David Graeber

David Graeber’s work is so full of argumentative fallacies and substantively wrong facts that one simply cannot trust it. He rested a lot of credibility on his “scholarship”, while often his arguments directly connected to claims that were simply not true. Yes, Graeber was a synthesist, and one must allow for some quibbles from specialists saying golly, he oversimplified something there. But it is common for informed commentators to say that his factual errors are integral to his arguments.

This frustrates me because he could be a marvelous radical thinker and polemicist, naming things which needed to be named. His Bullshit Jobs essay (which he eventually expanded into a book), for which he is perhaps best-known, is a good exemplar.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
[⋯]
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
[⋯]
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
[⋯]
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed.

Tasty.

But.

Over on Twitter, I assembled a thread of critiques of Graeber. Take for example a close look at the Bullshit Jobs book:

Indeed, the strange claim at the center of Graeber’s new book is that the explosive growth of the service sector—today, four of five jobs in the US are “service” occupations—over the past half century is entirely due to the massive addition of “pointless” employment in the FIRE [finance, insurance, and real estate] sector, where hired toadies tinker with Excel and spitball advertising strategies to while away their days

Or this one:

[The Bullshit Jobs Thesis] has the appearance of radical critique, but behind the combative language and occasional managerialist target successfully skewered, lies a series of claims that are empirically unsustainable, conceptually flawed and politically a dead end

Or a reflection on Graeber’s last book, The Dawn Of Everything:

This happens to be my own area of expertise, and I was curious to see what they would make of it. Quite frankly, I was appalled. Unfortunately, despite its promise, the work suffers from a slipshod and error-filled approach to this key moment in modern intellectual history.

Or another read of Dawn:

The readers of Graeber’s previous work will recognize this provocative style; he was a wildly creative thinker who excelled at subverting received wisdom. But he was better known for being interesting than right, and he would gleefully make pronouncements that either couldn’t be confirmed (the Iraq War was retribution for Saddam Hussein’s insistence that Iraqi oil exports be paid for in euros) or were never meant to be (“White-collar workers don’t actually do anything”).

In The Dawn of Everything, this interpretative brashness feeds off our lack of firm knowledge about the distant past. When only potsherds remain, conjecture can run wild. Graeber and Wengrow dutifully acknowledge the need for caution, but this doesn’t stop them from dismissing rival theories with assurance. It’s hard not to wonder whether this book, which zips merrily across time and space and hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted.

Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions. [⋯] Big if true, as they say, but the claim is ballistically false.

Or an anthropologist looking closely at Dawn Of Everything:

All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible.

Or a scathing breakdown of his argumentative fallacies from the New York Review Of Books:

A naked ‘what if?’ conjecture wanders off and returns in the three-piece suit of an established fact.

Economist Brad DeLong is perhaps Graeber’s most famous critic, mostly over the book Debt: The First 5000 Years. One may be tempted to dismiss DeLong’s read of a left anarchist since DeLong is a stubborn, smug neoliberal Democrat — which he is — and because Graeber responded to his long internet flame war with DeLong by asserting that DeLong “was operating in bad faith”. But I have followed DeLong since the early blogosphere days of the early ’00s and I know him to be scrupulous about speaking in good faith. This is apparent in a catalogue of Graeber’s errors DeLong maintains.

Notice what is going on? From saying that the book is bullet-proof save for Apple, now Graeber is claiming that I have “never managed to identify more than one” additional factual error, that it is “a minor point about the number of reserve board governors who are Presidential appointees”, and that “the main point… DeLong does not contest”. But I do contest what Graeber calls his main point.

I can attest that the point DeLong makes about Graeber’s misrepresentation of the founding of Apple Computer is correct. And here I must confess my own tiny flame war with Graeber, when he came into my Twiter mentions unbidden. I had criticized some people for making slanderous misrepresentations. He said I was wrong to … ultimately arguing that the facts were not even important. So I concur with the source hygeine attiude toward Graeber which DeLong offered on Twitter:

Not everything Graeber writes is wrong—some of it is right, and some of it is quite good. But nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.