Re: Capitalism’s secret love affair with bureaucracy - FT.com

[Robert Mahnke]

(Continuing my foray into last year's posts....)

I gather that David Graeber has some fans on the P-list, so let me ask this
("this" in the sense of, the question that comes after the following
paragraph).  I think he picks interesting and important things to write
about, and I am directionally sympathetic with what he has to say.
However, I get the sense that he plays fast and loose with historical
facts, reinventing them to serve his own purposes.  For example, in this FT
excerpt from his book, he says: "The only real way to rid oneself of an
established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as
Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome...."  A few minutes of quick research
suggests that not only did Alaric not kill all the Roman bureaucrats when
he sacked Rome, in fact the sack was mild by the standards of the day and
there were no mass killings.  This could be wrong, or perhaps Graeber is
just relaying something that Weber said (but did he? and if so, why not
correct it?).  But it seems to fit a pattern with Graeber. To take perhaps
the most notorious example, in Debt he wrote: "Apple Computers ... was
founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in
Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to
forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages."  As the kids say,
WTF?  From time to time, Brad DeLong has taken a hard look at Debt and
close scrutiny of Graeber's history is not kind to it and him.  Moreover,
my recollection is that when the folks at Crooked Timber did a symposium on
Debt and asked some tough questions about its claims, he reacted quite
poorly.  (Recollection somewhat confirmed by a quick search yielding this:
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/04/because-imperialism/).  All of this
leads me to suspect that his books cannot be trusted.

So fans of Graeber, or anyone else, tell me why this is wrong. Why is his
work worth engaging?

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Weber, postal service, and the Soviet Union make an appearance by the
> terrif David Graeber.
>
>
> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/73212b74-c1ba-11e4-8b74-00144feab7de.html#slide0
>
>
> Sent from my iPad-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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