Bureaucratic empires
 

Graeber / Wengrow 425: "By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity--but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns, or slaves"
 
a "system of equivalence run amok"--they go so far as to say that this is "[t]he first establishment of bureaucratic empires"
 
"how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form"

> from David Graeber and David Wengrow's Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)

> tagged with slavery, #imperialism, #bureaucracy

> created March 4, 2026 at 10:18:43 AM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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