Beginning of this month, David Graeber, a thinker fitting many labels, passed away.
“It might be said that all my work has been exploring the relation between anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, and practical attempts to create a free society, free, at least of capitalism, patriarchy, and coercive state bureaucracies”.
These words highlight the dualism of his approach: his political engagement and his scholarly work, which were both equally important, aimed at challenging the status quo and building a free society.
Graeber started his academic parcours by studying anthropology at the State University of New York at Purchase. He subsequently won a Fulbright fellowship which enabled him to spend two years doing anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar during his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Entitled ‘The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar’, it shares his research on the continuing social division between the descendants of nobles and the descendants of former slaves in Madagascar.
His academic career continued at Yale University, where he taught until 2005, after which his contract was surprisingly not renewed. Graeber supposed this was mainly due to his politics, a hypothesis which is notably supported by the 4500 colleagues and students who signed petitions supporting him. Even Maurice Bloch, a famous anthropologist at the London School of Economics, expressed his perplexity in a letter to the Yale faculty at the time: “I know nothing about the circumstances which have led you to your decision,” he said, “but I cannot believe that a university such as yours cannot cope with erratic behaviour or that it can afford to lose so extraordinarily talented a colleague.” Graeber then took up a post at Goldsmith’s College in London, and finished his academic career at the London School of Economics, where he was since 2013.
From a very young age Graeber started supporting anarchist ideas, criticising capitalism, and advocating for direct democracy through his participation in protests and books. He had his first experience of political activism at the age of seven, when he attended peace marches in New York’s Central Park and Fire Island. This was followed by numerous marches, and famously peaked during his participation in protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999. This was followed by protests against the International Monetary Fund in Washington in 2001, and most famously through his significant involvement in the coordination of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement in New York City. During the latter he helped coin the phrase “We are the 99%” as a response to the inequality arising from the capitalist system unleashed since the Thatcher and Reagan era of the 1980s.
In one of his books, “The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement”, Graeber states that “myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions themselves.” In his own words, the main achievement of the elite is that “they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism – and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialised, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now – is the only viable economic system.”
His critiques of our current economic system received a more in-depth consideration through his work on debt and bureaucracy. He wrote a book on each topic: in 2011 he came out with “Debt: The First 5,000 years”, and in 2018 he wrote “Bullshit Jobs: A theory”. In the former he recounts the history of the usage of debt, its vast nefarious impact on social relations, its huge growth in most countries (sovereign, municipal, corporate, and personal), and thus argues for mass debt cancellation. He himself contributed to multiple projects (e.g. Rolling Jubilee) through which tens of millions of dollars of overdue medical bills and payday loans belonging to tens of thousands of people were bought and erased. In “Bullshit Jobs”, Graeber wonders what happened to the 15-hour week that economist John Maynard Keynes, in 1930, had predicted would be possible by the end of the 20th century. Through conversations with hundreds of workers and general observations about the evolution of work, he argues that most white-collar jobs are meaningless, and that technology has led to people working more. He thus advocates for a mass reduction in working hours (e.g. 4-hour day) to focus on more socially valuable jobs and forms of employment in which people do not perform tasks they believe to be unnecessary.
In a way, we can recognise his anger and frustration with the current political system in many contemporary texts. For instance, French writer Edouard Louis’, in his ‘Qui a tué mon père’, when talking about politicians and people in power, writes: “that’s also strange, they go into politics despite politics not having any effect on their lives. For the dominating class, politics is often a question of aesthetics: a particular school of thought, a certain perspective on the world, a certain way to construct their identity. For us, it was life or death.” A bit further south, similarly, Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr, in his “Essai de politique relationnelle”,states that “to disarticulate this system, to dismember it and rebuild it on a more equitable basis is a moral and civilisational necessity.”
Importantly, though we may at first be apprehensive of his vehement critiques, his approach is very accessible and intuitive. This accessibility and appeal can for example be found in his writings about anarchism, such as “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise you!”. In this work, he breaks the main theoretical principles of anarchism down with the use of intuitive and easily understandable examples. For instance, he illustrates the principle of self-organisation by asking the reader whether they would wait in a crowded line to enter a bus or whether they would walk away, or even just skip the queue. Since most of us do indeed just respectfully wait in line, he effectively makes us recognise that there are very intuitive behaviours of mutual respect and organisation which we follow without having to be coerced into doing so. He thus describes anarchists as “people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to”, and through his work shows that throughout a large part of human history, people got by without centralised governments. This approach makes any reader seriously reconsider important aspects of society.
Regardless of whether we agree with him or not, we can at least acknowledge his academic integrity, praise his motives, and thank him for questioning the political structures we may tend to take for granted. One of his core messages is also one of solidarity and humanity, which in today’s world ridden by crises, inequality and environmental destruction, is particularly relevant.
As stated by Penguin Random House editor Tom Penn, Graeber was “a true radical, a pioneer in everything that he did. (…) His loss is incalculable, but his legacy is immense. His work and his spirit will live on.”