David Graeber


David Rolfe Graeber is an American anthropologist, anarchist activist and author known for his 2011 , 2015 The Utopia of Rules and 2018 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Overview

As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998 to 2007, Graeber 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 to 2013, 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. His parents are Jewish. 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 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 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" and a seminar entitled "Direct Action and Radical Social Theory".
On May 25, 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, entitled "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.
From 2008 until the spring of 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 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, was published by Indiana University Press in September 2007. A book of collected essays, ' was published by AK Press in November 2007 and ' appeared from the same press in August 2009, as well as a collection of essays co-edited which Stevphen Shukaitis called Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization. These were followed by a major historical monograph, ', which appeared in July 2011. Speaking about Debt with the Brooklyn Rail, Graeber remarked:
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 a historical work on the origins of social inequality with 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 ', 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:
Because of the article's popularity, Graeber then wrote the book Bullshit Jobs: A theory, published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster.

Criticism

Graeber has been criticized in the journal Democracy for his efforts of finding evidence that fits his preconceptions when, in 2017, he asked publicly: "Does anyone know any handy rebuttals to the neoliberal/conservative numbers on social progress over the last 30 years? again & again i see these guys trundling out #s that absolute poverty, illiteracy, child malnutrition, child labor, have sharply declined. . . . that life expectancy & education levels have gone way up, worldwide, thus showing the age of structural adjustment etc was a good thing. It strikes me as highly unlikely these numbers are right, or anyway that such improvements are due to privatization, etc. It’s clear this is all put together by right-wing think tanks. Yet where’s the other sides numbers? I’ve found no clear rebuttals."
The left-leaning Berkeley economic-historian Brad DeLong wrote a detailed critique of Graeber's book Debt that ran over many episodes on his own blog. DeLong claims there are "dozens" of errors in chapter 12. He lists in particular that Graeber got wrong the number of presidential appointee in the US Federal Reserve and that contrary to what appeared in the first edition of the book, Apple was not founded by ex-IBM engineers. Graeber has replied to these critics arguing they are based on divergence of interpretation, truncation of his arguments by DeLong and garbling in the "copyediting process". He admits though that his "biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544 pages of Debt, despite years of flailing away, was that got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong". However, Graeber argues that this had no influence on the point he was making in the blamed sentence.
The Guardian gave a mixed review of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, accusing him of having a "slightly condescending attitude" and attesting to the book's "laboured arguments", while referring to aspects of the book's thesis as "clearly right".

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".
On October 11, 2019, Graeber spoke at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square. Graeber spoke about the relationship between 'bullshit jobs' and environmental harm, suggesting that the environmental movement should recognize these jobs in combination with unnecessary construction or infrastructure projects, and planned obsolescence as significant issues.
In November 2019, along with other public figures, Graeber signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election. In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, he signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."

Publications

Books

;As co-editor

Articles

Academic

General