Nagarjuna [he/him]
We have a duty to fight for our freedom. We have a duty to win.
If you take someone with conservative values and you give them a quality education, they become a moderate. If you take someone with progressive values and give them an education they become a socialist very liberal. If you give someone with moderate values an education, they become an MBA. Education selects against conservatives because conservative politics come from ignorance and magical thinking.
I agree, they are, but Graeber’s the type of dude to prioritize making a playful argument over making a rigorous one. Debt has a whole chapter arguing that Muslim banking is better than European Banking because it obeys Abrahamic usury laws. He then included a footnote basically saying “I know it’s still capitalist, I mostly wrote this chapter to troll evangelicals.”
Like, he has brilliant insights, but not necessarily brilliant analysis. Take him as a supplement to your theory, not your main meal.
He is, read Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.
This analysis isn’t wrong, it’s just partial. There’s stuff like labor exploitation, gendered hyperexploitation, etc. But there’s also something where desirable jobs have less bargaining power because the labor pool is flooded (Firefighters are an example of this). Graeber’s argument is a non-structural articulation of the same phenomena. In the case of teachers, the amount we pay them is very much a decision made fairly arbitrarily. It’s mostly a matter of public investment, the decisions around which are massively over-determined to the point where you do have to talk about things like subconscious decision-making and cultural values.
If your issue is with taking the subconscious into account in your analysis, then you’re putting yourself in opposition to incredibly influential Marxists like Adorno.
So, when you see these kinds of articles, they’re usually the result of some really savvy organizing.
Union staff will develop relationships with reporters, and then when they need a story like this, they’ll media train a few workers or consumers, put together a fact sheet so that a reporter can pump out an article quickly, and then turn this over to a journalist who turns it into an article rather than do their own research.
It’s a way of leveraging journalists’ position as workers with quotas and limited time.
The reason unions go after companies like Starbucks or REI is because of their progressive image. They tend to attract union-friendly employees, and have a brand that’s very vulnerable to these kinds of media attacks. When they do what every single company does and union bust, it ends up biting them in the ass. I
