David Graeber obituary

The anthropologist David Graeber, who has died suddenly aged 59, was remarkably successful in marrying research with direct action. He was influential in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is reputed to have coined the statement: “We are the 99%.”

In 2011, for instance, he wrote a classic work of anthropology, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, in between organising with Occupy Wall Street in New York. In the book Graeber called for a biblical-style “jubilee”– meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. “Debt,” he wrote, “is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and make them seem right and proper.”

He noted that many of the people who protested with him, as well as those who took to the streets in Egypt and Spain in 2011, had one big thing in common: “Most of them were people who had gone through the educational system who were deeply in debt and who found it completely impossible to find jobs.The system has completely failed them … If there’s going to be any kind of society worth living in, we’re going to have to create it ourselves.”

Indeed, he described the Occupy movement as an “experiment in a post-bureaucratic society”, telling the Guardian in 2015: “We wanted to demonstrate that we could do all the services that social service providers do without endless bureaucracy. In fact at one point at Zuccotti Park there was a huge plastic garbage bag that had $800,000 in it. People kept giving us money but we weren’t going to put it in the bank. You have all these rules and regulations. And Occupy Wall Street can’t have a bank account. I always say the principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”

Born in New York, David was the son of working-class Jewish parents. His Polish-born mother, Ruth (nee Rubinstein), had been a garment worker who played the lead role in Pins and Needles, a 1930s musical revue staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. His Kansas-born father, Kenneth, who at college had been a member of the Youth Communist League, later fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war before returning to New York to become a plate stripper for offset printers. David was raised in a co-operative apartment building that he told one interviewer “was suffused with radical politics”.

By the time he was 16, he called himself an anarchist, though – as he made clear on Twitter – he never cared to be described as an anarchist anthropologist: “I see anarchism as something that you do, not an identity, so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist.”

He attended local state schools before winning a place at what he called “a fancy boarding school”, Phillips academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The scholarship came through some archaeologists discovering his precocious hobby of translating Mayan hieroglyphics.

His BA in anthropology from the State University of New York at Purchase (1984) led to his master’s and doctorate at the University of Chicago. Ethnographic field research for 20 months in Betafo, in the Arivonimamo district of central Madagascar, resulted in his PhD thesis (1997), on a community divided between descendants of nobles and slaves. A decade later it resurfaced in the book Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.

He taught at Chicago, New York University and ultimately at Yale, where he wrote Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001), and a short book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), musing on why, apart from David Graeber, there were so few anarchists in the academy.

In 2004 Yale decided not to renew his contract. The university, he claimed, gave “no reason for its decision other than dissatisfaction with my scholarship, but some felt it may not have been entirely irrelevant that I was by this time quite active in the global justice movement and other anarchist-inspired projects”. Asked if he would have got further at Yale if he had not been an anarchist, Graeber replied: “Maybe. I guess I had two strikes against me. One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much. Plus I’m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.”

After Yale, he claimed to find himself unemployable in the US, but in 2007 Goldsmiths, University of London, took him on, and in 2013 he became a full professor at the London School of Economics. It was in London that the exiled American wrote much of his best work, while still engaging in direct action.

His later books included Direct Action: An Ethnography (2013), a study of the global justice movement, which, he claimed “hardly anyone ever reads” and Debt: The First 5000 Years, “which virtually everyone seems to have read”. The Utopia of Rules (2015) argued that since the 70s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favour labour discipline and social control. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it. We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society,” he claimed. It was striking too that, while no cure has been found for cancer, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac that are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”.

In 2018 he wrote Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, arguing that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less. “Huge swathes 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 said. Did that imply, I asked him once, that his work was unnecessary. “There can be no objective measure of social value,” he replied.

In 2019, he married Nika Dubrovsky, a Russian-born artist and blogger, saying disarmingly: “I have never been more moved than that someone who actually knows me would want to be with me forever.” The couple founded Yes Women, an art group that sought justice for ostracised women in the former East Germany.

Late last year, Graeber fell out with the Guardian, tweeting that he would never write for the paper again after its treatment of the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, during the general election campaign. In particular he defended Corbyn against the charge that he was antisemitic. “If you look at the people who have left the party over antisemitism,” he told an interviewer. “Most of them weren’t Jewish and a lot of the people who still remain close to Jeremy Corbyn are Jewish. It’s absurd.”

He remained a busy figure until he fell ill in Venice at the end of last month. At the time of his death he was working with the archaeologist David Wengrow on a series of works on the origins of social inequality. He had also been working with the Kurdish Freedom Movement.

Graeber described himself as an “eternal optimist” who hoped in 50 years a new system would be in place that was not capitalist. He wrote in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology that “as the Brazilian folk song puts it, ‘another world is possible’. That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result.”

He is survived by Nika.

• David Rolfe Graeber, anthropologist and activist, born 12 February 1961; died 2 September 2020