“I am - and was earlier today - trying to understand if Graeber was a ’shame-faced materialist’ or an idealist….”
I had the pleasure of knowing David for over a decade we drunk together at my bookstore in 07 and he came back after being expelled from Yale and writing his book on mutual aid and credit. To answer your question I would say he was an anthropologist and very sympathetic to the anarchist cause both of which predispose one to a little idealism. Despite his own academic leaning I did find him to be a principled materialist >From personal chats with him regarding his prehistorical work it seems his interest was identifying forms of mutual aid and barter which influenced the development of associations and accumulation of wealth growing out of tribal and familial networks The anthropological evidence he used to cite often pointed to anti statal configurations he connected to his views on anarchist organizations and this is where his materialism can be seen to converge on idealism. Specifically he argues against the teleology of industrialization as being necessarily hierarchal pointing to the essential human connections that allowed for nuanced ways of sharing, organizing and distributing resources in communities without capital and the state. If there is idealism in his work it’s most likely the focus on humanism and his commitment to focus on non traditional modes of social organization however a lot of his research was backed by archeology which itself is very materialist. I can remember his enthusiasm about discovering connections between prehistoric tools and his interest in the implications of how these tools were involved in complex social and economic arrangements. Not sure if this responds to the Engles concern on British idealism which was a primarily a critique of religious metaphysics that was “shamefaced”precisely because the ideology could not subtend the material origins of social organization making even the spiritualist paradoxically materialist. To extrapolate the comment to apply to Graeber’s work one would need to connect anarchism or anthropology to a sort of religious conception of an ideal social organization that in the last instance cannot escape the agonistic return to the very material configurations I.e the archeology and the necessary labor embedded even in the production of tools that can be coded as artifact only after the living labor is transformed into the dead labor of historical documentation and then back into the living labor of academic research. It seems the materialism at this level is inevitable but I’m not sure if this is not part of Graeber’s point that the prehistoric material conditions of production had nuances in some instances that could point to alternative ways of social organization. I would contend that even these ideals would fall back on the productivity of labor in the final instance. Good discussion. Cheers, Ben > _._,_._,_ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40837): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40837 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117988661/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
