Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
Rebellion, in the face of the extraordinary mediocrity and pettiness of present-day human society as it has been constructed under the growing pressure of capitalist domination and ideology over the last few centuries, has accompanied David Graeber all his life. It is intrinsic to his whole approach. All of his anthropological research has been aimed at highlighting all the fundamentally different possibilities and forms of social organization that have been available throughout human history. This research overlaps with many others to demonstrate that capitalism has never been inevitable, that its totalizing approach has always provoked a great deal of resistance at all times. It is by no means through its logic that capitalism has imposed itself, and even less through its humanity, of course. It is through force and brutality and thanks precisely to the accumulation of capital extracted from a permanent violence exercised against nature and humanity that it has established itself up to the stage of its contemporary totalitarianism. Some, through laziness or cowardice, find it easier to try to acclimatize to it, to forget it or to act as if we should be satisfied with it. Others, like Graeber, will never be able to resign themselves to it and will make a lifelong struggle against this state of affairs. For our part, we dare to think that they are the salt of the earth.
“The ambition of this book is therefore to bring together a series of viewpoints on the reality of the world, viewpoints that are different and sometimes incommensurable. If their coherence is due above all to the conviction that our world could well have, after all, a very different aspect from the one it presents to us, this coherence is perhaps equally due to the belief that the combination of rage and curiosity, of intellectual play and creative pleasure that infuses any attempt at a critical theory of society worthy of the name, itself ultimately participates in the forces that could transform this world into something better.
“This is about the development, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of what C. B. Macpherson was the first to call ‘possessive individualism’, by which he means that people began to see themselves increasingly as isolated beings who no longer defined their relationship to the world in terms of social relations, but in terms of property rights.”
“Clearly, ‘wage labor’ (as opposed to, say, fees for professional services) implies a certain degree of subordination: a worker must be to some extent under the command of his employer. This is exactly why, throughout history, free men and women have tended to reject it, and why most of history has unfolded without capitalism, in its first definition, ever coming into being. (…) Free men and women therefore kept their distance from anything that could resemble wage labor, which they perceived as de facto slavery, the renting of oneself.”
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Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
| David Graeber |  |
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Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.