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Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)

This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at the context in which those examples fit (a superb irony for an anthropologist who had careful consideration for the nuance of the past).

At best, his work regarding patriarchy was surface level, and I don't care how many people try to convince me otherwise while highlighting the works in which he showcases those very surface level critiques. "The Bully's Pulpit," which is present in this book, is a perfect example of not understanding how the targeting of Bosniak boys and men over the age of 15 is part of a patriarchal problem, nor does it really explore why it was that Bosnian Serbs could successfully target them and pretend they weren't engaging in genocide, but it is also a perfect example of how that that very idea he had around boys and men can be extrapolated and misattributed by the "male loneliness epidemic" manarchists.

There is one "new" essay, which I have not found anywhere online. It's "The Revolt of the Caring Classes." Perhaps someone should lift it and post it to TAL, ensuring that the collection is complete. Perhaps it's good as a free ebook that collates a lot of his most commonly referenced essays, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend someone pay for this (saw a hardback in my local bookstore for €32, which is a bit pricy for things that've been widely distributed multiple times). Other essays included were turned into longer works (such as "There Never Was a West," which fueled much of what became The Dawn of Everything and "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which became Bullshit Jobs).

It's baffling that this is the choice that would be made, either by the editors or the publisher. Certainly, it would've been more interesting to engage in his unpublished works over these often referenced pieces.

Ironically, this section includes an essay with this same title, and that particular essay is the only one that is not available for free anywhere at all (while literally every other essay can be accessed either on davidgraeber.com, the original publication was published in, or The Anarchist Library). And I find it particularly amusing that it's this piece because David's ability to engage in feminist texts was limited, at best (and is one of my constant criticisms of his work because it becomes very obvious where someone has given him feedback about engaging with and citing more feminists... since it's almost always in citation chunks and rarely ever spread through the whole).

There's even a line in Erica Lagalisse's obituary for David that highlights this:

He read very few of the feminist texts I recommended, but often cited them where I told him to.

I suspect that this essay comes thematically from his lecture titled "From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes," though that specific essay wasn't published elsewhere. And I don't see how it's inherently feminist when he doesn't even engage in a feminist critique. He hasn't made any critique that frames who is largely responsible for 'caring work', and a lot of his assumptions are within the language he uses (e.g., "nurses" is a generally a neutral term and male nurses exist, but we often see "nurses" as feminine in, at least, the Western context) rather than being made explicit and connecting them to issues he rarely addresses (or doesn't address well), like patriarchy. He talks a lot about "power," but he doesn't completely engage in the systems of power.

This is the opening paragraph to Nika's introduction, and I find it a bit absurd. Perhaps David said it, but I have to wonder if this is what he meant. Part of what has made me disconnect from David's work has been the ways in which it feels like people keep trying to turn him into some kind of Anarchist God now that he's passed.

I have always had my own issues with David's work (namely the way that he'd often forget to include a whole range of analyses that'd actually make his work clear and decrease its use by people who want to misrepresent the point), but I have always found some value in it. However, none of it has ever felt worthy of turning him into a god in the postmortem, as so many seem to have wanted to do.

No one has asked her to do all this work to transcribe and archive everything he ever did (unless he did prior to his death or in his will, in which case... I think that'd be a superb irony), and it originally felt very much like the 'care work' taken on via grief (something I wish, in more situations, people would acknowledge as what they're doing). If people have asked her to do it, maybe she felt guilted into continuing his work. I don't know, but the entire project (as a whole) feels empty and hollow. Those feelings colour how I feel about this €30-something book full of essays you can find for free.

On some level, I have to wonder if this is what anyone would want. Not just David, but anyone at all. Is it 'posthumous freedom' (a term used in the intro) for someone to... chain everything down to the idea of one person?

There's a major problem with this quote, and it's that you can splice it into pieces almost immediately, here's some contextualisation that breaks her argument (this paragraph and more) very fast:

1. Compulsory schooling in the United States was relatively brand new. The first state to introduce it was Massachusetts in 1852, with the last state introducing it being Mississippi in 1917 (admittedly, I don't know how chronologically organise places turned into states or made into territories after 1917; for example, Hawai'i has a pretty old public school system that was set up under King Kamehameha III in 1840, but I'm pretty sure it was wildly altered after the overthrow of the Hawai'ian government in the 1890s).

2. Despite compulsory schooling being done, it was hard to monitor whether or not kids attended. Birth certificates actually made this kind of surveillance much easier, and those weren't even really uniformly used in the US until the 1930s. (Some of us have grandparents who didn't have birth certificates because they weren't in wide usage.) As a result, it was easier for families to keep children home despite the mandates of compulsory schooling.

3. Child labour laws weren't really introduced until 1938 (FSLA), and they weren't really fully enforced until 1950s (if they are at all). Again, a lot of us have grandparents who didn't complete the compulsory schooling of the time because they left early to go work in factories so they could help support their families.

4. Compulsory schooling was much shorter in the 1940s than is today. Unless you wanted to go to university, you were done at 15. It's like that'd impact student enrolment.

... And gee, I wonder why fewer (WHITE) women were working prior to WWII.

I am really struggling with the introduction to this book. In my most charitable, all I can say is that she wrote it hastily in order for her and her publishers to meet a deadline that would best allow them to profit from pandemic books.

But there are some lines and paragraphs that really stick out like sore thumbs, like how we're fortunate that hundreds of children died because it could've been much worse. Idk, I think any children dying to a pandemic is awful. I would've also thought she'd put some numbers up next to those for how still-living children were impacted by the loss of their caregivers because they died (which maybe she'll do... at some point?).

But there's a lot of attempts to justify the existence of schools because of all the responsibilities they have (but shouldn't) without even a glimmer of asking whether that makes any sense or what we could do instead.

I mean, it's obvious that this man is an excruciatingly racist piece of shit, but holy shit.

In 2011, we knew that the Broken Windows Theory was wrong and that Wilson/Kelling had misrepresented it with full intent to support racist policing. Pinker doesn't seem to care that Zimbardo's original experiment never supported the Broken Windows Theory and talks about it as if it were truth. Granted, this chapter is also one in which he cites Charles Murray and Francis Fukuyama, so I can't be surprised he's a fan of it.

In terms of history, he has never engaged with anything beyond what little he seems to have learned from coffee table books (which he even explicitly points to as his inspiration for a chapter on torture). We knew in 2011 that the use of the Iron Maiden and similar contraptions, like the Virgin of Nuremberg, were largely believed to be myth because we could find no contemporary evidence of their use... just a lot of things from later historical periods after that claimed it existed or was used. Pinker doesn't even bring this up.