The Gun Has No Trigger: David Graeber

David Graeber is an American anthropologist, political activist and author. He is currently a professor at the London School of Economics and was formerly an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. David also played a role in the Global Justice Movement and was one of the earlier organisers of Occupy Wall Street. He is the author of numerous books including The Democracy Project, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). His work deals with Theories of value, money, debt, politics, manners, magic, class, social movements, social theory.

[@knarf_on_a_bike]

I enjoyed the car story. That's why I love being a cyclist. No insurance, no registration, no license, no permits, no emissions certificates, free parking. It's the ultimate anarchist mode of transportation. RIP, David, you are sorely missed.

[@RainbowSunshineRain]

Yes bike is great! But I am afraid to use the bike in the city, the traffic is crazy and most of my friends already had some accidents.

[@guillll]

Cars are the ultimate capitalist scam. Spend a big part of your salary on something you mainly use to go to work.

[@HidingFromFate]

@@guillll But.. freedom! /sarcasm

[@ryanfranklin3206]

Word

[@pjabtg]

Graeber‘s most powerful teaching moments are often said in the most casual way. This time about conservatives and facsists..

[@juliotoru]

Love the man, I already miss him !

[@tietscho]

Props to you David. Another one feeding my thoughts. You inspire me from wherever you are...

[@bbrs925]

The super hero analogy would make an excellent stand up comedy bit !! Loved it

[@nikzanzev2402]

I've had similar thoughts recently, and seeing Graeber agree is pretty awesome. The way I thought about it though is that conservatives' main motto/slogan is "There is no alternative!" or "The alternative only has negative consequences!" (ala Albert Hirschman's Rhetoric of Reaction). My thoughts were that any left wing party/movement should adopt the opposite motto: "There is always an alternative!" Graeber's thoughts are more eloquent and hashed out but I think they are pretty much the same.

[@rillloudmother]

i tend to agree, but i would not limit this attribution to , 'conservatives.' for me, in the US and UK both parties rely on this whenever convenient.

[@ZealothPL]

What the conservatives fail to realise is that as the years go by even their strawman alternatives are starting to look more and more enticing compared to the status quo

[@pipster1891]

The big difference between Vietnam and Iraq on social movements at home was the draft. The government can get away with any war if there's no draft.

[@kalonicamcquesten692]

“Anarchist who has a squat” versus real estate developer. It’s so true. Honestly. The Ghost Ship did not need to happen. Because improvements to safety do not have to be structured to be ONLY AFFORDABLE AND ABLE TO BE ACCOMPLISHED BY CAPITALIZED ENTITIES. So that every property and space is weirdly controlled by contractors and developers. Not the humans who use or maintain or depend on the space. Errrrrgggghhhhh.

[@457max]

"Give everyone police training to abolish the need for police."

[@diiasze3743]

did he said that?

[@hmcyrus]

diiasze yes + you can check out this shorter clip from this discussion in which context he said that and also to get an idea of how they are trying to stop the state-like mechanism from applying power through apparatuses like police kzbin.info/www/bejne/mojKgYqCbM2Hba8

[@coreycox2345]

I like his definition of anarchy, loveablebastard.

[@MetalNick]

How then do we make sure people don't abuse their power? Am I supposed to see everyone being cops as less threatening somehow? Lol

[@CalamityInAction]

@@MetalNick Unfortunately an opportunity for that to happen is possible anywhere, whether you have police in a society or not; if people can get guns or other weapons, they can use them on others. There are two things to deal with this though: 1) If general people are able to defend themselves or others themselves, that makes it more dangerous for people to start conflicts; in fact it’s more efficient than the police because they’re often late 2) If we don’t want people to act antisocial, we should focus on preventing those conditions from happening. The Defund the Police crowd says the same thing: Fix communities and their conditions and people will act antisocially less

[@mooreanonumbers]

I love how David always casually mentions Madagascar

[@kyivstuff]

Why? Too soon. I will always love you. Thank you.

[@paulgraystone4919]

breath of fresh air. . good man!

[@holomorphy]

Thank you so much for uploading this video.

[@IggyTheReaper]

Fantastic talk, thank you for sharing. Very exciting stuff.

[@alvaromd3203]

Precious reflection.

[@northerncalifornia1969]

very interesting comments on Rojava, thanks for posting this video

[@movingdragons]

I would definitely love police training for everyone! You have to take feminist theory before you're allowed a weapon! Sweet! Women's Studies were my favourite classes in uni. I always learned so much and was challenged to think.

[@101atika]

Hi. Why don't you have another event? Is this channel meant only for this event?

[@barbarajohnson1442]

Wow

[@lucasmithsenise3041]

Does anyone know the African American authors he refers to around min 19:00?

[@mmarone333]

Baldwin wrote about this often.

[@jamesmorgan9258]

David Graeber: Giving a fuck about Rojava before it was cool.

[@ethandarcy7479]

The critique of superheroes is mostly correct, but check out Professor X and the X-Men, M. Graeber. They are all about developing super powers for enrichment and as well as the usual violent, maintain-status-quo stuff, and they have social consciousness.

[@randallsmith5631]

C.2015

[@slightlygruff]

why didn't they record the q&a

[@ColdIndian1]

who cares

[@StefanBorkenstein]

More than don't

[@larrysmith2636]

That is a bottomless abyss the further one peers into, the darker it gets.

[@steviejay9245]

have my tv on max volume, can't make out a thing.

[@animefurry3508]

This reminds me of the work of Mark Fisher!

[@SanvelloSerapiega]

6:00 body bag 12:00 structural violence

[@cuddywifter8386]

Anarky challenges Batman, tries to get him to use his imagination to see how he's only dealing with the symptoms, not the causes of crime.

[@goingupandupandup]

RIP

[@richardprofumo4236]

the propagation of the deed!

[@markjohnson5276]

Listen to Arlo Guthrie's song, 'Alice's restaurant'. It's a great parody of his experience. That story happened in the 1960s.

[@LegendsLit]

Couldn't a co-op own a car?

[@yp77738yp77739]

I’m convinced he/they do not have the answer either, clever chap though he was. Don’t believe it incorporates the realities of social Darwinism and the power of kin altruism. Better to make slow progress and cycle through the Hegelian dialectic, major improvements have been made in several aspects of people’s lives over the last 200 years.

[@kalonicamcquesten692]

“Imagination gets displaced onto the bottom”. Control should be bottom up. Begin by aligning and making more functional your NEIGHBORHOOD.. If it works, extend to your DISTRICT. Then maybe your CITY. And so on, and so on. Omigod. This bit about the materialist superheroes who get to have a bat cave as their beginning and end. Raison detre...Hilarious.

[@kalonicamcquesten692]

Stop looking for evidence of how you are not enough/don’t have enough/aren’t powerful enough. Instead, keep aligned with what power you have and have always had. Where you are. Interesting about the heavy objects thing. Check out Kitchen Sisters show about North Beach Citizens.

[@matthewsmith1612]

Concentrate most power to the Individual, then some to local authority, then a bit less to the State, and then even less to the Federal govt

[@randallsmith5631]

C.2015

[@ebmr1479]

Superman !?! What transcript is he reading from-a comic book!?!

[@davidwilkie9551]

Actuality for mono-dualistic Individuality is the awareness of degrees of information In-form-ation substantiation.., a picture of parallel coexistence at the Centre of Time Duration Timing Conception. This looks like chaos and is, requiring continuous review, analysis and meticulous reiteration by all concerned, that aspect of ONE-INFINITY would approximate a democratic process. If an individual is unable to police their own mind, ie live up to an acceptable standard of applied Gold-Silver, "Diplomatic" Rules of empirical cultural lore, then violence against others accused of having lost or consciously reversed standards set by the Rules of the Ruler, tolerated and substituted for chaotic disorder, (what is the "Rule of Law" actually?), will be imposed by the Society. Anthropology of/by association, The Memory Code association that is, there's not much predetermined logic that isn't of the Astrology-Numerological variety(?).

[@6Diego1Diego9]

Right wing conservatives are like old cartoons lol

[@vonroretz3307]

Is Matriarchy also a form of structural violence ?

[@HopyHop1]

If we are now in a patriarchy, I can't imagine what a matriarchy would look like. 90% of homeless people are male, over 90% of workplace deaths are of males, males usually don't get primary custody of children in a divorce, only males can be conscripted for military service, 4 out of 5 suicides are of males, more public funding goes into female-specific diseases than male-specific diseases, females have longer average lifespans than males and the list goes on and on. I suppose in a matriarchy 100% of homeless people would be male, 100% of workplace deaths would be male, 5 out of 5 suicides would be male, females would have an average lifespan 20 years longer than males instead of 7 years, and women would be awarded primary custody of children in a divorce 100% of the time. Is that what it would take for feminists to be convinced that there is no mysterious patriarchy that aims to enrich male lives at the expense of females?

[@almishti]

Since there's virtually no evidence, archaeological or anthropological, that a true matriarchy has ever existed (matrilineal societies are not the same thing), we'll probably never know and any theories like Mr. Rembrandt's there are purely speculative, and mostly formed on the presuppositions that are allowed to one from what we can empirically see from patriarchies; thus, again, trying to say what a matriarchy would look like is speculation, a decidedly UN-imaginative mirror image of patriarchy. Which in turn is one way that patriarchies self-propagate, by convincing us that any other form of social organization would be just as bad. But the evidence of matrilineal and other non-patriarchal societies suggests otherwise.

[@Cooliofamily]

@@almishti look into the iroquois confederacy. Not a "true matriarchy" but probably the closest thing to it. Also their constitution was of great inspiration to the founders of the united states. Another instance of white males appropriating PoCs ideas

[@HopyHop1]

@@almishti What evidence, if produced, would convince you that society is actually structured for the comfort and safety of females at the expense of males? If no amount of evidence would influence your opinion, then I guess there is no point in discussing the topic.

[@danarves7452]

90% of the male victims of patriarchy that you mention have low power and low wage. Those that do have power and money in a patriarchy are male. Which you confirm by saying the military (the definition of power) is dominated by men. By this logic you could argue that a matriarchy would have an opposite effect where men are cared about, as the current men in power obviously don't. You could argue that the current patriarchy is controlled indirectly by women, but that's just equivalent to saying we already live in a matriarchy. The basic point is that power itself is harmful and replacing the rulers with women or vice versa isn't a helpful objective. So yes of course men will lose out in a patriarchy, women too.

[@ebmr1479]

What a stench!

[@larrysmith2636]

Lives of opulence at the top gradually descending into lives of quiet desperation at the bottom. Welcome to the plantation.

[@TrevinoOrtiz]

Ummmm lol he said "ummm" 20 times in the first 3 minutes lol

[@SourovKabirII]

u can try saying ummm zero time to thousand times. who cares?

[@charlytaylor1748]

he was always rough round the edges as a speaker, but I get the messages

[@ofacid3439]

Decent speaker, outstanding thinker. That happens

[@ebmr1479]

Where does Graeber squat ? The portapoty in the city dump ?

[@ebmr1479]

I just saw a roach crawl out of his greasy hair.

[@charleswarren1901]

Dweeb. Academic dolt.

[@robertmoffat5149]

Nobody minds dweebs or academic dolts when they are engineers who design hardware or software but when they they don’t stay in their cage and start criticizing the system we make fun of them. America has always had a proud longstanding tradition of hating intellectuals. Nice one mate! How very dull and predictable.

[@charleswarren1901]

@@robertmoffat5149 You're talking about pseudo-intellectuals.

[@charleswarren1901]

But you don't know what you're talking about.

[@robertmoffat5149]

@@charleswarren1901 Prove that you do f#ckwit.

[@charleswarren1901]

@@robertmoffat5149 Hey, I can cuss, too; I can engage in name-calling, too. But for our purposes, I won't. What we have in Graeber and Wengrow are two British guys who, much the same as their American counterparts in the likes Ward Churchill and/or Michael Bellesiles, engage in "fantasy scholarship." Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for all sorts of problems associated with his "research," including but not limited to plagairism and making up "facts," whereas Bellesiles was fired from Emory University for falsification of "theory-driven research" in his book, "Arming America." The essential difference here is that the Brits, Graeber and Wengrow, present their work in a different light: It's still falsely thesis-driven but it's presented in such a way as to avoid all the messy realities involved with having to clean up after themselves. They can't be impugned for fantasy research, anymore than they can be called to task for fantasy football. They might as well have been writing "The Hobbit" all over again.