33. Rebecca Solnit, for instance, has written a brilliant book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York, Viking Books, 2009), about what actually happens in natural disasters: people almost invariably invent forms of spontaneous cooperation and, often, democratic decision making that dramatically contrasts with the way they are used to behaving in their ordinary lives.
CHAPTER 5: BREAKING THE SPELL
1. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2. Arjun Jayadev and Samuel Bowles, “Guard Labor,” Journal of Development Economics 79 (2006): 328–48. Some of the figures here could easily be contested—the authors include in the count not just members of the security forces but the “reserve army” of unemployed and prisoners, the logic being that insofar as they contribute to the economy at all, it’s by driving down wages and through other “disciplinary functions.” Still, even if you eliminate the contestable categories the numbers are striking, and even more, the fact that the numbers vary dramatically between countries: with Greece, the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain having roughly 20–24 percent of workers doing some sort of guard labor, and Scandinavian countries a mere 1 in 10. The key factor seems to be social inequality: the more wealth is in the hands of the 1 percent, the larger a percentage of the 99 percent they will employ in one way or another to protect it.
ALSO BY DAVID GRAEBER
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of several books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, and other magazines and journals.
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