David Graeber

[Fabio Cecin]

David Graeber: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs
they think are unnecessary’

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules

About 20% of the article quoted below:

"
(...)

“If you go to the Mac store and somebody says: ‘I’m sorry, it’s
obvious that what needs to happen here is you need a new screen, but
you’re still going to have to wait a week to speak to the expert’, you
don’t say ‘Oh damn bureaucrats’, even though that’s what it is –
classic bureaucratic procedure. We’ve been propagandised into
believing that bureaucracy means civil servants. Capitalism isn’t
supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a
profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they
don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.”

(...)

Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular,
spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be
unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this
situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet
virtually no one talks about it.”

(...)

Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was
mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on
their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing
all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad
now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working
class becomes unemployed.’

(...)

Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from
technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment
technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence
the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We
don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he
claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to
make violence harder to see,” he writes.

(...)

In 2011, at New York’s Zuccotti Park, he became involved in Occupy
Wall Street, which he describes as an “experiment in a
post-bureaucratic society”. He was responsible for the slogan “We are
the 99%”. “We wanted to demonstrate we could do all the services that
social service providers do without endless bureaucracy. In fact at
one point at Zuccotti Park there was a giant plastic garbage bag that
had $800,000 in it. People kept giving us money but we weren’t going
to put it in the bank. You have all these rules and regulations. And
Occupy Wall Street can’t have a bank account. I always say the
principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if
one is already free.”

(...)

He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc: “Putting
yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that
you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law,
custom or prejudice – and it’s up to you to create the situations.”
Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs – it was one of the
reasons he went into it. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now,
if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss
goodbye to the idea of an academic career.”

Why is that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large
percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling
them to go to hell … The eccentrics have been drummed out of all
institutions.”

(...)

“It’s about the play principle in nature. Usually, he argues, we
project agency to nature insofar as there is some kind of economic
interest. Hence, for instance, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. I
begin to understand the idea better– it’s an anarchist theory of
organisation starting with insects and animals and proceeding to
humans. He is suggesting that, instead of being rule-following
economic drones of capitalism, we are essentially playful. The most
basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than
rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms.

(...)
"


Fabio