Salon had a touching tribute - and the Guardian gives the basic facts -
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 – David Graeber studied
anthropology at the State University of New York and the University of Chicago,
he won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and spent two years doing anthropological
fieldwork in Madagascar.
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. “I guess I had two strikes against me,” he
told the Guardian in 2015. “One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much.
Plus I’m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.”
His 2011 book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years, made him famous. In it, 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.
“Huge swaths of people, in
Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives
performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. 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,” he told the Guardian in 2015 – even
admitting that his own work could be meaningless: “There can be no objective
measure of social value.”
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. He was a pivotal figure in the Occupy
Wall Street movement in 2011 – though he denied that he had come up with the
slogan “We are the 99%”, for which he was frequently credited.
“I did first suggest that
we call ourselves the 99%. Then two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist
added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them.
And they say you can’t create something worthwhile by committee! I’d include
their names but considering the way police intelligence has been coming after
early OWS organisers, maybe it would be better not to,” he wrote.
It’s been a sad few days for anarchists since it was only a couple of weeks ago that Stuart Christie died
Graeber Resource
For those who prefer visuals here’s a Youtube session hosted by Baffler with David and PeterThiel (!) debating the pace of innovation For an academic, Graeber has a very accessible writing style – although I have to say I found his massive "Debt - the first 5,000 years" too detailed for me to absorb. It has been sitting, glowering at me from the bookshelves, for the past couple of years.....
Much more accessible are
these books (all downloadable)
Possibilities
– essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire (2007)
Direct
Action – an ethnography (2009)
Revolutions
in Reverse – essays on politics, violence, art and imagination (2011?)
The
Utopia of Rules – on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy (2015);
Bullshit Jobs – a theory (2018) the full book
Bullshit Jobs - commentary
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/12/bullshit-jobs.html my
overview after reading the book
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/07/bullshit-about-jobs one
of the few academic reviews – but one with a tinge of jealousy about it
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331159223_Book_review_of_Bullshit_jobs_A_Theory_by_David_Graeber/link/5c691c87299bf1e3a5ad4600/download a
more positive academic take
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/08/bullshit-jobs;
a serious review which does a good summary
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review -
a fair review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant -
a more critical reviewer who ends up agreeing with Graeber
https://nonsite.org/review/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs too
clever
https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academic-trolls-review-of-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-e2782559becb turgid
nonsense
https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/managerial-feudalism-and-bs-jobs/ blog
http://www.catherinecheek.com/2018/12/10/book-review-bullshit-jobs-a-theory/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/14/bankers-anthropological-study-joris-luyendijk
It was a nice gesture of
New York Review of Books to give us another look at the last piece he wrote for
them - Against
Economics, his very positive review of Robert Skidelsky’s “What’s Wrong
with Economics”.
Graeber had also been complimentary about Skidelsky’s previous book - Money and Government – a challenge to mainstream economics
And also these
tributes from DG's friends - including this one
from writer Rebecca Solnit
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