David Graeber

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, read by Christopher Ragland.

Be honest: if your job didn''t exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren''t necessary. In other words: they are bullshit jobs. This book shows why, and what we can do about it.
In the early twentieth century, people prophesied that technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks and driving flying cars. Instead, something curious happened. Not only have the flying cars not materialised, but average working hours have increased rather than decreased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services, finance or admin: jobs that don''t seem to contribute anything to society. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how, rather than producing anything, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.
This book is for anyone whose heart has sunk at the sight of a whiteboard, who believes ''workshops'' should only be for making things, or who just suspects that there might be a better way to run our world.


''Spectacular and terrifyingly true'' Owen Jones
''Explosive'' John McDonnell, New Statesman, Books of the Year
''Thought-provoking and funny'' The Times

Brought to you by Penguin.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what''s really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.

''Pacey and potentially revolutionary'' Sunday Times

''Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read'' The Guardian

''Boldly ambitious, entertaining and thought-provoking'' Observer

''This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast'' Nassim Nicholas Taleb

© David Graeber, David Wengrow 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Olemme kautta aikain pitäneet ihmisen esi-isiä alkukantaisina ja lapsenomaisina - joko jonkin luonnollisen vapauden ja tasa-arvon perikuvina tai sotaisankarkeina köriläinä. Niinpä sivilisaation hinta on ollut joko tuon alkuperäisen viattomuuden uhraaminen tai primitiivisten vaistojemme kahlehtiminen. Antropologi David Graeberin ja arkeologi David Wengrow'n mukaan tämä meille nyt niin tuttu ajattelutapa muodostui vasta 1700-luvun mittaan.

Kyse oli konservatiivisesta reaktiosta kritiikkiin, jota erityisesti Amerikan alkuperäiskansojen edustajat eurooppalaista yhteiskuntaa kohtaan esittivät. Tämän oivalluksen myötä Alussa oli... järisyttää luutuneita käsityksiämme esimerkiksi maanviljelyn, omistamisen, kaupunkien, demokratian tai orjuuden merkityksestä.

Väistämättöminä pitämämme kehityskulut ovat olleet kaikkea muuta kuin väistämättömiä. Yhtäkkiä voimmekin kuvitella uudenlaisia vapauden muotoja ja tapoja järjestää yhteiskunta. Tekijöiden ajattelua ajaa poikkeuksellinen älyllinen uteliaisuus ja usko toiminnan voimaan.

Brought to you by Penguin. The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.Pirate Enlightenment is a retelling of Enlightenment myths. In their place comes a story about the magic, sea battles, purloined princesses, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms, fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners and devil worship that lie at the origins of modern freedom.(c) David Graeber 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2023

"Narrator Roger Davis, who earned first-class honors in media and anthropology, puts his training to good use to lead listeners through 17th- and 18th-century Malagasy history." - Library Journal The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies-vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island's politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

"An all-encompassing treatise on modern civilization, offering bold revisions to canonical understandings in sociology, anthropology, archaeology and political philosophy that led to where we are today." - The New York Times A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike-either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux