David Rolfe Graeber (; born 12 February 1961)
is an American anthropologist and anarchist
activist, perhaps best known for his 2011
volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is professor
of anthropology at the London School of Economics.As
an assistant professor and associate professor
of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007,
he specialised in theories of value and social
theory. The university's decision not to rehire
him when he would otherwise have become eligible
for tenure sparked an academic controversy.
He went on to become, from 2007–13, Reader
in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University
of London.His activism includes protests against
the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City
in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum
in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure
in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is
sometimes credited with having coined the
slogan, "We are the 99 percent".
== Early life ==
Graeber's parents, who were in their forties
when Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class
intellectuals in New York. Graeber's mother,
Ruth Rubinstein, had been a garment worker,
and played the lead role in the 1930s musical
comedy revue Pins & Needles, staged by the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’
Union. Graeber's father Kenneth, who was affiliated
with the Youth Communist League in college,
though he quit well before the Hitler-Stalin
pact, participated in the Spanish Revolution
in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil
War. He later worked as a plate stripper on
offset printers. Graeber grew up in New York,
in a cooperative apartment building described
by Business Week magazine as "suffused with
radical politics." Graeber has been an anarchist
since the age of 16, according to an interview
he gave to The Village Voice in 2005.Graeber
graduated from Phillips Academy Andover in
1978 and received his B.A. from the State
University of New York at Purchase in 1984.
He received his Master's degree and Doctorate
at the University of Chicago, where he won
a Fulbright fellowship to conduct twenty months
of ethnographic field research in Betafo,
Madagascar, beginning in 1989. His resulting
Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery, and politics
was supervised by Marshall Sahlins and entitled
The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and
Violence in Rural Madagascar.
== Academic history ==
In 1998, two years after completing his PhD,
Graeber became assistant professor at Yale
University, then became associate professor.
In May 2005, the Yale Anthropology department
decided not to renew Graeber's contract, preventing
consideration for tenure which was scheduled
for 2008. Pointing to Graeber's anthropological
scholarship, his supporters (including fellow
anthropologists, former students and activists)
claimed that the decision was politically
motivated. More than 4,500 people signed petitions
supporting him, and anthropologists such as
Marshall Sahlins, Laura Nader, Michael Taussig,
and Maurice Bloch called for Yale to rescind
its decision. Bloch, who had been a professor
of anthropology at the London School of Economics
and the Collège de France, and writer on
Madagascar, made the following statement about
Graeber in a letter to the university:
His writings on anthropological theory are
outstanding. I consider him the best anthropological
theorist of his generation from anywhere in
the world.
The Yale administration argued that Graeber's
dismissal was in keeping with Yale's policy
of granting tenure to few junior faculty (thus
generating the widespread false impression
that this was, in fact, a tenure case) and
gave no formal explanation for its actions.
Graeber has suggested that the University's
decision might have been influenced by his
support of a student of his who was targeted
for expulsion because of her membership in
GESO, Yale's graduate student union.In December
2005, Graeber agreed to leave the university
after a one-year paid sabbatical. That spring
he taught two final classes: "Introduction
to Cultural Anthropology" (attended by over
200 students) and a seminar entitled "Direct
Action and Radical Social Theory".On 25 May
2006, Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski
Lecture at the London School of Economics.
Each year, the anthropology department at
the university asks an anthropologist at a
relatively early stage of their career to
give the Malinowski Lecture, and only invites
those who are considered to have made a significant
contribution to anthropological theory. Graeber's
address was entitled "Beyond Power/Knowledge:
an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance
and stupidity". This lecture has since been
edited into an essay, titled "Dead zones of
the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy
and interpretive labor". That same year, Graeber
was asked to present the keynote address in
the 100th anniversary Diamond Jubilee meetings
of the Association of Social Anthropologists.
In April 2011, he presented the anthropology
department's annual Distinguished Lecture
at Berkeley, and in May 2012 delivered the
Second Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture at
Cambridge (the first was delivered by Marilyn
Strathern).
From 2008 through Spring 2013, Graeber was
a lecturer and a reader at Goldsmith's College
of the University of London. In 2013, he accepted
a professorship at the London School of Economics.
== Scholarship ==
Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology and Towards an Anthropological
Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own
Dreams. He has done extensive anthropological
work in Madagascar, writing his doctoral thesis
(The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and
Violence in Rural Madagascar) on the continuing
social division between the descendants of
nobles and the descendants of former slaves.
A book based on his dissertation, Lost People:
Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar,
appeared from Indiana University Press in
September 2007. A book of collected essays,
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion,
and Desire was published by AK Press in November
2007 and Direct Action: An Ethnography appeared
from the same press in August 2009, as well
as a collection of essays co-edited with Stevphen
Shukaitis called Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization
(AK Press, May 2007). These were followed
by a major historical monograph, Debt: The
First 5000 Years (Melville House), which appeared
in July 2011. Speaking about Debt with the
Brooklyn Rail, Graeber remarked:
The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and
what they did to countries in the Global South—which
is, of course, exactly the same thing bankers
are starting to do at home now—is just a
modern version of this old story. That is,
creditors and governments saying you’re
having a financial crisis, you owe money,
obviously you must pay your debts. There’s
no question of forgiving debts. Therefore,
people are going to have to stop eating so
much. The money has to be extracted from the
most vulnerable members of society. Lives
are destroyed; millions of people die. People
would never dream of supporting such a policy
until you say, "Well, they have to pay their
debts."In December 2017, Graeber and his former
teacher Marshall Sahlins released a collection
of essays entitled "On Kings" outlining a
theory, inspired by A. M. Hocart, of the origins
of human sovereignty in cosmological ritual.
Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk
and Merina kingdoms, and a final essay that
explored what he called "the constitutive
war between king and people." He is currently
working on an historical work on the origins
of social inequality with University College
London archaeologist David Wengrow.
From January 2013 until June 2016, Graeber
was a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2011 until
2017 he was Editor-at-large of the open access
journal HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory,
for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote
the founding theoretical statement and manifesto
of the school of "ethnographic theory".
=== Bureaucracy, Managerialism, and "Bullshit
Jobs" ===
Much of Graeber's recent scholarship has focused
on the topic of "bullshit jobs," proliferated
by administrative bloat and what Graeber calls
"managerial feudalism". One of the points
he raises in his 2013 book The Democracy Project
– on the Occupy movement – is the increase
in what he calls bullshit jobs, referring
to forms of employment that even those holding
the jobs feel should not or do not need to
exist. He sees such jobs as being typically
"concentrated in professional, managerial,
clerical, sales, and service workers". As
he explained also in an article in STRIKE!
magazine:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted
that, by century’s end, technology would
have advanced sufficiently that countries
like Great Britain or the United States would
have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s
every reason to believe he was right. In technological
terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet
it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has
been marshaled, if anything, to figure out
ways to make us all work more. In order to
achieve this, jobs have had to be created
that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes
of people, in Europe and North America in
particular, spend their entire working lives
performing tasks they secretly believe do
not really need to be performed. The moral
and spiritual damage that comes from this
situation is profound. It is a scar across
our collective soul. Yet virtually no one
talks about it.After the great success of
the article Graeber wrote the book Bullshit
Jobs: A theory, published in 2018 by Simon
& Schuster.
== Activism ==
In addition to his academic work, Graeber
has a history of both direct and indirect
involvement in political activism, including
membership in the labor union Industrial Workers
of the World, a role in protests against the
World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002,
support for the 2010 UK student protests,
and an early role in the Occupy Wall Street
movement. He is co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist
Convergence.In November 2011, Rolling Stone
magazine credited Graeber with giving the
Occupy Wall Street movement its theme: "We
are the 99 percent" though Graeber has written
in The Democracy Project that the slogan "was
a collective creation". Rolling Stone says
Graeber helped create the first New York City
General Assembly, with only 60 participants,
on August 2. He spent the next six weeks involved
with the burgeoning movement, including facilitating
general assemblies, attending working group
meetings, and organizing legal and medical
training and classes on nonviolent resistance.
A few days after the encampment of Zuccotti
Park began, he left New York for Austin, Texas.Graeber
has argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement's
lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either
existing political institutions or the legal
structure, its embrace of non-hierarchical
consensus decision-making and of prefigurative
politics make it a fundamentally anarchist
project. Comparing it to the Arab Spring,
Graeber has claimed that Occupy Wall Street
and other contemporary grassroots protests
represent "the opening salvo in a wave of
negotiations over the dissolution of the American
Empire." Writing in Al Jazeera he has noted
that from the beginning the Occupy movement
was about a "commitment to answer only to
a moral order, not a legal one" and so held
meetings without the requisite permits. Defending
this early decision of the Occupy movement
he has said that "as the public, we should
not need permission to occupy public space".Graeber
tweeted in 2014 that he had been evicted from
his family's home of over 50 years due to
his involvement with Occupy Wall Street. He
added that others associated with Occupy had
received similar "administrative harassment".
== Publications ==
=== Books ===
— (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory
of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.
New York: Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-312-24044-8.
— (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press (distributed
by University of Chicago Press). ISBN 978-0-9728196-4-0.
— (2007). Lost People: Magic and the Legacy
of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34910-1.
— (2007). Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy,
Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
ISBN 978-1-904859-66-6.
— (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography.
Edinburgh Oakland: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-79-6.
— (2011). Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn,
N.Y.: Melville House. ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2.
— (2011). Revolutions in Reverse: Essays
on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination.
London New York: Minor Compositions / Autonomedia.
ISBN 978-1-57027-243-1.
— (2013). The Democracy Project: A History,
a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
ISBN 9780812993561.
— (2015). The 
Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity,
and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville
House. ISBN 978-1-61219-375-5.
with Sahlins, Marshall (2017). On Kings. Hau
Books. ISBN 978-0-9861325-0-6.
— (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Penguin.
ISBN 978-0241263884.As co-editorGraeber, David
(2007). Constituent Imagination: Militant
Investigations / Collective Theorization.
Oakland, CA: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-35-2.
OCLC 141193537.
=== Articles ===
==== 
Academic ====
— (March 2006). "Turning Modes of Production
Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation
of Slavery" (PDF). Critique of Anthropology.
26 (1): 61–85. doi:10.1177/0308275X06061484.
Retrieved February 15, 2012.
— (September 2011). "The Divine Kinghip
of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the
Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology
of Sovereignty". HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic
Theory. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
— (December 2012). "Dead Zones of the Imagination:
On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive
Labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture".
HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Retrieved
January 21, 2013.
==== General ====
— (December 27, 1998). "Rebel Without a
God". In These Times. Retrieved February 15,
2012. A meditation on the anti-authoritarian
elements of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
— (August 21, 2000). "Give it Away". In
These Times. 24 (19). Retrieved February 15,
2012. An article about the French intellectual
Marcel Mauss
— (January–February 2002). "The new anarchists".
New Left Review. New Left Review. II (13).
— (June 1, 2003). "The Twilight of Vanguardism".
Indymedia DC. Archived from the original on
January 12, 2013. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
An essay originally delivered as a keynote
address during the "History Matters: Social
Movements Past, Present, and Future" conference
at the New School for Social Research on May
3, 2003
— (January 6, 2004). "Anarchism in the 21st
Century". Z Magazine. Archived from the original
on March 17, 2008. Retrieved February 15,
2011. Co-authored with Andrej Grubacic
— (December 6, 2005). "On the Phenomenology
of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary
Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of
the Police in American Culture" (PDF). Retrieved
February 15, 2012. Originally an address to
Anthropology, Art and Activism Seminar Series
at Brown University's Watson Institute, December
6, 2005
— (January 2007). "Army of Altruists". Harper's.
Retrieved February 15, 2012. An attempt to
solve the riddle of why so many working class
Americans vote right-wing
— (October 12, 2007). "The Shock of Victory".
Infoshop News. Archived from the original
on February 14, 2012. Retrieved February 15,
2012.
— (October 16, 2007). "Revolution in Reverse".
Infoshop News. Archived from the original
on October 17, 2011. Retrieved February 15,
2012.
— (April 1, 2008). "The Sadness of Post-Workerism,
or, "Art and Immaterial Labour" Conference:
a Sort of Review" (PDF). The Commoner. Retrieved
February 15, 2012. An assessment of recent
trendy autonomist theory (à la Negri, Lazzarato,
etc.), with some comments on the relation
of art, value, scams, and the fate of the
Future.
— (November 17, 2008). "Hope in Common".
Autonomedia.org. Archived from the original
on February 10, 2009. Retrieved February 15,
2012.
— (February 10, 2009). "Debt: The First
Five Thousand Years". Mute Magazine. 2 (12).
Retrieved February 15, 2012.
— (November 2010). "Against Kamikaze Capitalism:
Oil, Climate Change and the French refinery
blockades". Shift. Retrieved February 15,
2012.
— (January 1, 2011). "The divine kingship
of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and the
human condition, or, elements for an archaeology
of sovereignty". HAU. 1 (1). Retrieved May
9, 2017.
— (December 7, 2010). "To Have Is to Owe".
Triple Canopy (10). Retrieved February 15,
2012. An illustrated essay on the history
of debt, containing excerpts from Debt: The
First 5000 Years (2011)
— (September 25, 2011). "Occupy Wall Street
Rediscovers the Radical Imagination". guardian.co.uk.
Retrieved January 18, 2013.
— (March 2012). "Of Flying Cars and the
Declining Rate of Profit". The Baffler. Retrieved
January 7, 2013.
— (April 2013). "A Practical Utopian's Guide
to the Coming Collapse". The Baffler. Retrieved
February 15, 2014.
— (May 2013). "It is Value that Brings Universes
into Being". HAU. 3 (2). Retrieved May 9,
2017.
— (August 2013). "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit
Jobs". Strike! Magazine. Retrieved August
19, 2013.
— (February 2014). "What's the Point If
We Can't Have Fun". The Baffler. Retrieved
February 15, 2014.
— (March 26, 2014). "Caring too much. That's
the curse of the working classes". The Guardian.
Retrieved April 12, 2014.
— (May 30, 2014). "Savage capitalism is
back – and it will not tame itself". The
Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2014.
— (March 2, 2018). "How to change the course
of human history". eurozine.com. Retrieved
April 29, 2018. Co-authored with David Wengrow
