r/JewsOfConscience • u/Working-Lifeguard587 • Sep 03 '24
History Four years ago today, the world lost an intellectual giant. Rest in power David Graeber, we will forever miss your wit, wisdom & greater humanity
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u/turiye Non-Jewish Ally Sep 03 '24
Hearing him recount the smear campaign against Corbyn was so bittersweet. Totally on the money, but no one wanted to listen.
I liked his point about disliking the 'I'm not anti-semitic I'm anti-zionist but all zionists are evil' line, too. It's a good way to innoculate oneself intellectually against bad actors and can be the starting point for a much more robust movement for change.
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Sep 03 '24
Hearing him recount the smear campaign against Corbyn was so bittersweet. Totally on the money, but no one wanted to listen.
He wouldn't bow down in totality to israel and therefore got chucked out even though he was the leader most of the uk has always wanted and dream of. Politics and democracy is long dead in the west, the republican, democrat, Labour and tory parties all have the same corporate and foreign interests just with different framing
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u/xGentian_violet Non-Jewish Atheist, Anti-Zionist Sep 04 '24
as far as his commentary on Zionism goes, id dont really agree i have to say. It's definitional but rather important id say.
didnt Zionism always aim to create a discrete Jewish state somewhere, i.e. jewish majority state, not simply to move to Palestine?
i dont think people who simply wanted to move to Palestine in peace were zionists at all. The ancestors of Natrurei Karta did that and they arent Zionists, famously the opposite. Zionism specifically had settler colonial structure from the start
How could a movement that early on set it's aims at colonising palestine and turning it from a land with a heterogenous mainly muslim population, into a nation with a jewish majority, ever have turned out any way that isnt horrific? it couldnt have. Jabotinsky was right in his claims that what Zionists wanted could not have been achieved but by ethnic cleansing and apartheid, behind an Iron wall.
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u/simpon123 Nov 02 '24
Chomsky has talked a bit about this. I think the idea is that the term zionism was more politically multifaceted in the 30s and 40s, where some people who called themselves zionist were interested in binational, socialist solutions rather than a jewish majority state. Still, what Graeber says here is pretty weird, like "The project has ended up in a horrific, right wing government. That doesn’t mean it had to end up that way" - of course that is a natural and necessary development for the zionist project because it is inherently unjust and evil and it needs those machinations to survive
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u/xGentian_violet Non-Jewish Atheist, Anti-Zionist Nov 02 '24
Yeah i think even Simha Flapan of Mapam (Meretz predecessor party) might have had a bit of a different conception than Zionists today, and that was way after the 1940s. Not sure
I think what made it zionism was more about thinking the Zionist colonisation of Paestine was justified than beliefs in continuing ethnocracies. Again not sure
Yeah i personally both believe the zionist impulse to and eventual colonisation of palestine were inevitable (but immoral), and that this project could only really have ended up where it did eventually end up.
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u/Zealousideal-Skin655 Sep 04 '24
A great voice. Didn’t learn about him until a few months before his passing. 🕊️
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u/hydroxypcp Non-Jewish Ally Sep 04 '24
read (at least the summaries of) his works. The guy was and is a treasure to leftism
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u/Dan_IAm LGBTQ Jew Sep 04 '24
Huh, had no idea he was Jewish. Amazing person. Everyone should at least read Bullshit Jobs
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 03 '24
Four years ago today, the world lost a gullible semi-intellectual. There, fixed it for you.
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u/douglasstoll Reconstructionist Sep 03 '24
fixed what? What was broken?
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 03 '24
Calling Graeber an intellectual giant is broken.
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u/douglasstoll Reconstructionist Sep 03 '24
what's your critique?
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 04 '24
as an anthropologist: Graeber claimed (in his "Fragments") that he was pretty much the first actual anarchist anthropologist, despite the work of Harold Barclay and James C Scott, and the radical anti-tankie marxists Stanley Diamond and Pierre Clastres. so, arrogant and ignorant at the same time.
for his sweeping (and totally unreadable vanity project "Direct Action"), he reports as a participant-observer on the strategies and tactics of various anarchist and anarchist-influenced activist groups; many of the people he participated with and observed were not informed that their conversations and activities would be documented in a book. so, questionable ethics.
as a revolutionary tourist: like that other fool Milstein (and plenty of others, including a good personal friend of mine), Graeber was completely taken in by the PR handlers of the YPG when visiting Rojava. his paeans to the "Rojava Revolution" with their empty comparisons are painful to read for anyone who actually knows about the revolutionary projects of anarchists throughout the 20th century, like the Makhnovshchina, the various communes in pre-Mao China, the original Zapatistas, and the collectives in the Spanish Revolution. totally unlike the aforementioned examples, Rojava has no agricultural or industrial base to collectivize into economic self-management. the only aspects of life in Rojava that appear to be horizontal are the militias; while crucial for the defense of revolutionary experiments, the independent existence of militias is never sufficient for the flowering of such experiments. in most cases of anarchist and anarchist-influenced social revolution, militias arose AFTER the collectivization and self-management of agricultural and/or industrial areas. so, upside-down historian.
his campaigning for Corbyn was a colossal embarrassment for anyone familiar with the long-standing anarchist position on electoral politics (hint: anarchists are not in favor of parliamentarism). he should have known this already after writing a book called "Direct Action" -- which is the exact opposite of electoral action. plus, the fact that Corbyn did exhibit some soft antisemitism could never be admitted by Graeber or most other Jewish pro-Corbyn people. compounding the embarrassment is the fact that as a non-UK citizen, he wasn't even able to do what he encouraged others to do. so, shallow understanding of antisemitism, and shallow understanding of the role of parliamentarianism in propping up industrial capitalism.
as an anarchist: he didn't understand why anarchists are opposed to electoral politics; he didn't understand how he wasn't the first anarchist anthropologist; he didn't understand that the slogan he helped popularize ("We Are the 99%") is a majoritarian deception perpetrated by pro-capitalist populists who instinctively accept that landlords and cops are or can be our comrades in the struggle against a handful of "bad" capitalists. he didn't understand that going against the mainstream (in the case of his co-authored ode to urbanism, "The Dawn of Everything") often just makes you look foolish rather than radical. so, bad anarchist.
eagerly anticipating the flurry of downvotes from the anti-intellectual mob.
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u/douglasstoll Reconstructionist Sep 04 '24
what is soft antisemitism?
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u/xGentian_violet Non-Jewish Atheist, Anti-Zionist Sep 04 '24
they probably mean he wasnt a zionist
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 04 '24
zionism has nothing to do with it, goy.
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u/xGentian_violet Non-Jewish Atheist, Anti-Zionist Sep 04 '24
what?
and why are you immediately reaching for insulting my religious identity/ethnicity, Im sure if you have an actual point you can present it coherently and in a civilised manner
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 04 '24
You first. You made a wild assumption about what I meant by soft antisemitism without making an actual point, but instead imputing your own nonsense into it. I only mention your ethnic status because you do, and it's often pertinent in discussions about antisemitism to notice if people are speaking from personal experiences of bigotry.
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 04 '24
seriously? that's your response to my critiques of Graeber? derailing the discussion onto Corbyn?
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u/atav1k Antisatanic Jesuit Sep 03 '24
i think you’re confusing graeber for yuval hariri.
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u/BolesCW Mizrahi Sep 03 '24
haha... for all of Graeber's faults, he was light years ahead of that charlatan Harari.
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