RIP David Graeber; you'll be a bit but not totally missed here

David Graeber, the somewhat "heterodox" economist and historian of economics anthropologist, died yesterday. I had thought he was an economist but am informed otherwise.

 Late friend Leo Lincourt turned me on to him while also noting that his writing and thought were ... "uneven." He was specifically speaking about the book "Debt," so it's not only neoliberals who have criticized it.

Here's an interview of him about basic income and bullshit jobs, discussed by him in detail here. Generally good stuff.

But?

His one big idea, as in his book "Debt"? Built on somewhat false pretenses.

Like heterodox economist Michael Hudson, Graeber called for jubilee years like those in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible.

Problem? Those jubilee years of every seven years (actually the sabbatical year), and the super-jubilees of every 50, were almost surely aspirational, ideational. They weren't real. They come from the P section of the Tanakh, drafted in Babylonian exile or after. I mean, per the Wiki page for the book, even Jacobin, although it's not THAT far left, called it anecdotes that don't add up to proof. Wiki's pages on the sabbath year and the jubilee year are both useless. The sabbath year piece presents sabbath years as though they actually happened. The jubilee years piece cites Graeber as a reference, while even then noting that jubilees were (allegedly) offered when a new king was enthroned, and were for noncommercial debt only.

Contra conservative biblical scholars, 2 Kings 19 / Isaiah 37 do NOT imply a regular system of sabbath years at the time of Hezekiah. Rather, the passage seems to imply that Israelites couldn't plant in the current year, and in the second year, the soil might still be too disrupted (salted by Sennacherib?) to grow anything beyond more "volunteer" plants, and that "Yahweh would provide."

As for ancient Near Eastern kings doing this on their ascents in general? Given that we have but a few examples of this, and that "winners not only wrote history, they were the only ones writing" back then, if not fully ideational, there's probably less truth and more legend to these ideas than Graeber, Hudson or others would admit.

Per his Wiki page, he's then to blame, in part, for the myth of Occupy Wall Street vs. its reality? It wasn't as anarchist as he claims, though it was more than anarchist enough. Yet, it had leaders. Oh, it did. Also, riffing on the likes of Doug Henwood saying racism almost always reduces to classism? Graeber either missed, or papered over, that by demographics, OWS was BOTH racist AND classist.

He was also a big MMT touter, and I've called that a Maoist cult.

I don't know what all Leo had in mind by "uneven," but one piece I saw yesterday illustrated that to a T.

Here's a piece from him in The Baffler which shows the range of thought he had, though he's just wrong in his apparent support for panpsychism. And, his dismissal of the whole idea of emergent properties is simplistic. And, if, in light of the real thing called scientism, there's something called anti-scientism, this comes close.

And, in what must have enlivened editorial conversations at The Baffler, fellow writer there Thomas Frank said that Occupy Wall Street didn't accomplish shit. And, he was right. 

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Update, March 3, 2022: I have given Graeber's posthumous "Dawn of Everything" a thorough deconstruction at Goodreads, with a 2-star review. I have also offered background to that, including links to other critical reviews and what I learned from them, at this blog post.