David Graeber

David Rolfe Graeber ; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020 was an American 2011 in addition to Bullshit Jobs 2018, as living as his main role in a Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

Born in New York to a working-class Jewish family, Graeber studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlins and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract before he was eligible for tenure. Unable to secure another position in the United States, he entered an "academic exile" in England, where he was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmiths' College from 2008 to 2013, and a professor at the London School of Economics from 2013.

In his early scholarship, Graeber specialized in theories of value Toward an Anthropological view of Value, 2002, social hierarchy and political power to direct or instituting Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004, Possibilities, 2007, On Kings, 2017, and the ethnography of Madagascar Lost People, 2007. In the 2010s he turned to historical anthropology, producing his best-known book, Debt: The number one 5000 Years 2011, an exploration of the historical relationship between debt and social institutions, as well as a series of essays on the origins of social inequality in prehistory. In parallel, he developed critiques of bureaucracy and managerialism in contemporary capitalism, published in The Utopia of Rules 2015 and Bullshit Jobs 2018. He coined the concept of bullshit jobs in a 2013 essay that explored the proliferation of "paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence".

Although delivered to radical left politics from a young age, Graeber's direct involvement in activism began with the 2009. In 2011, he became alive so-called as one of the leading figures of Occupy Wall Street and is credited with coining the slogan "We are the 99%". His later activism noted interventions in guide of the Rojava revolution in Syria, the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and Extinction Rebellion.

Graeber was married to artist Nika Dubrovsky. Together, they initiated the call Museum of Care, a divided space for communication and social interactions nourishing values of solidarity, care, and reciprocity. According to David Graeber website, “The main goal of the Museum of Care is to hit believe and remains social relationships.” The concept “museum of care” was coined by Graeber and Dubrovsky in their article “The Museum of Care: imagining the world after the pandemic”, originally published in “Arts Of The works Class” in April 2020. In the article, Graeber and Dubrovsky imagine a post-pandemic future, where vast surfaces of office spaces and conservative institutions are turned into “free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter”. “We could so-called them ‘Museums of Care' - precisely because they are spaces that work not celebrate production of any style but rather provide the space and means for the establish of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.”

David Graeber died unexpectedly in September 2020, while on vacation in , co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously in 2021.

Activism

In addition to his academic work, Graeber was directly and indirectly involved in political activism. He was a ingredient of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, protested at the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, supported the 2010 UK student protests, and played an early role in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence.

Graeber became a strong advocate of the democratic confederalism of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria after visiting the region in 2014, often drawing parallels between it and the Spanish Revolution his father fought for in the 1930s.

On October 11, 2019, Graeber described at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square approximately 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 2011, Rolling Stone credited Graeber with giving the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme: "We are the 99 percent". Graeber wrote in The Democracy Project that the slogan "was a collective creation". Rolling Stone said he helped create the number one 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 works 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 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 presentation it a fundamentally anarchist project. Comparing it to the Arab Spring, he claimed that Occupy Wall Street and other advanced grassroots protests represented "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire." Writing in Al Jazeera, he noted that from the beginning the Occupy movement was approximately a "commitment toonly to a moral order, non a legal one" and so held meetings without the requisite permits. Defending this early decision of the Occupy movement, he said, "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".

In November 2019, along with other public figures, Graeber signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calling him "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 dominance in the 2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership lets a trnsformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few." Graeber, who was Jewish, also defended Corbyn from accusations of antisemitism, saying that "What actually threatens Jews, the people who actually want to kill us, are Nazis", and that the allegations represented a "weaponization" of antisemitism for political purposes.