David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist based at the London School of Economics. His work combined anthropological fieldwork (particularly in Madagascar), historical analysis, and anarchist political commitment to challenge the narratives that mainstream economics and political theory treat as self-evident.
Core ideas
- Debt as social relation: in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Graeber argues that debt is not a neutral economic mechanism but a moral and political relationship — one that has historically been enforced through violence. The standard economics narrative (barter → money → credit) is historically backwards: credit and debt came first, and money emerged from state and military operations, not from market exchange.
- Mutual aid as anthropological norm: building on Kropotkin’s work, Graeber argued from anthropological evidence that cooperation, sharing, and mutual aid are the baseline of human economic life — not the exception to a competitive norm but the norm that markets and states disrupted.
- Bullshit jobs: Graeber identified a large class of jobs that even the people holding them consider pointless — administrative bloat, corporate compliance, make-work — and argued that their existence contradicts the efficiency claims of market capitalism.
- Prefigurative politics: Graeber practiced and theorized the anarchist commitment to building the social relations you want in the present, rather than deferring them to a post-revolutionary future. He was active in Occupy Wall Street and other direct-action movements.
Notable works
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)
- The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, with David Wengrow)
- Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)