with the proliferation of finance.
The confusion seems to stem from the fact that David’s
classification focuses on work, rather than on labour, which depoliticises the issue
at stake because it discounts the social relation of production, that is, the
field of articulations, negotiations and struggles around which some human
actions are deemed to acquire more value than others, and underpin the social
constructions of skills, tasks, and actions as building-blocks of the whole
ritual edifice of bourgeois micro-economics.
Marxism in anthropology has never been too popular, but the
attack to productivism and labour value theory in anthropology, from James
Ferguson’s book on redistribution, Li Puma and Lee’s on financial circulation,
to various analysis on the productivity of the informal economies of slums, has
had the bizarre effect of generating a vast market for popular books about
work – whose more recent examples are Jan
Lucassen’s (2021) monumental book The Story of Work a New History of Humankind
and anthropologist James Suzman’s (2021) blockbuster book Work: A Deep
History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Like David, Suzman has become
a celebrity anthropologist, outspoken about the pointlessness of contemporary
work mental and material structures and advocating the 15 hours a week from the
perspective of the ‘stone age economics’ of the Ju/Hoansi bushmen of Namibia’s
Kalahari desert, which he studied during his PhD in anthropology at Edinburgh
university, started after he resigned as senior manager in the diamond mining
giant De Beers. Now Suzman runs Antropos ltd, a think-tank that offers ‘anthropological approaches
to present-day problem-solving’ at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day –
half for NGOs (Hunt, 2020).
These culturalist and evolutionary studies of work undervalue the
historical materialist aspects of labour, which Marx considers as a real
abstraction that is both material and ideological – economic and political.
Marxist labour theory of value says that capitalism is a political
and economic construction that systematically undervalues and exploits those
actions that are attached to a wage relation, which itself is a form of human
devalorization. It is not the content of the action that matters. It is the
relationships of production that matter, both at the local and global
levels, in the entanglement between finance and industry, centres and
peripheries, which generate complex entanglements of bullshit, shit, and shit
shit jobs.
Besides, David’s argument that the economy of late capitalism
is uneconomical, assumes that capitalism, at least at some point, was about
economics rather than power and that the economy (or capitalism?) can be fixed,
morally and productively, with an efficient work reorganization and that this
reorganization consists in sorting out which jobs are more important than
others. First, reproductive jobs are more important than productive ones,
productive from the point of view capital. But when you look at his
classification, nearly all jobs are reproductive, in fact the very problem of
productivism, David argues, is that it forgets that the vast majority of the
working-class fixes, maintains, looks after – machines, people and objects –
rather than heroically fighting on the production line. David’s intuition about
the value of maintenance and reproductive labour is a very important one. But,
if nearly all human actions are reproductive in large sense, reproductive of the
existent world and of existent institutions, how can we distinguish between
those which reproduce capitalism such as unpaid housework, and those which reproduce
life outside it?
Instead of looking at how the value of work is socially constructed through the wage relation, David considers the degree of satisfaction afforded by different work, tasks or actions, satisfaction which is directly related to their different affordance of agency and freedom. The emphasis here is on the morality or ethics of freedom rather than the politics of labour, which resonates with Tom Peters’ ideology of freedom management, that is, the idea that work can be abolished or freed, without abolishing capitalist social relations (on this issue see also Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Harry Pitts, 2021).
In fact, according to David, there is a clear moral divide
between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Shit jobs are morally satisfying and
meaningful, whereas bullshit work is immoral, alienating and ultimately
dissatisfying because it leaves the bullshitter without agency and creativity
and such lack of agency clashes with humans’ natural tendency to find pleasure
in seeing one’s action reaching its imagined end. But why is care work so satisfying
despite it involving so little agency? Or can a sense of agency emerge from
empowering other people’s actions or in the realization that all actions are
ultimately equally powerless because deeply relational? An analysis of the
social relations surrounding the evaluation of actions, and of the ethical
performativity of value, as in Michael Lambek’s (2013) article ‘The Value of
Performative Acts’, would have helped here.
Work as protestant ideology or ethics
But it turns out that freedom at work is heavily
constrained by the morality of the time.
David is interested in the morality of labour of Northern
Europe and North America and in its specific Christian protestant trajectory, and
he explicitly leaves out the aristocratic and patriarchal vision of labour held
in the Mediterranean
and in ancient Greece, whereby physical labour is only for serfs and women. This
historically and geographically essentialising classification, which
characterises so much Mediterranean anthropology of the 1980s, doesn’t make
much sense from the point of view of labour history.
In the feudal
economy of Northern Europe, dominated by the Puritan and Protestant ethical
framework, paid and waged labour were a form of education and disciplining of
the working-class, of training to show good manners, limited to the initial
part of one’s life. Its Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, which Sahlins
(1996) highlights so well in his ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, meant that work had
to be self-mortifying, sacrificial and redemptive. In such male dominated
society, human production is seen as an emulation of the heavenly process of
world creation and reproductive labour is considered a mirror, although
derivative, of the productive labour of men and God.
Capitalism
transformed service into a permanent relation of wage labour but salvaged the ideology
of feudalism. In fact, both managerialism and feudalism are forms of
abstraction from real production, in which appropriation and distribution of
goods, rather than actual production, creates elaborated ranked hierarchy. “Financial
capitalism isn’t really capitalism but a form of rent extraction, where the
internal logic are different from capitalism… since economic and political
imperatives have come to merge… now it resembles managerial feudalism” (Graeber
2019, 181). But were previous forms of capitalism just economical? Is not
always profit a form of rent extraction? David criticises the classical
assumption shared by both Marxist and bourgeois economists that under feudalism
the political and the economical blur because extraction is based on legal
principle, whereas in capitalism the economical is abstracted from the
political. In fact, he argues, capitalist economics, including work
organization, is an entirely political construction. This depiction of Marxism
is disingenuous. Marx clearly describes capitalism as a political construction,
in which the fictions and abstractions of capital, embodied as much in bourgeois
economics as in the material organization of the factory, become real.
More importantly,
according to David, under financial capitalism, human life becomes
progressively abstracted and surreal, which turns the ethics of Protestantism
into a weird sadomasochistic ideology, in which the relation between social
benefits and level of compensation is turned upside down; “people should be
compensated for horrible jobs because meaningful jobs are already compensating”
(Graeber 2019, 213). Productive labour becomes a form of punishment á la
Foucault.
David’s Marxism
David’s Weberian and Foucauldian understanding of contemporary
capitalism as a weird form of moral punishment and productive madness is a
radical change of direction from his previous Marxist analysis of capitalist labour
as an inverted form of slavery (Graeber 2006). There, David’s argument of the
historical entanglement of capitalism and slavery was part of a broader
reflection on structural Marxism, system theory and the political economy
approach in anthropology (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and Eric Williams) and
engagement with the radical black Marxism of Cedric Robinson. Particularly,
David shows that capitalism and slavery share the following traits: both rely on a separation of the
place of social (re)production of the labour force, and the place where that
labour-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is achieved
by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in
capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production)
from the workplace.
The transfer happens
by exchanging human powers for money. One effect of that transfer is ‘social
death’, in the sense of the devaluation if not annihilation of the community
ties and kinship relations and their separation from the workplace. The
financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labour, which is
pure creative potential and the sheer power of creation. The ideology of
freedom which conflicts with how most societies take it for granted that no
human is completely free or completely dependent, rather, all have different
degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in
fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of
chattel slavery.
Such Marxist
analysis of the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, tells us much more
about contemporary forms of feudal management, the systematic devaluation of
reproductive labour and the social construction of unfreedom, than the Weberian
approach of Bullshit Jobs.
Reproductive
labour
The central theoretical reference in David’s theory of
reproductive labour is the feminist scholar Nancy Folbre (2020). For Nancy Folbre,
patriarchy is the systematic devaluation of the power of reproducing life by
women or alien men such as slaves, which is achieved through three main mechanisms:
(1) the creation of property rights and laws that limits the circulation of
people and put it under male control; (2) restrictions of rights of women
children and sexually non-conforming individuals and (3) under-remuneration of
care work.
For Folbre slavery and capitalism are not just moral or cultural
systems (associated with patriarchy, aristocracy, caste, or race) or simply
work structures (in which factories and plantations mirror each other), but are
interrelated political and economic systems in which the wage relation is
entangled with and reinforced by conflicting ideological construction of
personhood and forms of evaluation of human action. The link between slavery,
devaluation of reproductive labour and capitalism is made by Meillassoux (1986)
in his anthropology of slavery, which shows how the systematic devaluation of
the labour of slaves and the denial of their reproductive powers become a
generalised and sustainable economic system only when slavery becomes entangled
in merchant capitalism; in the same way in which the systematic devaluation of
working-class labour can only be sustainable through the systematic denial of
the reproductive labour of women.
Finance
Another Marxist trope in Bullshit Jobs is the link between finance,
abstraction, and alienation, whereby the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance,
Real Estate) systematically create abstractions and abstracted organizations
which hire ‘complicators’ to increase financial abstractions and the
speculation connected to them. Finance creates meaningless ritual and new age gurus,
“who paint abstraction as reality, forgetting that there are some things more
real than others”. Marx describes capitalism as a form of
labour abstraction – CMC to MCM – and finance as a multiplication of such
abstract logic. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone (1993) considered the
abstracted and impersonal kind of work David associates with bullshit labour as
the materialization of the commodity form – a real abstraction of capital. But David
discusses the proliferation of finance, abstraction and rent extraction as unreasonable
and unrealistic deviations from classical capitalism and precisely because
unrealistic, to be easily overcome. Even if unrealistic, contemporary forms of
rentier capitalism, of the kind described by Christopher Brett (2021) or by Lisa
Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) cannot be challenged simply
through work re-organizations or wage redistribution, because it is deeply
attached to assets inequality and on feudal power relations which capitalism
constantly re-produces, via its impersonal machine.
Solidarity
But the best part of the book are the descriptions of the
creative strategies of resistance of this new precarised and dispossessed class
of bullshitters consisting of Wikipedia ghost-writers, occupational poets, toilet
graffiti artists, deluded rock stars, professional dropouts, and gossipers. It
is precisely in the creative agency of these workers, and in David’s empathy
towards them, that the book’s call to action emerges. After all, the book is
based on interviews with individuals who had read David’s original article and
identified with his political project of demystifying the corporate world. That
is, the book is based on a sense of solidarity between David and the
bullshitters. In this sense, Bullshit Jobs’ greatest potential is as a work of
fiction or an ethnography of direct action, which in defiance of the tragic post-workerist
sociological narrative, gives voice to the creative withdrawal, artistic desires,
and post-capitalist fantasies of platform workers – whose anti-heroic politics
resonates with that of the lost people of Madagascar.
David’s optimism reflected the hopes about the end of
capitalism that opened after the economic crisis of 2008 and embodied in the UK
by Corbynism with which David had a strong affiliation. At the time, even the gigantic
productivist trade union UNITE supported the elimination of bullshit jobs via
the Universal Basic Income as a way into what Aaron Bastani (2020) imagined as a
‘fully automated luxury communism’.
This sense of hope was wiped out by the recent global
pandemic, which, if anything, widened the gap between overpriced bullshit jobs
and undervalued shit jobs. On the one hand, the lawyers, corporate accountants,
the platform managers, the internet influencers and gurus. On the other, the
Amazon Turkers, the IT engineers who build new Zoomified working environments, or
install powerful optical Internet cables in middle class neighbourhood, the gig
workers who deliver groceries, parcels, or health services; the nurses,
teachers, and carers who continue to be responsible for the reproduction of
life. Deadly on humans, the global pandemic didn’t singlehandedly eliminate any
useless job or revaluate productive labour. If anything, it introduced the new
category of spectral labour, the labour of nurses who are both underpaid and
operate daily under deadly working conditions. If a pandemic cannot change
capitalism, interstitial changes, operating ‘through the cracks of capitalism’,
as John Holloway (2010) would say, or
cultural prefigurations of ‘what could be’, to use a term of Murray Bookchin
(1971), won’t do that either.
I have been working on Universal Basic Income project in Brazil
for some time, and I must say that the problematic associated with Bullshit
Jobs alerted me of the perils of thinking that work can be eliminated with targeted
policy measures without the elimination of capitalist social relations. From
where we stand now, and looking back at 2013, when the article was written,
seems to glance into a different era, one of intellectual hope and political
mobilization, so fully embodied in David’s charismatic figure of scholar and
activist. His call to action, as hard to follow as it may seem, continues to
strongly resonate with me.
Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at
the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research
Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He
specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the
anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography
of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with
economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.
Ferguson, James. 2015. To Give a Men a Fish.
Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press.
Dinerstein Ana Cecilia and Harry Pitts. 2021. A World
Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia.
Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
Folbre, Nancy. 2020. The Rise and Decline of
Patriarchal Systems. An Intersectional Political Economy. London: Verso.
Graeber, David. 2006. Turning Modes of
Production inside Out: Or Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery. Critique
of Anthropology, 26(1): 61-85.
Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. A
Theory. London: Penguin Books.
Gorz, Andre. 1980. Farewell to the
working-class. London: Pluto Press.
Suzman, James, Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. London: Penguin Press.
Cite as: Mollona, Massimiliano. 2022. “Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/22/massimiliano-mollona-why-the-end-of-work-will-not-be-the-end-of-capitalism/
Discussants:
Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez
When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he struck a chord in the public imagination. As soon as the article went up, the Strike! website went down for too much traffic. The article quickly became viral and was translated into at least a dozen languages. Before long, quotes from the piece appeared in the form of guerrilla posters on the London Underground with messages such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. The essay’s main thesis was that work had become an end in itself to sustain the logic of neoliberal capitalism, thereby contradicting the myth of capitalist productivity. In 2018, David decided to turn this brief essay into a fully-fledged book with the intention to flesh out the argument more systematically. In this final instalment of the series, Massimilano Mollona and Andrew Sanchez move beyond the buzz sparked by the essay to sift through the conceptual and empirical claims presented in the book. Weaving personal working experience with anthropological theories of work and value (Sanchez), and considering it from the lens of Weberian and Marxist understandings of capitalism (Mollona), they show where the book succeeds and where, in their view, it is found wanting.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at
LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute
and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s
Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Massimiliano Mollona is
Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University
and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths
College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and
political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently
working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in
collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de
Janeiro.
Andrew Sanchez is Associate
Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has
published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital:
Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in
an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the
Imaginationco-edited with Catherine
Alexander.
David
Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling –
set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free
of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he writes, is “stupid” and “absurd.” Stupid or
otherwise, it represents the effect of a vast and powerful set of forces
operating through the mechanisms of the modern state, of which the United
States is both example and exceptional case. Its goal, in Graeber’s gloomy
vision, is to destroy the stability and viability, both social and economic, of
entire populations, while congealing ever larger portions of the world’s wealth
into ever fewer hands; its stupidity lies in refusing all alternative
interpretations to official Diktat (see especially pp. 80-81). Graeber
largely ignores bureaucracy’s many non-state versions, a choice that reflects a
bias toward current American uses of the term. Instead, he plays creatively and
contrastively with the British self-view as anti-bureaucratic (p. 13). This
distinction nevertheless entails excessive generalization and elides differing
historical trajectories. It is hard now to write critically of Graeber’s
provocative thought, grounded as it was in an uncompromising search for social
justice and a becoming modesty about the originality of his own ideas, without
sounding petty. The significance of his many projects, however, demands both
generosity and critique.
To
that end, it seems useful to begin by asking whether stupidity rather than (perhaps
deliberate) tautology or ritualism, the latter explicitly acknowledged by
Graeber (p. 50; see also Hinton 1992; Herzfeld 1992), is the basis of bureaucracy.
In many societies, a clear distinction is made between sly cunning and
intelligence of morally neutral (or even foolishly innocent) stamp (e.g., Schneider
1969). In his eagerness to debunk the crasser versions of pseudo- or
meta-Foucauldian analysis, which at least attribute agency to state operators, Graeber
seems to discount the slyness of those bureaucrats who realize that getting
people to monitor themselves furthers the state’s rather than the public’s interests.
As I have recently noted, the complexity and unpredictability of the various
national COVID-19 testing requirements force nervous international travelers to
monitor their own actions with ever-increasing unease (Herzfeld 2022a). Graeber
also overlooks the helpfulness of some bureaucrats, who may even – indeed,
often do – collude with their clients by shifting the interpretation of the rules.
Image 1: Book cover of The Utopia of Rules
Graeber does distinguish between the system and its operators, but one might wish for a more detailed exploration of where the two diverge. He tells us very little about how agile operators actually bend the system to meet their own and their clients’ exigencies – apparent exceptions that may actually confirm his argument since, by generating a sense of the obligatory gratitude of client to patron, they further weaken resistance to encompassing bureaucratic structures. This is implicit in his argument, but his broad generalizing prevents readers from seeing how the wiliness actually works. Within the utopia of rules, continual adjustment occurs in the form of supposed illegality lurking in the very implementation of legality (see, e.g., Little and Pannella 2021). Graeber’s observation (p. 214) that legality is born of illegal actions is also historically consistent with the crisis of legitimacy posed by the persistence of rebellious forces claimed as heroic forebears by nationalistic state regimes (see Herzfeld 2022b: 39-40). Graeber does nevertheless expose some real cunning, notably when he points out the discrepancy between the virtually flawless operation of ATMs and the deeply flawed operation of American voting machines (p. 35). It is hard to believe, he suggests, that such a glaring discrepancy could be unmotivated; both trajectories serve the same general politico-financial interests.
Graeber
is on firmer (because more explicit) ground when he suggests an analogy, albeit
an inverse one, between bureaucracy and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: whereas
bureaucratic logic suppresses insight, the equally narrow and schematic analyses
of the structuralist master open up exciting new paths. This is surely a more
productive comparison than dismissing one system as stupid and the other as
genial. Both systems are concerned with classification, one to impose it and
the other to decode it. But Lévi-Strauss would never have dismissed indigenous
taxonomies as stupid; nor would any anthropologist since Malinowski have
considered such a characterization as other than the expression of a colonial
and racist contempt for “the Other.” In rightly up-ending power by treating
bureaucracy as the Other, Graeber nevertheless refuses it the minimal respect that
he surely would have demanded of his students for the taxonomies of other
cultural traditions.
It
is here that his activism seeps into his anthropology and exposes, as he surely
must have desired, the difficulty of trying to do anthropology, especially activist
anthropology, in one’s own milieu and at such an inclusive level. While calling
bureaucracy stupid seems epistemically retrograde, it may eventually facilitate
new political insights – if, that is, someone undertakes the necessary ethnographic
labor. The gap between insight and demonstration is one of several tensions exposed,
but not necessarily resolved, in Graeber’s book. Some of his more speculative
leaps of faith are persuasive – but I found myself wondering whether that was
simply because I was already predisposed to agree, and what unexpected
subtleties a more ethnographic approach might introduce.
Graeber’s
claim that technological advances were deliberately advanced by a capitalist
cabal evilly intent on reducing humanity to a collective serfdom does appear to
be on target for the period he describes. He provides convincing examples of
how specific technologies, poised to take off in directions anticipated by
science fiction and other fantasy literatures, have clearly faltered. Whether
this remains true – whether his account is more than a conspiracy theory – has
perhaps become more questionable even in the short time since his death. More
problematic still is his confident attribution of collective intent on the part
of neoliberal capitalists to condemn the entire world to servitude. While it is
apparently true that during the current pandemic the super-rich have vastly increased
their wealth while the numbers of the truly poor in the U.S. alone have soared
(see Luhby 2021), the idea of a concerted intentionality risks reproducing
precisely the kind of conspiracy theories that favor right-wing panic-mongering
(although, unlike the latter, it stands a reasonable chance of eventual
vindication). Here, too, he implies an unprovable ability to read collective
minds. Moreover, I am unsure that animals are incapable of “creating
self-conscious fantasy worlds” (p. 171). Indeed, how can he be so sure?
Such
problems typically arise when anthropologists shift from familiar engagements
with ethnographic detail to grapple with the big picture. Graeber, an anarchist
activist for social justice, was skilled in both practices, but in this book
the big picture, along with the speculative reasoning that it tends to generate,
predominates. Although educated in the U.S. in what is there called cultural
anthropology, and despite his scathing (and largely well-conceived) critique of
“globalization,” Graeber does not attend to cultural differences that may
affect bureaucratic habits. While too generously acknowledging my own study of
bureaucracy, he complains that virtually all the anthropologists who have
written about bureaucracy “almost never describe such arrangements as foolish
or idiotic” (pp. 237-38n42; cf. Herzfeld 1992). There is, as I have just
indicated, good reason for this apparent omission.
With
regard to mind-reading, anthropologists do often report on a range of emotional
reactions, from astonishment to contempt, that their informants display toward bureaucratic
arrangements. It is expressed attitudes that they describe, not
innermost thoughts. Indeed, they often also note their informants’ reluctance
to read minds (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). The reported reactions and the
accompanying skepticism are ethnographically revealing to a level that
Graeber’s broad-brush descriptions of capitalism, bureaucracy, and globalization
do not always achieve. His description of globalization, in particular, sweeps
over cultural differences that – as, for example, James L. Watson (2006) argued
so lucidly for consumption in Asian McDonald’s restaurants – may significantly affect
how we understand the local significance of apparently global phenomena.
In
this sense, all bureaucratic practices must be understood in terms of cultural
values shared by bureaucrats and their clients. That argument also fits
Graeber’s excellent debunking (pp. 166-174) of bureaucracy’s claim to pure
rationality. When one side makes excuses that its interlocutors might indeed
view as lamentably stupid, the other side accepts them, not necessarily because
they are believable, but because they are conventional. They are a means for
both sides to manage otherwise difficult situations, their effective
performance always, from one situation to another, mediated by the tension
between the conventions for excuse-making and the inventiveness of those involved.
This illustrates what I have called “social poetics” (e.g., Herzfeld 2016), a
concept that in some respects fits nicely with Graeber’s focus on imagination
(see especially his illuminating analogy with the structure and playfulness of
language, pp. 199-200, a passage that beautifully exemplifies the important but
often-forgotten principle that an explanation based on language does not
necessarily reduce all social phenomena to discourse).
An
effective bureaucrat – though not necessarily a good one – manages, while
appearing to insist on rigid adherence to the rules, to operate them with
considerable ingenuity and, yes, imagination. Graeber barely considers the
extent to which bureaucrats must deploy the unspoken local social rules in
addition to the “stupid” requirements of the official system. While such
seesawing between convention and invention is apparently common to all state
bureaucracies, the specific modalities may vary enormously. The unfinished task
Graeber has bequeathed to his successors is the ethnographic exploration of
high-end bureaucratic management. Cultural specificities will loom large in
such studies – all the more critically inasmuch as the managers invoke
supposedly universal principles to justify their actions.
Let
me illustrate with a simple example. During early sojourns in the Netherlands,
I found an unsmiling bureaucracy that seemed obsessed with observing the rules.
Gradually, however, I learned that, if I met the initial refusal to make an
exception or interpret the rules creatively with polite sadness rather than
anger, I would subsequently discover that the functionaries had done exactly
what I wanted even after declaring it to be impossible; they were experts at identifying
exceptions that ultimately validated the system of rules while allowing them to
satisfy their clients’ needs. This pattern, I soon discovered, extended from
relatively highly-placed officials to restaurant staff members. Other
foreigners subsequently confirmed my impressions; some Dutch friends, perhaps bemused,
nevertheless also largely agreed.
Despite
such assurances, so sweeping a characterization of Dutch bureaucratic practices
is unquestionably over-generalized. If that concern holds for a few sentences
about one country, however, how much more it must apply to the Graeber’s far
larger claim that bureaucracy is invariably stupid. Stupidity does not inhere
in a system; it describes the alleged capacities of those who operate the
system or the capacities they would like to produce in others (p. 95). To blame
the stupid system is an almost proverbial excuse, in many cultural contexts,
for failures of both bureaucrat and client. Adroit management of excuses may
signal the exact opposite of stupidity.
Graeber’s
image of bureaucracy is largely based on the American experience; he posits
Madagascar contrastively as, for historical reasons, a place where bureaucracy
has little impact on everyday life. But there are vast numbers of intermediate
cases (as he recognizes, p. 22). While it is true that the American model
threatens to dominate much of the world for reasons that Graeber ably lays out
for us as he documents its seemingly inexorable, creeping expansion, it
sometimes blinds us to the potentiality for pragmatic variation concealed within
its systemic similarity. Hence the unresolved tension in Graeber’s text between
the fine ethnographer-historian’s sensitivity to local detail and the political
activist’s tendency to universalize local experience.
Some
of the generalizations hold true for demonstrable historical reasons. Even then,
however, the pandemic-like spread of bureaucratic practices – what Graeber
(p.9) calls the Iron Law of Liberalism – is filtered through widely differing sociocultural
expectations. Graeber’s Iron Law bears an uncanny (and unacknowledged)
resemblance to “Parkinson’s Law” [Parkinson 1958], a similar elaboration of
common knowledge; while Graeber may be right to argue (pp. 51-52) that
anthropologists have been reluctant to tackle the boring paperwork aspects of
bureaucracy, writers like Parkinson can perhaps be read as ethnographers if not
as anthropologists in the strict sense. Yet the differences among bureaucratic
systems are also important, even with regard to the paperwork (see Hull 2012). Anyone
who has experienced the Chinese version of the academic audit culture, which
superficially appears to follow the American model in its schematic numerology,
quickly apprehends the huge difference in application and impact. Local actors
play by local understandings of the rules, as Watson’s observations on
globalization would lead us to expect.
In
keeping with his critique of its reductionism and reliance on schematization, Graeber
sees bureaucracy as the antithesis of imagination, which he identifies with
revolution (pp. 92-93). This insight echoes the conventional understanding that
bureaucracy often does repress imaginative practices. In reality, however, considerable
inventiveness may go into bureaucratic management – something that Graeber
repeatedly acknowledges, by showing how “interpretative labor” is carried out
largely by the subaltern classes, including lower-level bureaucrats, since
those with power feel no pressing need to interpret anything their supposed
inferiors do. (The wealthy often don’t even bother to pay taxes; let the
minions sort all that out – and, if fines are levied, they will only affect a
tiny fraction of the offenders’ wealth.) It is not only the surveilled who must
master interpretative techniques; those conducting the surveillance must do the
same inasmuch as they will have to file reports with their superiors. This emphasis
on the hierarchical positioning of bureaucrats accords with Graeber’s view –
generously and convincingly attributed to feminist inspiration – of where
interpretative labor occurs.
Ethnographic research on policing (e.g., Cabot 2018; Glaeser 1999; Haanstad 2013; Oberfield 2014) complicates – but does not entirely invalidate – Graeber’s generic intimations that police (whatever other goals they may pursue) rarely tackle crime directly (p. 73) and that bureaucracy precludes the exercise of intelligence. Graeber might have argued, reasonably enough, that it is not bureaucrats who are stupid but the bureaucracy. Eliding the actors into the abstract category, however, is a dangerous source of confusion – actually, in Graeber’s own terms, a bureaucratic one.
Graeber’s
treatment of police is consistent with his anarchism. There can be no question but
that in the American and British contexts it is, sadly, borne out by acts of
racist and sexist brutality only recently acknowledged by the media and by the
law. Here, however, we might ask whether the turning of the tide (if what we
are seeing is more than a mere flash in the pan) parallels a potential recovery
of technological mastery and inventiveness. If so, Graeber’s dystopian vision
of a world increasingly dominated by a few ruthless, super-rich men, bent on
thwarting scientific advances and socio-economic equality alike, might be an
overstatement or, at least, a genuine insight into a situation that has nonetheless
already begun to change. Agreed, evidence for a return to a more imaginative
world is still remarkably thin. Graeber presumably entertained hopes, however,
that the world might be re-enchanted, even, perhaps, acquiring a reconfigured
and tamed bureaucracy (see p. 164). Only by means of such a conviction could he
have sustained his passionate activism.
Here
I am struck by the accuracy of the distinction he draws between his concept of
imagination and Benedict Anderson’s (1991). While some contest his criticism of
Anderson as too narrowly concerned with newspapers and nationalism, the
difference is striking. Anderson’s use of imagination has more in common with
the semiotic concept of iconicity (we imagine our co-nationals to resemble ourselves),
whereas Graeber saw in imagination the recognition of radical difference and
innovation. Here again, however, I worry that Graeber’s monochromatic portrayal
of bureaucracy – its lack of cultural specificity – overlooks pre-existing and
sometimes highly localized cultural predispositions as well as the presence of
skilled and sympathetic actors.
Anthropology
handed a poisoned chalice to the bureaucratic apparatus of the state in the
nineteenth century: the concept of reified, bounded cultures. Historically, our
discipline should be taking more responsibility than it has usually admitted
for providing the instrument of ideologies that too easily morphed into racism
and fascism. By talking about “the state,” Graeber skates around the deployment
of the concept of national identity and the threat that this poses to the
masses who get dragged into wars and humiliating labor conditions in the name
of national redemption – a story that largely confirms his understanding of how
capital works on the global stage. The ease with which the idea of the state
gets fused with that of the nation-state has recently led me to express
a preference for the intentionally clumsier term “bureaucratic ethnonational
state” (Herzfeld 2022b). Ethno-nationalism is one of the dirtiest tricks
perpetrated against the poor by a self-indulgent leadership. It both deploys
local cultural features and is inflected by them; its appeal, framed as
liberation, can reinforce local warlordism and global domination at the same
time. Anthropological analysis threatens it precisely because it leads us back
to the cultural specificities that give the global structures of power their
local traction; it also shows that a unidirectional model of globalization is
as facile as unidirectional models of social evolution (see, e.g., Tambiah 1989).
Graeber
does display some affection for evolutionary conceptions of political life, as
when he displays fascination with “heroic” histories. His historical vision of
the heroic, however, has more in common with Vico than with Darwin; he does not
see heroic societies as representing a single stage of past evolution. Rather, he
seeks to recuperate from these exceptional historical moments the power of
imagination, now divorced from aristocratic control, as an antidote to the
numbing regularities of bureaucracy and as a path to the resuscitation of
technological ingenuity.
Graeber
describes vast areas of bureaucratic mismanagement with impressive, terrifying
accuracy. He is at his best when he ethnographically describes the area of
bureaucratic activity that he knows best, that of the academic world. Some
other autobiographical moments are ethnographic gems in their own right,
notably the sad account of his tussles with the health bureaucracy as his
mother lay fatally stricken – a striking disproof of his contention (p. 52)
that bureaucratic procedures cannot be subject to lively thick description. Moreover,
no academic could seriously dispute his engaging account of how increasing
amounts of scholars’ time, as well as that of doctors and other health professionals,
are gobbled up by deadening, useless audits (Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern
2000).
Yet
resistance remains possible. Graeber correctly observes that no matter what we write,
the rest of the world barely even notices. We should nevertheless try to find a
way to make the world care; the effective suppression of our calling stifles
an important and useful commentary on the state of the world at large. If that
were not the case, why would Graeber have written this book? Why would anyone
not simply down tools and give up? (Of course, some have; but theirs is a
dispiriting surrender to what I call “vicarious fatalism” – the apparently
axiomatic ascription of passivity to the underdog by those with power in
virtually every social inequality known to humankind.)
Resistance
is not easy; some of the impediments are present in our own educational and
cultural backgrounds. Graeber’s use of classical Greek (and more generally
European) history, for example, hints at the difficulty that all Western
anthropologists experience in standing back from their own assumed intellectual
and cultural heritage, as well as the intellectual rewards of making that
effort. Note, for example, his Vichian emphasis on etymological links between
the ancient Greek polis and the modern word “police” and its cognates in
multiple languages (not, however, including modern Greek, in which the police is
astinomia, the controller of urban space; see also Cabot 2018). The
Latin-derived terms “civility” and “civilization” hold similarly rich and
ambiguous implications.
“Polite,”
on the other hand, probably does not, pace Graeber, share the Greek
derivation of “police,” but from a Latin word denoting “cleansing” (with sinister
echoes of Mary Douglas’ [1966] perennially useful analysis of purity and
pollution). It, too, has a richly ambiguous etymology. “Civility” suggests, as
does the Italian use of the adjective civile (see Herzfeld 2009: 182) or
even the English “civil society,” that sometimes being civil demands facing the
police down when they overstep the boundaries of decency. The polity (classical
Greek politeia) may not be a polis or a police state. It may
represent an archaic structure pushed aside by violent modernity or it may be a
completely novel one such as those imagined by intentional communities. But the
possibility of resistance to the bureaucratic ethnonational state, with its
police enforcement of conformity to repressive cultural norms, is essential to
ensuring a bearable future and is the best way of ensuring civility.
The
bureaucratization of morality is decidedly uncivil. An example of audit culture
that constrains civility (not to speak of academic freedom!) appears in the bureaucratization
of research ethics – a confusion of true ethics (Graeber’s scathing discussion
of value-free ethics, pp. 166-67, is especially pertinent here!) with its
simulation (a term Graeber usefully derives from Baudrillard and Eco). This perversion
of ethics is especially painful for anthropologists because the very
unpredictability of their research defies the scientistic logic of bureaucracy
(“proposal design”). That logic also ignores the cultural specificity of ethics
– an instance of what Graeber (p. 75) calls “ignoring all the subtleties of
real social existence” – and now, through the imposition of rules backed by fear
of legal consequences, bids fair, if we fail to resist, to make ethnography
itself impossible. Occasional revolts against the centrality of ethnography because
of past ethical errors risk collusion in perpetuating the injustices of the
present, much as segments of the Left, in Graeber’s account (p. 6), have
sometimes colluded in spreading the miasma of bureaucracy-speak and its
oppressive effects. Intensified bureaucracy is no solution to ethnography’s
ethical dilemmas. On the contrary, here as much as anywhere it conforms to
Graeber’s striking insight (p. 103) that bureaucratic violence is less about
making people talk than forcing them to shut up. Ethnographers, too, must
resist being silenced by the avalanche of paperwork.
Ethnography,
in fact, can expose abuses of power. It therefore poses a genuine threat to the
powerful; ethics regulations not only protect universities from being sued but
provide a potential shield for powerful bureaucrats should the anthropologists
get too nosy. These authority figures also have resources of their own. A few
hardy anthropologists have nevertheless pushed forward with pathbreaking
ethnographic studies of dominant financial institutions. Among these, Douglas
Holmes (2013), examining the management practices of central banks, offers a clear
demonstration of why, as Graeber saw (p. 20), the bourgeoisie so passively
obeys the financial bureaucracy. Such studies usefully complicate Graeber’s
claim that the weak necessarily perform more interpretative labor than the powerful;
they also pierce the iron shield of ethics, with its talk of confidentiality,
transparency, and impartiality (otherwise, significantly, called indifference;
see p. 184). Holmes, for example, examines the methods with which bank
officials study the public – all of them virtual anthropologists, and with nary
an ethics committee to restrain them.
Graeber’s
book is in every sense a tour de force. I have focused this discussion on
a set of interlocking points that strike me as particularly timely for the
discipline and for the current state of the world. The book’s main provocation lies
in Graeber’s critical reading of both the dominant economic system and the
mass-produced and imitative critiques of it that sometimes pass muster as
serious academic commentary (or at least satisfy audit-culture assessments for tenure
and promotion). Its potential weaknesses lie in his avoidance of specificity where
critics could easily find counter-factual examples in local contexts. Offsetting
its occasional narrowness of cultural focus is the corrective that it offers to
assumptions about universal value and globalization. A good ethnography is
always more than simply a description of a local society. The Utopia of
Rules is much more – and at times rather less – than an analysis of
bureaucracy. It is a challenge still waiting to be taken up “in the field” –
wherever that may be. It retains the potential to contradict its own pessimism
and affect the trajectory of human society in the years, even decades, ahead.
Michael Herzfeld
is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department
of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage
Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of
twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling
Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology
and The Making of Modern Greeceand The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic
Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of
crypto-colonialism.
Anderson,
Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso.
Cabot, Heath. 2018. The Good Police Officer:
Ambivalent Intimacies with the State in the Greek Asylum Procedure.” In Kevin
G. Karpial and William Garriott, eds. The Anthropology of Police (Abingdon:
Routledge), pp. 210–29.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An
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Cite as: Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. “The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/09/michael-herzfeld-the-slyness-of-stupidity-a-commentary-on-david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules/
If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy. The first instalment of David’s thought on the topic came in his 2006 Malinowski lecture at the LSE – ‘Dead zones of the imagination’ – where he described a fundamental link between the blindness of bureaucracy and the nature of structural violence. The lecture later became an essay in ‘The Utopia of Rules’ (2015). The book significantly expanded the discussion to cover technology and popular culture, making a case for the stupidity of bureaucracy that anticipated his later work on bullshit jobs. Here, Michael Herzfeld dissects the merits and flaws of Graeber’s thought-provoking ideas on bureaucracy and examines whether they hold up to ethnographic scrutiny. For this week only, we have the papers, but not the videos, of the seminar. On the scheduled day of the seminar, the LSE faculty went on strike to fight against poor working conditions in academia that are compounded precisely by the kind of bureaucratic structures that David attacked in the book.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and The Making of Modern Greeceand The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.
I would never have expected
Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this
past year has been somehow unexpected, from the coup itself, in the early hours
of 1 February, to the scale of the popular reaction. Friends who expressed little
interest in politics or protest during my fieldwork, only a few years ago, have
been in the streets. Striking has been the role of young women—women like Ruth,
a Christian born in the Chin Hills, who works at a church in Yangon where I did
much of my research.
As the uprising grew through
February, Ruth’s posts filled my Facebook feed: selfies in Covid-19 masks amid
swelling crowds around the Sule Pagoda; memes mocking the generals behind the
coup; photographs of victims shot by security forces. One thing not surprising has
been the brutality of the crackdown. As it intensified in late February and
early March, Ruth’s posts showed her wearing not just a face mask, but also a
helmet and goggles.
As Pentecostals, believers
like Ruth have also been praying. One video streamed via Facebook Live had
about twenty members of her church engaged in a session of collective prayer,
entreating God to protect Myanmar. Such prayers were commonplace during my fieldwork.
But this one resonated with the revolution then building momentum in the
streets: put to the rhythm of a familiar call-and-response chant made famous in
the 1988 uprising, the prayer replaced the usual rejoinder “do ayei! do ayei!”
(“Our cause! Our cause!”) with “Amen! Amen!”
What draws these Christians so fully into the revolution through protest and prayer? There’s been much said about how a decade’s experience of a more open public sphere makes return to military rule impossible to countenance. Many have also remarked on how this moment has transcended lines of difference that have long animated Myanmar’s politics, with Chin Christians and even Rohingya Muslims manning barricades alongside majority Burman Buddhists.
But maybe part of an
answer also lies in the imagination.
I say this, in part,
because of another question I’ve had, watching Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
unfolding from afar over social media: What would David Graeber make of this?
Graeber never wrote about Myanmar, but he was, of course, deeply interested, intellectually and practically, in revolution. And for him, the question of revolution was tied to the question of imagination. In one essay (2007), he distinguished a “transcendent” form of imagination, the terrain of fiction and make-believe, of “imaginary creatures, imaginary places … imaginary friends”, from an “immanent” form, one not “static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world … ”. It was the latter, for Graeber, that had revolutionary potential.
While Graeber never wrote
about Myanmar, had he not died in September 2020, that might not have remained
true for long.
Some years ago, he agreed to write the foreword to a new edition of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma. The foreword was never finished, so we can’t know what Graeber would have written. We can’t know how he would have engaged with Raymond Firth’s original, laudatory foreword. We can’t know how he would have dealt with Leach’s later reappraisal, when he acknowledged that he had somewhat essentialised gumsa and gumlao, the Kachin categories famously at the heart of his analysis. We can’t know how he would have situated the book in relation to debates in anthropology in the decades since, or how he would have dealt with critiques that have been directed towards it, including from Kachin scholars (e.g., Maran 2007), and especially amid growing calls to meaningfully decolonise the study of Myanmar.
What we do know is that Graeber was a fan. “Edmund Leach,” he once wrote, “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Leach was, for Graeber, “a model of intellectual freedom”. References to Leach appear across Graeber’s body of work, including citations of the younger Leach and the older Leach following his so-called “conversion” to structuralism—a break which, as Chris Fuller and Jonathan Parry note, has probably been overdrawn. “Not only are there striking continuities in the sort of questions Leach asked of data,” they write, “and the sort of answers he offered, but more importantly he kept faith throughout his career with one broad vision of the anthropological enterprise” (1989: 11).
If the same might be said of Graeber, it’s not the only way in which the two men were similar. Both thought across relatively long stretches of time: 140 years in the case of Leach’s study of the oscillations in Kachin political systems; millennia in the case of Graeber’s work on debt and his recent collaboration with David Wengrow. Both were also prolific and lucid writers, eager to engage audiences beyond anthropology—including, incidentally, via the BBC, which broadcast Leach’s Reith Lectures in 1967 and Graeber’s 12-part series on debt in 2016.
What James Laidlaw and
Stephen Hugh-Jones (2000:3) write about Leach could just as easily be said of
Graeber, that “the lessons of anthropological inquiry were relevant to the
everyday moral and political questions that were being debated all around him …”.
Both were interested in the micro and macro forces that impacted the production
of knowledge in anthropology, and both reflected on how their own biographies
and albeit very different insider/outsider positions in the discipline shaped
the work they produced (Leach 1984; Graeber 2014).
There are, however, few
references to Political Systems in Graeber’s corpus, which raises another
question: What would he have written in this foreword?
It’s impossible to attempt
a definite answer. Graeber was far too creative for that. But it’s probably not
going too far out on a limb to suggest that imagination might have been a
central theme. For what are the political categories of gumsa and gumlao
analysed by Leach if not products of the “immanent” mode of imagination that
interested Graeber? One reference that does appear at several points in
Graeber’s writing is to a point Leach made in his short 1982 treatise simply
titled Social Anthropology. There, Leach suggests that the distinction
between humans and non-humans is not that the former have a soul, but that they
are able to conceive—or imagine—that they have one, and thus, that it is
imagination, not reason, that sets humans apart. On this point, Graeber also
(e.g., 2001: 58) cites Marx’s observation that, unlike a spider weaving its web
or a bee building its nest, “the [human] architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.”
If imagination is, for
Leach and Graeber, a general feature of the human condition, it’s also one
thrown into relief at certain moments, like moments of revolution. “When one tries to bring an
imagined society into being,” Graeber wrote, “one is engaging in revolution”
(2001: 88). It’s maybe
not too much of a stretch, then, to also imagine that, if he had been writing
the foreword to Political Systems this past year, Graeber would be
attending to the revolution underway in the valleys and the highlands that
feature in Leach’s book: a revolution whose participants, like Ruth, imagine
not just a political system in Myanmar with the military no longer in charge,
but a society transformed in myriad other ways.
Image 2: Book cover of Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach
Around 2011, as Myanmar started to emerge from five decades of military rule, Ruth’s church and other Pentecostals intensified their evangelism efforts, seeking to win converts in a country where about 90 percent of the population are Buddhist. Taking advantage of the political opening, and with an eye to the spiritual rupture it was thought to herald, these Christians began to preach more energetically than they had in years.
But even before the coup, there was evidence that the rupture might not be forthcoming: a sense that liberalisation was benefitting only well-connected cronies; new forms of censorship impinging on what was supposed to be a newly open public sphere; an ascendent Buddhist nationalism rendering increasingly precarious the position of minorities, and playing out horrifically in the treatment of the Rohingya. There were also few signs that Buddhists were suddenly interested in Jesus. This did little to dent my friends’ commitment to evangelism, however. “God works in his own time,” was the frequent refrain.
How, in this understanding,
to make sense of the coup?
The immediate days after the military seized control, detaining elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, were strangely quiet. Healthcare workers and teachers were among the first to go on strike. Garment workers followed soon after. As the civil disobedience movement took shape, more people took to the streets. By the middle of February, tens of thousands of protesters were assembling each day in Hledan, a busy commercial neighbourhood near Yangon University.
Ruth was among them. We’d
been in touch since the hours following the coup. She sent photos and videos of
the swelling crowds. In one image her white sneakered foot stamps on a poster
of the face of Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the coup, taped to the
pavement for protesters to walk over. In another she holds up a placard with
the words #justiceformyanmar alongside an image of Aung San Suu Kyi, the
imprisoned NLD leader. “Young people will not be turning back,” she wrote in one
message.
The spokesperson for the
parallel government established by the parliamentarians deposed by the coup has
been a prominent Chin Christian doctor, Dr Sasa. At certain points protest signs
featuring his face seemed to eclipse those featuring Aung San Suu Kyi’s. In
late February Ruth posted an old photo of her with Dr Sasa, with the caption,
“May the Lord bless you and use you for our nation and His kingdom.” Dr Sasa’s
role has been particularly important to my Chin friends, accustomed, like other
ethnic minorities, to being treated like second class citizens, if citizens at
all, by a state whose leadership has been dominated by Burman Buddhists.
The literature on ethnicity
in Burma has often been in dialogue with Leach, for better and for worse. His
arguments in Political Systems are so well known to anthropologists that
they barely need repeating. His analysis of oscillations between political
categories—the hierarchical gumsa and the egalitarian gumlao—is
deployed to attack the equilibrium assumptions of his structural-functionalist
colleagues, and their allied tendency to treat ethnic groups as bounded units. Social
systems, Leach argues, do not correspond to reality. They are models used, by
the anthropologist and those they study, to “impose upon the facts a figment of
thought”.
Such models find their
clearest expression, for Leach, in myth and ritual, which present the social
order in its ideal form, conjuring it by acting “as if” it already existed. Such
a model, importantly, does not float freely from the messy world of social facts;
it “can never have an autonomy of its own” (1964: 14).
Critics of Leach have homed
in on his nonchalant confession, toward the end of the book, that he is
“frequently bored by the facts” (1964: 227). This attitude, they charge, means
that his analysis floats more than a little too freely. “[O]ne might with
justification,” write Mandy Sadan and Francois Robbine, “accuse Leach of
reducing the Kachin sphere to a kind of intellectual laboratory without any
expression in reality because of the way in which he moulded his case study to
a theory, rather than the other way round” (2007: 10-11).
I’m sure Graeber would
have dealt with these criticisms in his foreword, but less certain what he
would have said about them, or how his own view of the relationship between
facts and theory would have shaped his assessment. My main hunch, though, is
that Graeber would have devoted much of his foreword to what Leach tells us
about the “as if”—the otherwise glimpsed in ritual and myth but still tethered
to social action. Such an otherwise, the space of the immanent imagination,
drew Graeber’s attention throughout his anthropology, even when he wasn’t using
the term.
Consider his foreword to
another book, The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi, which deals with
the relationship between ritual objects, memory, and the imagination. Graeber praises
the book for showing that “imagination is a social phenomenon, dialogic even, but
crucially one that typically works itself out through the mediation of objects
that are … to some degree unfinished, teasingly schematic in such a way as to,
almost perforce, mobilize the imaginative powers of the recipient to fill in
the blanks” (p. xv). When communicated in the subjunctive mood of myth or
ritual, such an imagination can, to use a term of which Graeber was fond, prefigure
realities to come.
The crackdown in Myanmar grew more brutal through March. Protesters like Ruth continued to be in the streets. By late February, we’d shifted our conversation from Facebook Messenger to Signal because of the safer encryption that app offered. Still, Ruth continued to post on Facebook, using a private VPN to access the site in the face of the junta’s effort to block it, and, periodically, the internet altogether. Her content grew more graphic. In early March she posted a widely circulated video of three paramedics being beaten by security forces. Videos of shootings followed daily. Posts were often accompanied by the slogan, “The revolution must succeed”.
It’s now been one year since the coup, and Myanmar’s revolution has continued to evolve. Just as the country ought to be considered world historical, so those involved in the uprising continue to make history, through their ongoing resistance amid a military assault that has been especially vicious in Chin State and other ethnic areas.
What would Graeber have
made of this unfolding revolution?
Unfolding is the operative term. “Every real society is a process in time,” Leach famously writes in the introduction to Political Systems. And, as Tambiah (2002: 443) suggests, there is much in Leach that resonates with—prefigures, perhaps—Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s routine “denial of coevalness.” There’s an irony, then, that many of the strongest critiques of the book focus on Leach’s elision of the historical circumstances in which his study occurred, something about which Graeber would have no doubt remarked, especially if his treatment of another major figure in British anthropology, Evans-Pritchard, is anything to go by.
There are certainly important
differences between Graeber and Leach, political and otherwise, but one other
thing they had in common is that they were not just prolific writers, but
prolific readers too. There’s been much said about the place of the imagination
in the writing of anthropology, but less, perhaps, about imagination’s role in
its reading. If all ethnography is “fiction”, as Leach claimed in one of his
final lectures, and even if it isn’t, what imaginative faculties are engaged in
reading it?
What modes of speculative reading do we pursue, though gaps, from afar, of Facebook posts, of texts that don’t, really, exist? In his foreword to Severi’s book, Graeber pushes against the “utopian ideal” of a text produced by a “single, unique” genius. Instead, he argues, “everything turns on a tacit complicity, whereby the author leaves the work, in effect, half-finished so as to ‘capture the imagination’ of the interpreter” (2015: xx-xxi).
How do we read with an imagination
that is a “social phenomenon, dialogic even,” one that works through the
mediation of things unfinished and incomplete?
Unfinished, unfolding, incomplete—like
Myanmar’s revolution. Ruth is also working in the presence of something that
doesn’t, really, exist, and didn’t even in the years of so-called transition: a
democratic Myanmar that is both politically—and, for her, spiritually—saved. But
in continuing to defy the military, just as she continued to evangelise in the
face of indifference, she and others act “as if” they live in a world not just where
“the revolution must succeed,” but in which it already has, and in imagining
that world, they work to bring it into being.
Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in
the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.
Fuller, Chris and Jonathan Parry. 1989. “Petulant
Inconsistency? The Intellectual Achievement of Edmund Leach”. Anthropology
Today 5/3: 11-14.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward
and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New
York: Palgrave.
Graeber, David. 2007. Revolutions
in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London:
Minor Compositions.
Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of
the professional-managerial class”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
4/3: 73–88.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Concerning Mental Pivots and
Civilizations of Memory.” Preface to The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology
of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.
Laidlaw,
James and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 2000. The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume 1.
Anthropology and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maran, La Raw. 2007. “On the continuing relevance of
E. R. Leach’s political systems of Highland Burma to Kachin studies”. In M.
Sadan and F. Robbine (eds.) Social Dynamics in the Highlands of South East
Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden:
Brill
Leach, Edmund. 1964
[1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press.
Leach, Edmund.1984.
“Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology”. Annual
Review of Anthropology 13: 1-23.
Sadan, Mandy and Francois
Robbine (eds.) 2007. Social
Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering ‘Political Systems
of Highland Burma’ by E. R. Leach. Leiden: Brill.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 2002. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cite as: Edwards, Michael. 2022. “Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar.” FocaalBlog, 27 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/27/michael-edwards-graeber-leach-and-the-revolution-in-myanmar/
David Graeber’s work is
often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David
Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of many of
the most entrenched Enlightenment myths about human history and the origins of
social inequality. But what makes his way of myth-busting particularly
compelling is that it is informed by a theory of myth itself – of what myth is,
what it does, and how it stands in relation to human creativity and social
transformation. The study of myth, for Graeber, was not an arbitrary
indulgence. It was central to his overall take on the scope of anthropology.
For him, anthropology was most valuable as a comparative inquiry into human
possibilities – one that throws our own contemporary myths into sharp relief,
thereby revealing our own creative potential and possibilities for social
transformation.
Though Graeber never
published specifically on myth, the theme emerges in a variety of guises
throughout his work: in the Value book (2001), in the essays collected in Possibilities
(2007), and of course in The Dawn of Everything
(2021). He often taught courses on myth and ritual.
Before his death, he had prepared a series of lectures focused on Gregory
Bateson’s Naven mythic and ritual complex. Most importantly, in 2017 he wrote a
long foreword to Terry Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar (2017), a detailed structural analysis of the
Kayapo myth on the origin of cooking fire. We learn from this not only the
value that Graeber saw in the anthropological study of myth, but also the huge
influence that Turner had on his thinking. Turner was for Graeber what Graeber
is for many of us, someone with “a remarkable ability to make … (still
extremely complicated) ideas sound like matter-of-fact common sense, and even
to render them fairly straightforward.” (Graeber 2017:xxi). Graeber lamented that what Terry
Turner could do in person in no way corresponded to his written work. He admitted
that, initially, he could not understand a word of it. Once he understood it,
however, he came to regard Turner as “the most underrated social theorist of
the last 50 years” (pers. comm.) and The Fire of the Jaguar “one of the
greatest achievements of anthropological theory, […] that should deserve a
place among the classics” (ibid:xxxix).
Image 1: Book cover of Fire of the Jaguar by Terence Turner
Given Graeber’s political
life, his interest in myth seems surprising. In a pedigree that goes from
Mircea Eliade to Jordan Peterson, the study of myth has traditionally been the
province of the politically conservative. Though approaches to the subject vary
widely, for the great majority of theorists, myths either reflect archetypal structures
of the human mind or resolve contradictions related to individual experience.
They have no direct relationship to social organisation, let alone social
transformation. What Graeber saw in Turner was quite the opposite: a rare
progressive theory of myth, where the latter emerges as the embodiment, if not
as the paragon, of human social creativity. In what follows, we examine these
connections, we show how this argument originates from a radical rethinking of
structuralism, and we consider how it came to fashion Graeber’s way of doing
anthropology.
First, though, a few words
on The Fire of the Jaguar.
Myth, action and dynamic
structuralism
The Fire of the Jaguar is the most prominent myth of the Kayapo, an Amazonian group whom
Terry Turner researched for over fifty years. The myth recounts the story of a
young boy who is adopted by
jaguars, who then teach him how to use cooking fire – knowledge that he brings back
to the Kayapo community. In essence, the myth explains how Kayapo attain full
sociality out of nature, a process that is reflected both in the maturation of
the boy and in the manipulation and replication of fire.
To our knowledge, Turner’s
analysis of this myth is the most detailed analysis of a single myth in the
anthropological literature. It is structuralist in character but very different
(and, in Graeber’s view, more compelling) than the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.
Turner embeds his analysis of myth in Kayapo socioeconomic organisation (which
he knew very well) and is not concerned with comparing it with other myths to
reveal an underlying code. He suggests instead that the maturation of the boy
in the myth reveals a model not only for the socialisation of youth but also
for the consolidation of Kayapo society as a whole. In Kayapo matriuxorilocal
communities, men must undergo an emotionally disruptive process of detachment
as they move from their natal home to the communal men-house, and finally to
the house of their in-laws. By recounting parallel processes of detachment, the
myth of the fire of the jaguar reframes the tensions and contradictions of this
experience. Myth thus functions as an important means whereby societies are
able to shape behaviour into collectively prescribed organizational patterns.
Ultimately, Turner argues that Kayapo myth and social organisation stand in a
relation of circular causality with one another, i.e., they influence each
other in non-linear fashion.
He arrives at this
argument by making a fundamental move away from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism:
the minimal units of myth in his analysis are not categories (types of beings
or types of objects), but actions. The difference between categories and
actions is that actions, when repeated, force the subject to consciously
acknowledge a pattern. This is ultimately what structure is for Turner: it is a
pattern of action, or, in his words, a “group of transformations bounded
together by invariant constraints” (2017:207). This type of structure is always
dialectic. As soon as a pattern shows change and diversification, the acting
subject is forced to create a higher level of abstraction in order to account
for and compare differences, which in turn can lead to yet another higher
level, and so on.
Understanding what Turner
means by all this requires some minimal familiarity with the concepts of
‘dynamic hierarchical system’ and ‘self-organisation’ that he takes from Piaget
and cybernetics (Turner 1973) (were he to write today, Turner would
probably find a more compelling treatment of these concepts in the field of
complexity science (e.g., Thompson 2007 or Deacon 2012)). His adaptation of these theories into
anthropology might be at times counterintuitive. For Graeber, the
cross-disciplinary move he accomplishes is central. To exemplify Turner’s application
of dynamic structuralism to the social domain, Graeber asks us to consider the
action of feeding a child (Graeber 2017:xxxii). The moment we do this twice but
with the understanding that it
is the ‘same’ action we performed before, we generate, through repetition, a
kind of hierarchy since there is a higher level at which those actions are both
tokens of the same type. But the moment we say a different kind of repeated
action is not the same – say, feeding a husband or feeding a rival at a feast –
we are generating a third level, where different types are being compared. At
the same time, by defining certain types of action in this way, we typically generate
certain identities (child, husband, rival), kinds of person who typically
perform such actions, which in turn lead us to consider, on yet a higher level of
analysis, how these identities relate to one another, and so forth. Structure,
in short, is always dynamic and open-ended, and always develops from
lower-level actions.
Turner applies this analysis to both Kayapo social
organisation and the myth of origin. The plot of the myth proceeds through a
sequence of apparent tensions (e.g., a boy growing up in a matriuxorilocal
society, which implies eventual separation from the natal family), which it overcomes by transposing them
onto a higher level of structural differentiation of the same pattern. For
instance, the detachment from the boy’s original family in the myth reflects an
initial distancing from ‘nature’, which is then reproduced on a higher level in
the boy’s manipulation of fire. Similarly, in Kayapo society, the actions that
produce sociality at the lower level of family organisation level are structural
variations of actions that produce sociality at the upper level of moieties and
communal organization in the village. Overall, Turner claims to have demonstrated that, at least among the
Kayapo, the dynamic structures of myth and social organisation parallel one
another.
Turner’s central theoretical argument in The Fire of
the Jaguar is that what we usually consider ‘mythical thought’ – the
central message of the myth that is subjectively experienced by people – consists
in the highest level of social
self-organisation. Myth, essentially, places a cap on an otherwise ever-evolving
dialectical process that would make social organisation impossible. At some
point, the complexity of social reality – of why we treat one another the way
we do, or why we value certain actions over others – becomes such that we are
unable to form a higher level of abstraction to account for it. What myth does
is pre-empting the need to construct that level, because it treats
contradictions in the structure of society as playing out within the terms of
that structure itself. For Turner, this also explains the reason why
most myths are about the origins of social institutions: in order to avoid
having to consciously create a higher level, we attribute the origin of social
institutions to a mythical power in the distant past. And this is why the
Kayapo, for example, regard the very power to create and maintain their social
order – the fire – as originating from an extra-social source – the jaguar (see
also Graeber 2020).
In sum, Turner’s
structuralism makes a radical departure from Lévi-Strauss’ because 1) it takes
actions, rather than ideas, as starting points. ‘Nature’ and ‘society’ are not
static orders of classification but contrastive modes of actions continuously
in tension with one another. 2) It takes the perspective of the subjects,
rather than that of the analyst. These are tensions and processes lived by the
Kayapo, which shape their values and subjectivity and the reproduction of their
society. 3) It does not assume that myth simply evokes contradictions and then
mediates them. This is only half of the story. The other half of the story is
that myth is equally concerned with the differentiation of ambiguous situations
and with their transformation; it is the end-product of a dialectical process.
On alienated consciousness
and social creativity
It is challenging, of
course, to give justice to the complexity of Turner’s thought on myth in the
space of a few paragraphs. We hope it is clear, however, how these ideas might
have had a profound influence on David Graeber: the causal significance of
myth, the emphasis on action, the focus on social production, the conscious
creation of structure, the very idea of a ‘dynamic structuralism’… Graeber
endlessly reworked these ideas throughout his writings. The aspect we are most
interested in focusing on here is that of social creativity.
Turner saw myth as the
creative result of a dialectical process that enables a system of social
relations. By virtue of their capacity to support different types of social
organisation, the constellation of myths we find across cultures could be seen as
a vast compendium of human creativity. Yet (and this is something Graeber finds
particularly curious) myth is also creativity turned against itself: most of
them are about how latter-day humans can’t be genuinely creative anymore. They
often appear to be all about fixing either natural differences or social
relations. The Kayapo myth of cooking fire is a good example of this. The
creation myths of Ju|’hoan (or !Kung) speakers, among whom I (Megan Laws) did
fieldwork, are another good example. They speak of a time when different beings
had no fixed form, and of how (and this is significant) humans then ‘branded’ the animals with fire to give them their
distinctive characteristics (Biesele 1993: 116-123) and set in place the relationships
between them.
It is natural, here, for
both Turner and Graeber to turn to Marx’s (1964) idea of alienation, because, so defined,
myth does appear to be a form of alienated social consciousness (“we create our
physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of, the process
by which we do so”, Graeber 2005: 409). As Turner puts it (2017: 202), myths seemingly
present us with the “form of the natural universe”, which is “seen as
self-existing prior to any particular instance of human social activity”
(2017:202). We appear to be presented with the way things are, not with how they
came to be. In the process, we confer power upon that which we have ourselves
created. There is clearly a potential dark side to this. As Marx argues so eloquently,
there is a necessary link between humans’ misunderstanding of the process of
their own creativity and forms of authority and exploitation.
One of the problems in
seeing things this way is that, from an anthropological perspective, one risks
being condescending to people like the Kayapo. Are we really prepared to say
that the Kayapo live under a form of alienated consciousness? Graeber reflects
on this dilemma on several occasions, most explicitly in his criticism of the
‘ontological turn’ (Graeber 2015).
His take is twofold. Firstly,
he writes, the dilemma changes as soon as we realise that we frequently
criticise our colleagues’ own assumptions about the workings of society.
Denying the possibility of saying that the Kayapo are wrong in their own
assumptions would amount to denying their status as potential intellectual
peers. But, secondly, though certainly capable of questioning the foundations
of their own thought and actions, we should not assume that people like the
Kayapo are questioning the
foundations of their own thought and actions, or that there’s any particular
reason why they should.
As Turner points out, the Kayapo “are fully conscious of constructing themselves and their society” (2017:203) through myth. We see the same awareness in the phenomenon of fetishism examined by Graeber (2005). Drawing upon ethnographic research from West Africa from the 17th to the 19th century, he writes that fetishes, from the African viewpoint, are not simply objects that are presumed to have power over us. They are objects recognised as creations, as embodiments of intentions and actions that have power over us. Likewise, the Akha people of highland Laos where I (Giulio Ongaro) did my fieldwork are known to build their villages around three features (a swing, a well, a gate) that are imbued with spiritual force. These spirits both protect and afflict Akha people with illness, but they can also be torn apart every time Akha move village. Besides, Akha know that they are the only people in their multi-ethnic region to have those features, which suggests that they are also aware that these spirits do not exist out there independent of their own minds. Like myths, these objects can embody social creativity because they have the power to establish new social relations. Yet, it would be a stretch to consider them as products of alienated consciousness because people are ultimately conscious, on some level, of the fact that their power has a human origin.
The danger comes when we
take this power as natural, “when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute
assurance that the gods are real.” (Graeber, 2005:431). The assurance, in other
words, that such power is immutable. Similarly, with myth, the danger comes
when we elevate myth as fact. When we do so, we risk losing sight of those
moments when the forms we take as natural or given are a product of the
activity of human agents (and to this end, might be transformed).
In many of his writings, Graeber
states that this is the condition we find ourselves in at this historical
moment. We forget, as his popular line puts it, that “the ultimate, hidden
truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as
easily make differently”. He and David Wengrow reflect at length on this point
in The Dawn of Everything. They show how our own Enlightenment myth of
origin takes the linear growth of social complexity and hierarchy as natural. If
there is something peculiar about this Enlightenment myth of origin is that,
unlike virtually all other origin myths, which start with a creative event (with
the branding of animals or the mastery of fire), it starts with nothing and
seems to negate the possibility of social creativity altogether. This brings us
back to Graeber’s overall vision of anthropology and his scholarly efforts to question
our own contemporary myths and their social effects.
Creative refusal
Graeber saw anthropology
as a dialogic enterprise, driven by the willingness to turn to ‘others’ to
challenge the value-laden assumptions – or myths – that colour our own
experience of the world. He knew that anthropologists cannot take a ‘view from
nowhere’, as philosopher Thomas Nagel (1989) puts it. As all social scientists, they
labour under the weight of their own culturally specific assumptions. Some of Graeber’s
contemporaries, most notably those aligned with the ‘Writing Culture’ turn (as
well as post-structuralist and post-humanist scholars), saw this as a damning
indictment of the impossibility of anthropology as an objective science (Graeber
2007b). For Graeber, it was its main strength. It
is precisely by turning to ethnography, specifically to comparison, that he saw
it possible to challenge our own myths, and it was in this guise that
anthropology was most valuable for him.
How does the ‘dynamic
structuralism’ of Graeber’s mentor, Terry Turner, fit into this? As we have
examined, an important difference between the structuralism espoused by
Levi-Strauss and ‘dynamic structuralism’ is that the former takes myths to have
no direct link to social and material reality. The latter, to the contrary,
takes myths to not only grow out of “the
structure of social relations” and appeal in concrete, affective terms to those
who listen to them; they are, as Turner puts it, “powerful devices for
supporting a given form of social organisation” (2017:134). If we assume a
relation of non-linear dynamic co-causality between myth and social
organisation, then the political implications are clear: by changing one, one
can change the other. Whether this circular causality between myth and social
organisation is actually in place can be questioned. Graeber certainly assumes
it and turns to our contemporary myths to both draw attention to their
consequences, and to attack them.
Ernesto De Martino once
wrote that “the task of anthropology lies in the possibility of positing
problems whose solution leads to an expansion of the self-consciousness of our
civilization. Only then can anthropology help the formation of a wider humanism”
(De Martino
1973:3; translation from Italian original). With some reservations on the term
‘civilisation’, Graeber would surely embrace this spirit. Once he said on
Twitter: “I am bored of post-humanists. I think I am a pre-humanist. Humanity
is something we aspire to achieve at some point in the future”. But Graeber
would also add that, though anthropology is uniquely placed to fulfil this
role, the aspiration to achieve a wider humanism is by no means exclusive to
the society that invented anthropology. In one way or another, it has been the
primal moving force of all cultures.
This was the key point of
his Marilyn Strathern lecture, where he suggested that what we call ‘cultures’
should be seen as examples of successful social movements, particularly as the
outcome of a creative process of refusal (Graeber 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many
ethnonyms – the names a culture gives to itself – actually mean ‘human’,
suggesting perhaps that they see themselves as having achieved such status. The Dawn of Everything considerably elaborates
on the argument of the Strathern lecture. Graeber and Wengrow not only engage
in their own process of creative refusal – challenging enduring Enlightenment
myths and their socially deleterious effects – they show the role that creative
refusal and conscious social experimentation has played throughout human
history. Some early criticisms of the book have contended that Graeber and
Wengrow “demythologise the past” (Vernon 2021) and take our ancestors to be rational
political actors who believe that “mythical narratives and religious
sensitivities are inferior bases for organising society” (Shullenberger
2021). This should certainly call for an unpacking
of the term ‘conscious social experimentation’. Perhaps, in and of itself, the
term does evoke the idea of a group of people getting together and rationally
imposing their will on the world. In light of what we have discussed in this
paper, we suggest that the rubric of ‘conscious experimentation’ can – without
contradictions – involve forms of myth and mythmaking.
Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in
the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo
Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in
highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.
Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted
ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism,
sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.
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Cite as: Ongaro, Giulio and Megan Laws. 2022. “Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/24/giulio-ongaro-and-megan-laws-towards-a-progressive-theory-of-myth-turner-and-graeber-on-social-creativity/