Reading: What Happened to David Graeber? By: Crispin Sartwell / 20 January 2024
I BOW TO few in my admiration for the anthropologist, economist, radical leader, and delightful prose stylist David Graeber, who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59. Since I read his little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in 2004, I’ve been telling anyone who seemed inclined to listen that he was the most important anarchist thinker since Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921. His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future.
Overwhelmingly, I find this start to be completely fawning and infuriating. I'm not a fan of people who highlight the “most important” thinkers of any movement, particularly as those people who are the “most important” are often benefiting from a lot of quiet collaborators (and something that must be said is how often academics benefit from the the work and experiences of non-academics, extracting from communities to take it within the academy—academics who do not acknowledge this, anarchist or not, are doing us a disservice).
I think David Graeber himself was part of sharing ideas that definitely shaped ideas in Occupy, and I think we over-credit his book. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is hundreds of pages long. Do you think, prior to the Occupy Movement, people were reading it in droves? I think, if anything, Occupy sparked people to look at it. The role is widely reversed, and it is done so in ways to continue fawning over Graeber rather than recognising the way people come to new understandings and engage with expanding their knowledge. Books rarely preempt movements, but people within movements are likely to engage with books.
I also think another aspect to this is highlighted in the ideas here but obfuscated rather than said clearly:
All of this in loose yet precise and swashbuckling prose, and all of it well documented by a serious scholar. Debt, the book, had for many a dramatic “head-flipping” quality, and it helped make sense of what Occupy, emerging at that moment, was saying and what it wanted.
It's less that people in the movement were reading it and more that people outside the movement who didn't understand it found a (sanctioned) location in which to obtain their ideas of what the Occupy even was (because heaven forbid you listen to the people stumping in the park or telling you what they want; it's better to get it from a book where you can slightly interpret it in your own way while appearing quasi-sympathetic).
I love books, but this is an over-dramatic explanation of the importance of Debt on a whole movement. Debt has its place, but its place was never within the movement. It is a book that was used to justify it and a piece that was widely read primarily after Graeber participated in Zuccotti Park. Honestly, his appearance there is what sparked its sales.
The anarchism that Graeber developed across a series of protest actions and writings ... was—is—notably contemporary and inspiring. Central aspects of Graeber’s politics as he framed them circa 2000–15 include “the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination”; “decentralized forms of consensus-based direct democracy,” as developed in Occupy encampments but also in many other places and cultures; “prefigurative politics of resistance” or the claim that a nonauthoritarian revolution cannot be conducted successfully by authoritarian forms of organization; “rejection of permanent, named leadership structures”; and anti-statist “communism,” economies based around sharing or even “the gift,” as suggested by the anthropology of Mauss, for example.
It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. ... But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all.
Something all academics should know is that the more closely they align themselves with the academy, the less they align themselves with what's happening outside. You're doing your work for them, and you're not doing your work for us (even though tons of academics will claim that). I cannot recommend listening to Dr Joy James talk on this because she, as an academic, admits it. She says it out loud. Even Graeber didn't really want to, and none of the anarcha-demics even really want to try. (Because what happens to their positions if they actually say what they are?)
It is not clear, to me at any rate, that one can be an anarchist and not also be an egalitarian and an anti-statist. Repudiating those two positions, by which Graeber definitely defined his politics circa 2010, amounts to repudiating the anarchist position, or else leaves you trying to define it in other terms, terms more adequate to the subtlety and complexity of power as it actually appears in real cultures. If he intended to generate such a reconstrual, he hadn’t quite done that work yet when his writing abruptly stopped.
I agree with Sartwell's understanding of The Dawn of Everything, and it is one of the things that I found infuriating. That understanding is:
Both “inequality” and “the state,” on Graeber’s late view (or on late Graeber’s view), are problematic and ideological concepts, not adequately defined, perhaps not definable. Hence, egalitarianism and anti-statism, insisting that these things ought to be destroyed, are equally simplistic and equally trapped in Western conceptualizations that emerged in modernity.
But I also think it has been present throughout Graeber's work, especially the inequality aspect. Maybe it's because I (and others) recognised that Graeber's work routinely failed to include different perspectives (e.g., it talked from a very 'default' position while not understanding that perspectives would shift based on gender, race, migration status, disability, etc). Every book of his reads in a similar way: When he was told to add those perspectives (sometimes by people in his life), he'd just slot in a bunch of citations; it never felt like he fully engaged with them but only that he needed examples and didn't really want to do the extra work that came with engaging with them.
This is a very common theme among cis men who are anarchists, which is why when these people (and it is more often cis men, especially white cis men) who find themselves trending right-ward even when they think they aren't (or who know they are but obfuscate it for some reason, like maintaining social capital within a space or acting as an infiltrator).
Now, I don't think Graeber was an infiltrator, but I do think that he was trending toward liberalism and away from anarchism. I don't disagree with Sartwell on this point, but I think he did it largely because the stakes were never truly there. (I know Lagalisse says he 'sold out' on Bullshit Jobs because he “didn't want to rent into his 60s,” which is understandable... but also, he never really had the kind of discomfort that the rest of us have had to endure. He didn't receive his tenure from Yale because (he said) of his politics, and he claimed to be unemployable in the United States (but I don't know where he tried to apply), but he still landed securely in London; he maintained those connections.
And, as Joy James analyses for Angela Davis and the deradicalisation of abolition, some of the same argument applies here. He is comfortable to academics because he is one; he may have grown up with working class parents, but he became an academic and started moving around less working class circles. Maybe he still believed in the things he professed to a degree, but he left the movement long ago and a lot of his ideas and work became deradicalised... Along with himself, and a lot of people who now control his “legacy” have definitely completed that deradicalisation as well.
One wonders what Occupy-era Graeber, the man who (by his own account and many others’) helped formulate the slogan “We Are the 99%,” might make of passages like the one below. ...
Here, he appears almost to be ridiculing himself and the Occupy movement (if also Thomas Piketty), or Graeber and Wengrow appear to be ridiculing earlier Graeber. Do I hear a touch of Friedrich Hayek? What was once a fundamental critique of the world economic hierarchy, insisting that it has created an absurd and ever-increasing degree of differential access to resources, has become “technocratic tinkering,” and it is not exactly clear why. That some questions about inequality are obscure or ill-framed does not indicate that inequality of wealth is not a fundamental social problem. To make sure you don’t miss the centrality of this stunning turnabout, Graeber and Wengrow return to their critique of egalitarianism in their conclusion, and also to their critique of the concept of the state. Of the concept, mind you, not the thing.
While I do think there are major critiques of Occupy that should always be held front and center, the kinds of critique offered in The Dawn of Everything don't feel right to me, especially when coming from Graeber. For me, it's also hard to know how much of Graeber went into his collaborative projects and how much of it was his co-writer. This isn't me placing the blame on Wengrow for some of these more frustrating things, but it is me wondering how that process went.
But, like Sartwell, it's hard not to question what Graeber would've felt about these lines and how close he was to the process of writing them.
But this “simplistic” conception of the state is also the conception that fuels or articulates the anarchist critique of the state, from William Godwin to Mikhail Bakunin to Emma Goldman. As I argue in my book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (2008), state power rests on violence and coercion; violence and coercion, to be defensible, require a moral justification; social contract theory and all other attempts in this regard are pathetically inadequate. Therefore, there should be no political state. In late Graeber, this looks simplistic and nonempirical. “The state” is a concept that falls apart under analysis and should be abandoned. Of course, that makes anti-statism just as senseless, for what is an anti-statist fighting against, really?
Prior to this paragraph, Sartwell summarises what Graeber had been saying about the 'origins of the state', so I'm going to include that here:
This assertion builds on a complex analysis of social power emerging from anthropological and archeological research. Rejecting the classic Weberian definition of the state as a group of people who claim a monopoly on violence, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the modern state contingently combines three elements that are seen in history in very different configurations: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. Reducing political power ultimately only to the first of these paradigmatic forms of domination is, they repeat, terribly simplistic.
And while I don't think that we should give in on the basis of “Well, earlier anarchist critiques talked about the state like this, so we must also do so” (we can talk about the so-called complexities of the state in our critiques), I do think that Sartwell is right in questioning this attitude. How can we continue fighting against the state and participating in anti-state activism if we... just abandon the concept of the state? And if we're not going to question the basis of the state, what is the point? Understanding it doesn't really do much to undermine it; I logically understand things like sexism and racism as concepts, and that has done very little to remove them from the world.
Something else that I find annoying is that it doesn't really matter what the 'origins of the state' are, just like it doesn't really matter what the 'origins of injustice' or the 'origins of inequality' are. It's interesting to see the connections between what happens now and what came before, but it's not important to fight against those things now. The 'origin' of something isn't necessarily the same as the 'basis' of it; I don't need to know the origin of the state to know that what its based on is violence, coercion, control, and a mythical justification.
It’s not that I think we should routinely violate one another’s freedom to disobey, though that is going to require some elucidation. It’s that I’m somewhat surprised to see this sort of universalism emerging from this sort of anthropology, which supports it thinly at best and is widely and wildly in tension with it at worst. Graeber was never a relativist, exactly, but casually applying the same three concepts to every culture that has ever existed seems incompatible with his previous vast respect for human differences, not to mention many of his own earlier political positions. The persistent “threeness” of the distinctions hints at a line of a priori reasoning that is anything but empirical.
I don't have much to add to this; I wanted to keep it for my own notes because this is something that I distinctly remembered feeling and having some discomfort with when I was reading The Dawn of Everything. (I also kept getting vibes of underlying Noble Savage tropes. This isn't to say that anything positive about indigenous peoples is inherently a Noble Savage trope, but I couldn't shake the feeling that their presentation was done in a way that kept conveying that trope without fully or explicitly doing it.)
Perhaps it's because they kept saying that Europeans would “invariably” choose to live in indigenous communities, which isn't... entirely true? (There are many cases of people who've been captured who haven't assimilated into societies and chose to leave when given the opportunity; this requires so much contextualisation that both Wengrow and Graeber didn't do, which is why it always reads odd to me.)
In an excellent profile of the author in New York magazine, Molly Fischer writes that, at the end of his life, Graeber was active in the UK Labour Party. “The reason I support [Jeremy] Corbyn, or am happy about him,” he said in an interview, “is because he is willing to work with social movements.” Graeber, reports Fischer, “had struck up a connection with John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer [in] an effort to bring ordinary Britons into the workings of government.” Corbyn’s communications director described Graeber as someone “sparking the imagination for what’s politically possible.”
Again, I think it's worth looking at the people who Graeber with whom surrounded himself. His desire for anything anarchic seemed to be whatever could be achieved within UK Labour. (And then again, check the people managing his “legacy” institute. Not much room for anarchists... and at least one person who conveniently was in Epstein's emails. Hm.)