He's right about some things; possibly wrong about others. For the last fifteen years I've been working off/on with a couple of dozen engineers who prefer to work in small startups. For one reason or another, these small startups eventually get bought by behemoth IT companies. The engineers try to work for the big behemoths, but they get so frustrated with corporate mentality that they quit and do another startup. They're now working on their fourth startup.
They prefer the startups because they work more democratically and because of the absence of five layers of management. Graeber is wrong about financial decisions though. Most startups I know of depend on VC money, and that leads to some weird/wrong decisions (let's hire in India to impress VCs) and some unfair endings...when the company gets bought, the VCs are first in line for the money; the engineers are last. Not all startups are democratic and fun to work in. But in this case, they were -- best group of people I've ever worked with. Joanna ----- Original Message ----- Brad Delong follows up on some apparent intellectual sloppiness from David Graeber: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/04/no-silicon-valley-did-not-and-does-not-partake-of-the-anarchist-utopian-nature-why-did-you-imagine-it-did.html ----------------------------snip Graeber gives no references for this "famous example" in Debt. He does, however, write: Seminar on Debt: The First 5000 Years: The endlessly cited Apple quote was not supposed to be about Apple. Actually it was about a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.) But Graeber does not name a single company of which it is true-for which, in Wolff's words: groups of computer software engineers in large capitalist corporations (IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and so on) quit… small groups often gather with their laptop computers in someone's garage… form a new enterprise with rules of strict equality… decisions about what to work on and how to work are made collectively… proceeds from the sale of software they create are received and distributed collectively… net revenues that remain after individual incomes and all other costs are subtracted - the surplus/profits - are distributed by means of collective decisions with each engineer having an equal voice…. Monday through Thursday [engineers] work on software in ways collectively determined, and… Friday participate in collective decision-making… workers have become their own collective board of directors and have abolished the exploitative worker-capitalist relation… replaced their enterprise's capitalist class structure with a communitarian (or communist) structure… Note what Graeber does not say: He does not say "I wrote this passage from what I remembered of a lecture by Richard Wolff that was itself excessively vague". He says, instead: "What I wrote was right! What I wrote is true of many, many firms!! But I am not going to tell you what they are!!!" Having doubled down, he quadruples down, blaming his editor: [...] On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 5:00 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > A very nice review of Graeder's book overall and well worth a read, > but I am intrigued by the question it raises about whether Graeber may > have been less than diligent in some of his fact-checking. > > http://codeandculture.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/how-the-poor-debtors/ > ---------------------------------------------snip > Other interesting points he makes on debt are various ways that it > becomes a moral obligation such that debtors are seen as sinners and > religious salvation is seen as a spiritual analog to redemption. This > helps explain something I never completely understood when watching > The Sopranos, which is why gangsters first go to the trouble of > getting someone to incur an illegal debt before shaking them down? It > turns out that the point of loan-sharking instead of mere naked > extortion is the victim feels a certain moral obligation to repay the > debt and so loan sharks exploiting gambling addicts has the same logic > as how many grifts (e.g., 419 advanced-fee fraud, the fiddle game, > etc.) first involve the victim as co-conspirator in a crime against a > real or imagined third party. Moreover, Graeber makes the bold point > towards the end of the book that debt can drive people to do things > that they otherwise would be morally averse to, with his example being > the conquistadores. > > This is all fascinating but it depends a lot on how much you trust > Graeber’s empirical claims. For instance, was it really true that > everyday economic life in early modern Britain was largely cashless > and instead used a combination of token currencies, informal credit, > and asynchronous barter? Maybe, I really don’t know. I’d like to trust > Graeber on this but I don’t know if I can since he gets some things > pretty wrong, or at least dubious. At Unfogged there’s a review (and a > very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence > contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect: > > Apple Computers is a famous example: it 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. > > This is not exactly stuff written in the cuneiform of Mesopotamian > diplomacy, the barbarian law codes of mediaeval Ireland, or the field > notes of Victorian anthropologists, but something that occurred in > suburban California around the time I was born and concerns the > extremely well documented origins of one of the world’s biggest firms. > If Graeber gets this wrong, how can we trust him about the stuff > that’s harder to check, like all that business about barbarian law > codes. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
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