David Graeber was an anthropologist, activist, and bestselling author.
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We know from history that there are many ways we can live together—let’s explore the idea.
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David Graeber (1961-2020) was an anthropologist, activist, and author of several bestselling books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything. He was involved in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street. His book Pirate Enlightenment was published posthumously, in 2023.
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A Democratic Multitude
In These Times | November | 2022
November’s European Social Forum was a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8 meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that “police intelligence” had discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread destruction in the ancient city.
The organizers—who had selected Florence partly because its citizens had just elected a radical mayor—demanded an audience with government ministers, where they presented a simple proposal: We are not intending violence or destruction, they said, but we are also determined to hold the forum in Florence, with permission or not. If police tried to shut it down by force, some activists would certainly defend themselves; it was really up to the government whether they wanted there to be violence. So the government gave in. For the moment.
The long, hard road to the birth of a new slogan: "Never Mind Us!"
Co-authors: Nika Dubrovsky | Artnet | December | 2019
German women die in penury in the one of the richest countries on earth, the much-vaunted “winner” of the economic war of all against all that followed the collapse of the Cold War order. So Nika and David asked themselves what can they—as artists—do to help hundreds of thousands of divorced women who have been abandoned by politicians?
What can artists do in this world? How much power do we really have?
The Rise of the Pointless Job
The Guardian | May | 2018
What is a bullshit job? The defining feature is this: one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there’s a good reason for them to be doing it. They may not be able to admit this to their co-workers—often, there are very good reasons not to do so—but they are convinced the job is pointless nonetheless.
Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless; typically, there has to be some degree of pretense and fraud involved as well. The employee must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason their job exists, even if, privately, they find such claims ridiculous.
The Baffler | April | 2013
Graeber revisits history in order to understand whether the great revolutions ever really were what we thought them to be.
In These Times | February | 2003
The massive, coordinated outpouring of anti-war protest in more than 600 different cities across the globe on February 15 was something unprecedented in world history. Commentators reached and grasped to come up with anything to compare it with: The parties that wreathed the world during the millennium? The revolutions of 1848?
Publications by this author
Buccaneers, Women Traders and Mock Kingdoms in Eighteenth Century Madagascar
Allen Lane | February | 2023
David Graeber’s final posthumous work, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, explores the rich history of pirate societies and their influence on the Enlightenment. Rooted in David’s field research in Madagascar, the book examines how the Zana-Malata, descendants of pirates, practiced proto-democratic governance. Challenging the European-centric view of Enlightenment thought, David reveals non-European contributions to “Western” ideas and highlights alternative social orders that offer new possibilities for the future.
A New History of Humanity
Co-authors: David Wengrow | Penguin Press | July | 2022
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.Diaphanes | December | 2020
Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman ask Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discusses the meaning of anarchist ethics―not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) “anarchist morality” today.
A Theory
Penguin Press | February | 2019
In 2013, David Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” asked if our jobs make a meaningful contribution to the world. It went viral, sparking global debate. In Bullshit Jobs, David examines how many roles—HR consultants, corporate lawyers, and more—are meaningless, highlighting how finance capitalism perpetuates this issue. The book calls for a cultural shift, valuing creative and caring work over empty tasks.
The First 5,000 Years
Melville House | July | 2011
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Debt was pronounced to be the anarchist bible. Graeber placed the topic of debt at the center of academic debates, inspiring many other scholars to wrest the understanding of economy away from professional economists. Thanks to this book, the call for clean slates and widespread debt cancellation has never rung so loudly.
Co-authors: Nika Dubrovsky | MIT Press | November | 2024
What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika’s then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit—because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.
Media by this author
Feature | May | 2018
Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century's end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks. But instead, something curious happened. Today, average working hours have not decreased, but increased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services or admin, jobs that don't seem to add anything to society: bullshit jobs.
In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon—one more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate—has happened. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.
Feature | May | 2017
David Graeber talks bullshit jobs and the concept of work under capitalism with Real Media and the Real News Network.
Interview | May | 2017
Radical anthropologist David Graeber analyzes how Trump fits into U.S. history who represents real estate interests above all else.
Feature | January | 2016
David Graeber speaking at ʻBasic Income: How do we get there?ʼ Basic Income UK meet-up at St. Clements Church Kings Square, London, December 3, 2015.
Feature | October | 2013
Graeber talks about the future of democracy.
Feature | February | 2012
While the “national debt” has been the concern du jour of many economists, commentators and politicians, little attention is ever paid to the historical significance of debt.
For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtorsʼ children into slavery.
By the same token, for the past five thousand years, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place.Interview | April | 2006
Associate professor of anthropology at Yale and prominent anarchist David Graeber talks about his unique ideas about anthropology.
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