David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Graeber melded economics, anarchy and anthropology in his books on bureaucracy and economics. He was a leading voice in the global social justice movement whose activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in... moreDavid Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Graeber melded economics, anarchy and anthropology in his books on bureaucracy and economics. He was a leading voice in the global social justice movement whose activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at 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%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.
Born in New York in 1961 to two politically active parents – his father fought in the Spanish civil war with the International Brigades, while his mother was a member of the international Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union – Graeber first attracted academic attention for his teenage hobby of translating Mayan hieroglyphs. After studying anthropology at the State University of New York at Purchase and the University of Chicago, he won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and spent two years doing anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar. In 1998, two years after completing his PhD, Graeber became assistant professor at Yale University, then associate professor. In 2005, Yale decided against renewing his contract a year before he would have secured tenure. Graeber suspected it was because of his politics; when more than 4,500 colleagues and students signed petitions supporting him, Yale instead offered him a year’s paid sabbatical, which he accepted and moved to the UK to work at Goldsmiths before joining LSE.
In his 2011 bestselling books Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber explored the violence that lies behind all social relations based on money, and called for a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. Graeber followed it in 2013 with The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, about his work with Occupy Wall Street, then The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy in 2015, which was inspired by his struggle to settle his mother’s affairs before she died. A 2013 article, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, led to Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, his 2018 book in which he argued that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less.
Born and raised in New York City, Graeber identified as the son of working-class parents, and in his career, he sought to harness his anthropological training to better understand economics. An anarchist since his teens, Graeber was a supporter of the Kurdish freedom movement and the “remarkable democratic experiment” he could see in Rojava, an autonomous region in Syria. He became heavily involved in activism and politics in the late 90s. In his website bio, Graeber wrote that he "only really became active in any meaningful way" after working involved with the alter-globalization movement at the beginning of the 2000s. Graeber was frequently dubbed an "anarchist anthropologist," but, in his Twitter bio, he wrote that he saw "anarchism as something you do, not an identity," and asked people not to use the label to describe him. In a 2011 opinion article for The Guardian, Graeber wrote that he saw the Occupy movement as "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire."
Though his activism centered on global economics, Graeber's academic career focused on anthropology. Graeber's work was not without criticism as his books were often dismissed or rejected as leftist political rhetoric. Economists and US business leaders often criticized him and, on his blog, the liberal economist and Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith described Debt as ''a sprawling, rambling, confused book, mostly about economic history, mixed with some political and moral philosophy.''
Following his death whilst on holiday in Venice with his wife Dubrovsky, an artist and writer, a series of talks, workshops, performances, protests, readings, and public conversations took place on October 11, 2020 as part of an 'Intergalactic Memorial Carnival' organised to celebrate Graeber's life and works. At the time of writing the cause of his death had not been confirmed. Graeber married Nika Dubrovsky in 2019 and the two collaborated on a series of books, workshops, and conversations called Anthropology for Kids.
