David Graeber, American anthropologist, dies aged 59
For anyone interested in social sciences, the modern world of work and the crises facing humankind in these times, the untimely passing of David Graeber yesterday is sad news indeed.
Debt: The First 5000 Years
"David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and
one of the organisers of Occupy Wall Street, presents a stunning
reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that long before there was
money, there was debt. In this sweeping study, Graeber argues that our
current ideas about money are limited, if not completely wrong. Society
has always been divided into debtors and creditors, and debt and
forgiveness have been at the centre of political debate long before
money existed. Graeber shows how we are still fighting these battles
today, and the financial crisis is an urgent and global example of that."
And a remarkable inquiry into the widespread vacuousness of the modern workplace, called, rather provocatively:
Bullshit Jobs: 'The rise of pointless work, and what we can do about it'
Below is an article published in The Guardian today:
David Graeber, anthropologist
and author of Bullshit Jobs,
dies aged 59
David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author
of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit
Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59.
On Thursday Graeber’s wife, the artist and
writer Nika Dubrovsky, announced on Twitter that Graeber had died in
hospital in Venice the previous day. The cause of death is not yet
known.
Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about
bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in
the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the
London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death. His final
book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with
David Wengrove, will be published in autumn 2021.
The historian Rutger Bregman called Graeber “one
of the greatest thinkers of our time and a phenomenal writer”,
while the Guardian columnist Owen Jones called him “an intellectual
giant, full of humanity, someone whose work inspired and encouraged
and educated so many”. The Labour MP John McDonnell wrote: “I
counted David as a much valued friend and ally. His iconoclastic
research and writing opened us all up to fresh thinking and such
innovative approaches to political activism. We will all miss him
hugely.”
Tom Penn, Graeber’s editor at Penguin Random
House, said the publishing house was “devastated” and called
Graeber “a true radical, a pioneer in everything that he did”.
“David’s inspirational work has changed and
shaped the way people understand the world. In his books, his
constant, questing curiosity, his wry, sharp-eyed provoking of
received nostrums shine through. So too, above all, does his unique
ability to imagine a better world, borne out of his own deep and
abiding humanity,” Penn said. “We are deeply honoured to be his
publisher, and we will all miss him: his kindness, his warmth, his
wisdom, his friendship. His loss is incalculable, but his legacy is
immense. His work and his spirit will live on.”
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 – Graeber first
attracted academic attention for his teenage hobby of translating
Mayan hieroglyphs. After studying anthropology at the State
University of New York at Purchase and the University of Chicago, he
won a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and spent two years doing
anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar.
n 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. While it divided critics, it attracted
strong sales and praise from everyone from Thomas Piketty to Russell
Brand.
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.
The
Guardian, Thursday 3rd September 2020
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