Conference David Graeber - Building bridges between social sciences and social actors for a more democratic society

David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, who died suddenly on September 2, 2020, will have, during his short life, marked his passage by his scientific creativity and his original contributions to major public debates. Having contributed to an anthropology that can be described as political and anarchist, showing that the diversity of social organizations, that ethnographic surveys reveal, opens up the idea of a plurality of possibilities and thus the prospect for a more egalitarian and democratic society, he became a major intellectual figure of the libertarian left. His work, combined with his involvement in international political protest movements, is at the origin of his great public popularity. But his more academic works also constitute an important contribution to social science: the ethnography of Madagascar, the anthropology of magic, the nature of kingship, the knowledge of prehistoric societies, among others. It is also often crossed with philosophical and epistemological thoughts which come from the history of ideas in social sciences, as illustrated by his texts on the conceptions of value. His public notoriety also came in the context of the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 with the publication in 2011 of his book "Debt, The first 5000 Years" which drastically questions the dogmas of monetary and economic institutions in the light of the historical and anthropological knowledge of monetary practices, a work that will have a worldwide impact. The ambition of this book is important insofar as its transversal thesis is that debt and the monetary practices and institutions attached to it constitute the most fundamental social relationship. This thesis differs firstly from approaches - those of some traditions in economic anthropology and economics - that focus on the exchange and the market. Similarly, by considering debt and monetary institutions as a major structure of domination, it also differs from approaches, perpetuated by the Marxist tradition, that emphasize the relationship of production and labor between social classes. In adequation with the times, where the dissemination of ideas is largely mediated by social networks, one of his most original articles will have a major impact, "On Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, A Work Rant" published in 2013, in which he defends a thesis that will also be reflected in his subsequent books: "Bureaucracy, The Utopy of Rules" in 2015 and "Bullshit Jobs" in 2018. Graeber's talent lies in his way of turning around some well established representations of the contemporary economic system, by showing that the alleged market economy efficiency is in reality less grounded on truly liberal mechanisms than on a process of growing bureaucratization based on the alliance between the State and the economic powers for the benefit of a few most fortunate (the "1%" ). The structure of the financialized economy, marked by the growth of income and wealth inequalities, is characterized by the multiplication of kind of jobs (often the best paid) that respond to the strengthening of managerial mechanisms. The thesis of "bullshit jobs" - those jobs deemed useless by the employees who do them, and which are multiplying as part of the process of bureaucratization in all spheres of society, from companies to public organizations, even in creative fields - re-emerged during the covid crisis in 2020 under the controverse between essential and inessential jobs. This debate also echoed Graeber's anthropological work on the opposition between the principles of "commercial societies" and "human societies" (whose activities are turned towards human life and social relations, care, the arts, play...) in human history. According to a formula that Jean-Michel Servet used in his tribute after his death, "David Graeber was a bridge". First, he was a bridge between academic disciplines. Secondly, he increased the visibility of anthropology out of the social sciences and showed how it could fuel knowledge on social organization, forms of action, imagination of alternatives, etc., and influence other disciplines, such as economics, sociology or political science, particularly with regard to monetary issues, labor problems and the crisis of democracy. He has also made a bridge between thought and action (and has written on this subject) and this in a double direction: his approach is in favor of an epistemic democracy, that means that the social science must be based on the experience of the actors and on their narratives (which of course can be linked to the ethnographic method and hence to an interest in social networks) or on the epistemic value of popular culture (science fiction, series, pop music); and that the knowledge produced by the social sciences had an instrumental vocation, i.e. that it must constitute an imaginative and transformative force in favor of a truly democratic society. The objective of this conference is to bring together contributions from the different disciplines involved in David Graeber's works, including anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and social philosophy. The contributions can be related to a particular discipline or, to a particular subject, treat it from a transdisciplinary perspective.