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/88/ Vouchers for Toxicity ft. Anton Jäger (Patreon)

Published:
2019-09-19 12:02:42
Imported:
2024-07
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On post-work. We discuss Anton's review of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and why it seems to have such appeal, even amongst elites. There is a crisis in the work ethic, but is it an error to counterpose work and leisure and simply opt for leisure? Is leisure even 'ours' anymore, or has it been fully colonised by capitalism? Ultimately, is the problem today more about bullshit in jobs, rather than bullshit jobs per se?

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Andrea

So, I read Anton's article when it came out, but I only had the chance to listen to this podcast now, so I guess nobody will read my comment, but I'll leave it here anyway. Of course I agree with what have been said and written (and bravo to Anton!), I just wanted to say that as a marxist anthropologist I found the things he says "about the anthropology of or the ethnography of these pre-capitalist societies" as being "all about gift giving" to be kinda inaccurate. Which is understandable, coming from one of our archenemies, namely political science (but of course we don't get along well also with sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, or, well, economists, for that matter, but who does anyway?). Jokes aside, I mean to say that anthropology is definitely NOT hegemonized by anarchists à la Scott (and I would not carachterize Sahlins as one of them, but I'm maybe wrong). They have actually reached a wide extra-academic fame, I suppose especially thanks to the post-structural, and later post-modern, non anthropological popularising of some of their theories, meshed together with various other (sometimes incompatible) more or less radical theorists. But there is a strong tradition of Marxist anthropology that explicitly countered these theories, even though it remains a quite unknown branch even inside of my discipline. Now that I think of that I also had a facebook comment exchange with one critic of the techno-utopianism that gave rise to the "californian ideology" you interviewed in one of your podcasts (Richard Barbrook). If I'm not mistaken he took the gift economy as a "given" too, taken more or less uncritically from that strand of anthropology, and it was at that moment that I realised the effects of the popularisation of that concept outside of anthropology and especially in "autonomia", "post-structural" radicalism and "techno-utopians". Which is a bummer cause I have to roll my eyes every time someone mentions the supposed benefits of a gift economy.