When​ David Graeber left academia in 2005, he had no intention of going back. His contract had been cancelled by Yale, supposedly after colleagues objected to his tardiness – though he suspected the real reason was that he had stood up for a student organiser whom the authorities wanted rid of. One of the brightest anthropologists of his generation, he scorned his peers on the way out. ‘I’m both more productive intellectually than they are, and I’m having more fun. It must drive them crazy.’

This barb suggests a thick-skinned arrogance that hardly matched the intense, hunched, broken-toothed, clever, boyish, utterly genuine figure Graeber cut in person. Still, he does seem to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist militants, or sitting in on horizontalist spokescouncils, arguing and taking field notes. He would arrive with his notepad, ready to scribble pages of ‘thick description’. Then, like Keats’s naughty boy, he stood in his shoes, and he wondered. Why this action or that classification and not another? He would discover, for instance, that activists are limited by categorical oppositions – production v. reproduction, or selfishness v. altruism, or values v. bread-and-butter concerns – that are internal to the society they oppose. Or he would puzzle over why the police were waging a vendetta against the giant papier-mâché puppets used by anticapitalists, smashing them to bits before demonstrations. From such seemingly trivial details, he teased out the tacit rules of engagement between activists and police.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) – a manifesto for his method, in which Graeber attributes the ‘strange affinity’ between anarchism and anthropology to the anthropologist’s ‘keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities’ – he describes the ‘non-vanguardist’ intellectual contribution to struggle: observe, decipher ‘the hidden symbolic, moral or pragmatic logics that underlie [people’s] actions’ and ‘offer those ideas back … as gifts’. This is strikingly reminiscent of the communist’s role, per Marx, as someone who shows ‘the world what it is really fighting for’. And indeed, Graeber described himself at one point as a ‘libertarian, practice-oriented Marxist’. There was ‘no necessary contradiction’ between Marxism and anarchism, he said, since the former was ‘about theory’ and the latter the ‘ethics of practice’. Or, more pointedly: ‘The Marxists can tell us why the economic crisis happened … the anarchists can decide what to do about it.’

After moving to London in 2007, Graeber was swiftly lured back into teaching, taking posts at Goldsmiths and then at the London School of Economics. An avalanche of publications followed, though some of his most important work has attracted little attention compared with his later blockbusters. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001) is a cross-cultural revision of value theory which characteristically draws on but also stretches Marxist categories in order to move beyond theories of value internal to capitalism based on such quantities as labour-time or utility. Building on Marcel Mauss’s description of gift economies, Graeber argues for a labour theory of value that defines labour ‘much more broadly than almost anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has’: since labour is an act of self-realisation, however alienated under capitalism, individuals are evaluated on the basis of their actions. What is of value in any society, whatever the mode of production, will be judged according to the imaginative and ethical principles guiding communal life.

Graeber’s doctoral fieldwork among the Malagasy in the rural community of Betafo, Madagascar, conducted in the early 1990s under Marshall Sahlins’s supervision, was eventually published as Lost People (2007) and explored manifestations of historical trauma among descendants of slaves and slaveholders. It is difficult to overstate how formative this was for Graeber’s politics. Here was a place where people were still haunted by history, disempowered and poor. Yet, as he observed in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, these rural people had withdrawn from the state and gone about their lives, and the sky hadn’t fallen in. They were still, at least in potentia, historical actors. Lost People is also exemplary of Graeber’s idiosyncratic way of theorising: the book is an opulently observed micro-ethnography, on the basis of which he makes sweeping theoretical claims. He treats magic and ritual as ordinary contemporary facts that suffuse systems of law, exchange and bureaucracy. On Kings (2017), written with Sahlins, takes a similar approach, interpreting kingship as a system of cosmological beliefs, ritual obligation and kinship structures that imposes moral and spiritual imperatives on king-ruled communities. The essays in The Utopia of Rules (2015) examine a supposedly disenchanted modernity to discover its hidden fetishes, taboos and magical thinking.

What made Graeber’s name, however, was his work as a participant-theorist, first in the anticapitalist movement and then in Occupy. Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009) is half thick description, in diary format, of a movement, its tactical dilemmas and above all its deliberative ethos of consensus decision-making, and half meditation on the nature of anarchism and its practical ethics. Direct action embodies the anarchist ethos: not a ‘cataclysmic seizure of power’ but a ‘continual creation and elaboration of new institutions’ and ‘non-alienating’ relations. Far from requiring a totalising transformation, anarchy is always a possibility latent in the present.

The Occupy movement, whose slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ is often credited to Graeber, sprang up shortly after the publication of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (2011) and inspired The Democracy Project (2013). Debt, Graeber’s most ambitious work up to that point, is a revisionist history of exchange systems which argues that debt preceded both barter and money as a structure of violence. There was ‘no better way’, he wrote, ‘to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt’. If debt is a language of violence, the tradition of a debt jubilee is a vital means of averting social disaster. The Democracy Project, written in the afterglow of the spread of Occupy camps across the United States, Europe, South America, Africa, East Asia and the Middle East, when the horizons of possibility still seemed wide open, was a story of success. Focused on the US, it asks why the movement wasn’t immediately shut down by police, and how it was able to break through the usual media omertà on substantial coverage of radical politics and liberate the anarchic democracy latent in American life. More than a decade later, the legatees of the Tea Party are now setting the agenda through a series of domestic and global conflagrations, while the descendants of Occupy are once more consigned to the fringes.

The Dawn of Everything (2021), arguably Graeber’s most important work, wasn’t published until after his death from pancreatitis in September 2020. It is in this book, co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow, that Graeber emerges most clearly as, in Ayça Cubukçu’s phrase, an anthropologist of human possibilities. Always hostile to evolutionist theories of history, whether Hegelian or Darwinian, Graeber upends the familiar history of the species in which primitive societies were egalitarian and the agricultural revolution brought a new order of class and domination. He wanted to show that life wasn’t really like that: there were always multiple, contending possibilities. Stories of a human fall from Edenic bliss ‘simply aren’t true; have dire political implications; make the past needlessly dull’. This is, you might think, dubious on all three counts, and only works at all if the purview is limited to the last thirty thousand years. But the point, as Graeber and Wengrow stress, is to move ‘the dial a bit further to the left than usual’, to explore the possibility that ‘human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume.’

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, edited and introduced by Graeber’s widow, Nika Dubrovsky, attempts to convey the breadth and flavour of his thought by selecting essays, articles and interviews from across his career, most of them already available on his website. The quality of the material is decidedly uneven, some of it (the debate with Thomas Piketty on debt, for instance) barely scratching the surface, some of it (the essay ‘On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets’) incomparably rich. A method is implied in the title, which alludes to Graeber’s conviction that the ‘ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’. Wherever he encounters what seems to be a structural limit to human freedom, he inquires into its history and class basis. In his critique of economics, as in his philippic against ‘bullshit jobs’, he stresses the political decisions involved in what appear to be basic economic realities. Whatever Graeber is writing about, however recondite his research, whether it is the history of democracy or the relationship between slavery and debt, he is usually trying to solve a problem in the present or to expose its latent potential.

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World begins with a long and ambitious critique of ‘the West’, which gives an extended commentary on Samuel Huntington and civilisational discourse before revealing its true purpose: a defence of consensus decision-making. For Graeber, the model of democracy acquired from an idealised fifth-century BC Athens depends on being able to force minorities to abide by decisions they detest. Societies far more egalitarian than that of ancient Greece, and lacking a coercive capacity, tend to rely on reaching consensus. The familiar objection to this approach, that it replaces the problems of majority rule with the problems of minority rule, may be correct but misses the point, which is ethical not operational: people, born free, shouldn’t have to abide by decisions that affect them but to which they do not consent. Non-coercive social relations must be prefiguratively and painstakingly built in the present, not deferred to the endlessly receding time ‘after the revolution’. And while it’s true, as Graeber acknowledges in The Utopia of Rules, that consensus groups can also lend themselves to moral coercion and clique formation, why would the answer be to formalise cliques and coercion constitutionally in the form of elected leaderships?

The clichéd response to all this would be that consensus is a lovely, fluffy idea in principle, but entirely unrealistic in practice. In fact, its precepts are perfectly reasonable, and there is nothing prefigurative about it. Based on the anthropological evidence that Graeber sets out, consensus is an excellent way for small, face-to-face groups to sublate their differences. But beyond that, in my view, it is a disastrous idea. Why should groups of people who want different and opposing things be compelled to agree? Why should minorities, who may be hostile to the goals of the group, wield a veto? Why should the decision-making process favour a handful of activists with a lot of free time who spend much of their lives arguing over politics? And what of exigency? Notoriously, several camps in Occupy were sandbagged by obsessive, circular discussion of their own processes. One struggles to imagine this model being effective in the context, say, of industrial action. As for the future, unless humanity devolves into a set of small egalitarian communities, it’s unclear why consensus should be considered anything other than a specialised, pragmatic option for very tightly knit communities.

Graeber’s​ argument is based, however, on a more fundamental and challenging idea. From Mauss and Pierre Clastres, he draws the insight that counterpower isn’t just something realised in special circumstances, when self-governing institutions face off against the state, but a ‘dialectical possibility’ in daily life. All societies maintain what, in Debt, he calls ‘baseline communism’: a free, non-commodified mutuality without which no society can exist. Baseline communism happens wherever ‘no accounts are taken’ and it would be ‘offensive, or simply bizarre’, even to consider taking them: giving a stranger directions, buying someone a pint, offering food to a guest, or fixing a friend’s car. Graeber finds this ‘raw material of sociality’ everywhere, usually working alongside more hierarchical and contractual relations.

‘Baseline communism’ is suggestive, like so many of Graeber’s formulations, of untold possibility in the present. But sometimes the formulations are less satisfying, even patronising. ‘Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose,’ he writes in one essay, ‘and when they deal with others who are equally free.’ Just like your local bowling club or credit union. From this point of view, freedom and coercion are among the myriad possibilities in any society regardless of its historical situation, and it is the job of anarchists to back the libertarian and egalitarian streak in everyday life. The challenge of building the future in the interstices of the present is not successfully answered by rehearsing the flaws of prefiguration. It is interesting, in this regard, that The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World does not include Graeber’s coverage of the Kurdish Rojava experiment, a bold effort to realise Murray Bookchin’s ‘social ecology’ in a fragile space created by state collapse, civil war and funds from trade in black market oil. In the most unpromising of circumstances, Kurdish revolutionaries built a ‘stateless’ enclave based on communes, but it’s debatable whether this would have been possible without the implosion of the Syrian dictatorship.

The next section of the book, ‘Against Economics’, spins off the research for Debt. Far from being against economics as such – Graeber draws a great deal on heterodox economists – its foil is the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM), the idea that money should be regarded as a physical commodity, not a social convention, and that prices rise and fall with the amount of money in circulation. He traces this way of thinking to the 16th-century French jurist Jean Bodin, who blamed inflation on the glut of gold and silver reaching the Continent from the Spanish colonies. In fact, Graeber says, most of that loot didn’t get to Europe at all but was reinvested in other colonies and markets. QTM always ‘seems self-evident, but only if you leave most of the critical factors out’. In Debt, Graeber links this fetishistic notion of money to ‘the Myth of Barter’, which originated with Adam Smith and held that money arose from spot-barter transactions in moneyless societies. Graeber argues that the anthropological evidence in fact suggests that money first came about in places like Mesopotamia, not as a unit of exchange in the market but a unit of account in the palaces. In an argument overlapping with Modern Monetary Theory, he argues that money may in some circumstances take the form of a tangible material like gold, but is in its essence a form of debt. The ‘feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalised violence, mass slavery and predatory standing armies’: a thought worth bearing in mind given the pervasive goldbugging on the contemporary far right, as documented recently by Quinn Slobodian in Hayek’s Bastards.*

In ‘Against Economics’, Graeber develops the argument as a counterpoint to austerity, with its derisive attitude to ‘magic money trees’. The banks, he argues, are indeed magic money trees. As the Bank of England felt compelled to explain in 2014, banks create money by making loans. Government borrowing doesn’t ‘divert funds from the private sector’, as Graeber puts it, but creates ‘entirely new money’. Frugality is a political choice, reflecting the preferences of small-state, pro-creditor factions in political life. Does this dial a little too far to the left? It is true enough that governments can create money by borrowing, and that printing money might make good, countercyclical sense in a deflationary period when credit is cheap. This possibility underpinned the project of the Corbyn-led Labour Party, which Graeber strongly supported. But the post-Covid era of inflation and rising borrowing costs has brought that era to a close: no state could now fund ambitious spending projects without taxing concentrations of wealth. The result, given the left’s retreat, is a flaccid, authoritarian centrism embedded in the logic of austerity.

The collection turns next to Graeber’s fascination with bureaucracy, its occulted functions and moral satisfactions. The salient contribution here is Graeber’s essay for STRIKE! magazine on ‘bullshit jobs’ – occupations so soul-crushing and worthless that even the people in them are aware of it – which evolved into a bestselling book published in 2018. (Graeber’s one-time partner Erica Lagalisse has said he joked that Bullshit Jobs was his ‘sell-out’ book – the advance he got from Simon & Schuster paid for a house. As a reader, this might be something to rue; as a writer, it fills me with optimism.) Keynes predicted that advanced societies would work fifteen-hour weeks. ‘In technological terms,’ Graeber says, ‘we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.’ As a corollary, he wonders why useful labour is so undervalued and useless labour so heavily remunerated. Is capitalism doing something supposedly foreclosed by the profit motive? Is it keeping millions busy with pointless and unprofitable occupations that largely service ‘managerial feudalism’? This isn’t Graeber at his absolute best – he’s relying on an intuitive interpretation of anecdotal evidence – but as ever he produces, offhand, some luminous axioms. People ‘find a sense of dignity and self-worth in their jobs’, he says, precisely ‘because they hate them’. So deeply has the capitalist work ethic saturated contemporary life that to have a job that was satisfying would seem almost frivolous. But the analysis is empirically weak in relying on polling evidence to suggest that a third of workers feel their job is of little value: more detailed research suggests the figure is closer to 5 per cent. And his reading elides the ways in which socially irrational allocations might be rational for companies or bureaucracies.

Better by far are the essays ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’ and ‘On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets’. The first studies the ‘boring, humdrum, yet omnipresent forms of structural violence’ which, because they lack symbolic ‘density’, don’t tend to attract the attention of anthropologists. What Graeber has in mind in particular is everyday encounters with bureaucracy, and his own experience of struggling to arrange Medicaid for his mother after she had a series of strokes. Any institution, he writes, involved in the ‘allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments … ultimately rests on the threat of force’. Violence is useful in such a system because it ‘may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing’. Bureaucracy is an ‘area of violent simplification’. And yet, as he also argues in The Utopia of Rules, it is not without ‘a kind of covert appeal’, since the pleasure we take in complaining about red tape implies that if only it were perfected it could deliver the ‘fairness’ it seems to promise.

In the second of these essays, originally published in 2007, Graeber reverts to his role as participant-theorist to consider the secret rules governing the dynamic between anticapitalist activists and the police in the US. ‘Cops hate puppets,’ he observes, discussing their habit of seizing and destroying giant papier-mâché puppets before protests. ‘Activists are puzzled as to why.’ Graeber detects an answer in the way the puppets, made from salvaged trash and worn as garish, outsized costumes, are put to work during direct actions. Police, he writes, are ‘bureaucrats with guns’, and the surest way to prov0ke violence is to ‘challenge their right to define the situation’. That was the role of the puppets. Just as a conventional stand-off was developing, the puppets would trundle through police lines and upset the co-ordinates. Graeber engages in a sustained reflection on the various political and ideological conditions which might lead the police, trained to believe they protect the innocent, to become violent towards protesters whose concerns may not seem personally unreasonable to them – a critical problem, because when governments are toppled ‘it is usually at the point when the police refuse’ to fire on protesters.

Apersistent challenge​ to anarchism is that it can’t work because human nature ‘isn’t like that’. People are too selfish. Graeber responds by casting doubt on the idea that human nature is so simple. ‘Neither egoism nor altruism are natural urges,’ he writes in ‘Army of Altruists’. They are ‘ideas we have about human nature’, and the opposition between egoism and altruism is itself inconceivable without the market and its imperative of competition. The job of the left is to undo that opposition, so that pragmatic, self-interested action is also collective, other-interested action – as in mutual aid. This doesn’t stop Graeber looking for signs of altruism where it is least expected. He finds it lurking, improbably, in the US army, whose outreach programmes at overseas military bases had soldiers repairing schoolrooms, offering free dental check-ups and the like. The programmes were kept up not because of their success in improving local relations but because of their ‘enormous psychological impact on the soldiers’, who would ‘wax euphoric’ about them: ‘This is why I joined the army.’ Elsewhere, he speculates that a perverse source of austerity’s ideological appeal is that working-class people care too much. It is a ‘universal sociological law’ that the poor are more giving than the rich, and that those at the bottom of any unequal arrangement ‘think about, and therefore care about, those on top more than those on top think about, or care about, them’. And if ‘caring for one’s community’ once meant ‘fighting for the working class itself’, in the era of austerity, during which the majority were stripped of any form of collective belonging other than the nation-state, caring could mean a stoical acceptance of belt-tightening for the good of the country. The wrinkle in this picture is that the most popular austerity measures were often the most sadistic. In the UK, for instance, there was greater public support for reductions in benefits than other cuts. It’s easy to support ‘sacrifices’ at someone else’s expense. But this is exactly the point: human motives are rarely simple, and we learn more from articulating the contradictions than we do from simple moralising.

Graeber is at his most speculative, and engaging, as a theorist-practitioner of fun. Elaborating the political ethics of play and care, in the final part of the collection, he takes up a version of the question he once posed in an introduction to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: ‘If all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it?’ In an essay titled ‘What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?’, on the ‘intellectual scandal’ of animal play (actually a growing topic of ethological concern, as seen in the works of Gordon Burghardt and Marc Bekoff), he notes that evolutionary psychologists have created a minor cottage industry explaining why, for example, ‘sex is fun.’ What they can’t explain ‘is why fun is fun’.

A large body of work will inevitably include some mistakes and conceptual sloppiness, and over the years Graeber supplied plenty of ammunition to his critics. In Debt, for example, he appears to confuse the economist Carl Menger with his son, the mathematician Karl Menger. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow mistakenly describe Rousseau as one of a class of men who ‘spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants’, even though Rousseau had himself been a domestic servant. In his essay ‘Turning Modes of Production Inside Out’, Graeber mangles a line from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy and attributes it to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the same essay, he startlingly claims that Marxists have ‘largely abandoned’ the concept of ‘mode of production’ – which would be a shock to most Marxists. Errors of this sort suggest that Graeber was at times only half attending to his sources. Still, there is always a tension between innovation and rigour, and Graeber was nothing if not inventive.

Unlike the work of most academics, Graeber’s theoretical innovations bore immediate political fruit. In the spring of 2011, in the anticlimax of the UK’s student movement, I was on a panel at the ICA delivering what I thought was a glib, rather worthy talk on the art of democratic self-government. After I had finished, I sat for a moment, flustered and uncomfortable. Soon, a slightly wayward, randomly dressed man from the audience bounded to the desk. ‘That was great,’ he said. He seemed as unready to make eye contact as I was, and his teeth – his ‘godforsaken working-class teeth’, as Lagalisse put it – were as ruined as mine. Recognising him, my spirits lifted. Had I, inadvertently, said something novel? No, I had merely alighted on some of what he had been chewing over for decades. Debt came out soon afterwards, and quickly went through several reprints. Within months, he was at the heart of an occupation that would trigger a worldwide social movement, whose consequences are still working themselves out today.