David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
up to what size & technological level?
There are historical examples with tens to hundreds of tousands of inhabitants. Those are actually quite common.
Graeber’s book “The dawn of everything” has some good examples.
In what way is the “technological level” dependant on a state?
From the top of my head: The Neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas show that both metrics can be answered with “quite high/a lot”.
my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.
For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.
I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.
For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.
I disagree. The native Americans were “technologically” quite advanced when it came to stewardship of the land. Think agriculture (food and forests), language and the like. Europeans basically enacted biological warfare on them.
Native American societies were quite sophisticated. Some were closer to anarchy, some weren’t. A lot of what we would like to know got wiped out before any European met them; initial contact was towards the south, but disease spread northward before Europeans did. The writings we do have about their society come from Europeans, which is hardly the best source.
What we can gather from archeology is that they had cities just as big as European ones at the time, and had trade and agriculture on the same level, as well. North America was a fully anthropogenic environment–altered to be better for humans–and the common perception of “vast, untouched wilderness” comes from the fact that Europeans were visiting a century after disease had ravaged the native population.
Edit: rereading your post, what society could solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem?
American Indians were mostly killed by the germs that the European invaders accidentally brought. In actual battles the Europeans didn’t fair so well as they were usually vastly outnumbered and the Europeans that defected or got captured mostly preferred to stay with the Indians afterwards. And yes, never trust history written by the winners.
150 seems to be the number for humans.
What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You’ll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.
The article formatting is hosed because it’s so old, but this is the most important thing I’ve ever read to describe wide swaths of human behavior. Give it a shot and the world will make loads more sense.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Funny note; For all the times I’ve posted that here and on reddit, not one soul has come back and said any part of it was bullshit.
it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of “people i know well enough to fully humanize” and “all other humans.”
I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we’ve built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.
The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author’s premise.
Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.
AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are “defectors” (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.
Graeber radicalized me. Bullshit Jobs was my first book, later I read Debts and Dawn. Now I work a bullshit job and spend my working hours on lemmy and podcasts



