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

[Mark Kohut]

i am/was one....I, too, am directionally sympathetic and found the
leading principle of DEBT believable and insightful. But unlike you, I
stopped out of that book because I felt I could not read it critically
enough and because I move on too quickly with many books. Yes, your
Apple Computers quote is a WTF?.....I have seen one of DeLong's
criticisms and it seemed right on....I wanted to go deeper but did
not.

I salute your diligent critical examination.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> (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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l