A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Earlier this week, news broke that David Graeber, author of influential works such as “Debt: The First 5000 Years,” had passed away. In his memory, today’s Long Reads Sunday is a reading of his 2013 piece “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse.” In it, he argues the impact of the revolutionary period of the 1960s was much more profound than popular opinion has it, and that the age of revolution is far from complete.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.
0:09.0	It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.
0:15.2	The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.
0:23.6	What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, September 6th, which means it's time for long read Sunday.
0:31.2	At the end of last week, we got the sad news that David Graber had passed away. Graber was an author perhaps best known in our little
0:42.2	part of the world for his history of debt. This is a book that people like Vitalik have cited as a
0:49.1	hugely influential book in how they think about the world, and it offers a very different take on debt than I think
0:56.3	many of us were used to. Greber is also known for his theory on bullshit jobs, and I'll just quote
1:02.9	a small piece to give you a sense. Huge swaths of people in Europe and North America in particular
1:08.4	spend their entire working lives performing tasks
1:11.5	they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation
1:16.2	is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul, yet virtually no one talks about it.
1:22.5	Anyways, when I saw that Graber had passed, I wanted to pick one of his pieces to read for Long Read Sunday.
1:29.5	A lot of you folks who are listening probably have very different politics from Graber,
1:34.7	but I still think you'll enjoy this piece, and especially if you put it in context.
1:40.8	So this piece is about revolution, and it's from April 2013, and is called a practical
1:47.3	utopian's guide to the coming collapse.
1:50.7	What is a revolution?
1:52.7	We used to think we knew.
1:54.4	Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the
1:59.2	political, social, and economic system in the
2:01.5	country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just
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