related tags: #ShortReading, #GraeberStuff

• David Graeber: Concerning the Violent Peace Police (2012)

A letter that Graeber wrote in response to Chris Hedges misrepresenting Black Bloc. Some interesting bits and pieces. Was suggested in response to critiques around discussions of violence. I may want to come back to this because of my frustration with parts of it.

• Josef Burton: The Modern Passport Has Eliminated Fraud, Forgery, and Heroes Who Can Bend the Rules to Save Lives (2026)

Interesting exploration of the modern passport. It doesn't fully explore the history of passports, but does look at how they've changed over the decades to be hellish creations.

• Noah Hawley: What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos's Private Retreat (2026)

Meh, but it at least has some useful bits. Overwhelmingly, it's annoying that this is about an event from 2018. Took a while for Hawley to, you know, realise some things, I guess.

• Sophie Hurwitz: Gwyneth Paltrow Just Goopified Drone Warfare (2026)

Not long, low-info, but it does provide a good highlight of how the wellness industry works with state apparatuses and also is accepting of laundering reputations of people who should be labelled as war criminals.

• Gigi G: PSL's Top Propagandist Resigns, Publishes Tell-All Letter (2026)

More PSL-internal drama. Highlights known issues of them sweeping abuse under the rug, being authoritarian, and acting as such while pretending to engage in anti-colonial or anti-imperial politics. One funny sentence includes, “[Smolarek] says members caught reading Jacobin... are treated as security breaches.” Considering Jacobin is such a patsoc outlet, I'd also treat them as a security breach... but for a different reason. (This is a joke. But also, I wouldn't read the Jacobin.)

by: Josh Reno and Holly High / 19 February 2025 related tags: #GraeberStuff

By the time of his death in 2020, Graeber had become an important public intellectual. Outside of anthropology, he became known for his popular salvos on work and democracy—including the breakthrough publication Debt: The First 5,000 Years—and his activism within the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. His posthumously published The Dawn of Everything, an ambitious reconsideration of human history co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, became an international bestseller. More trade books of Graeber’s writing were released posthumously in 2023 and 2024.

All of this feels like a problem, and it also feels like something I should've addressed in the piece I published recently.

The perpetual “posthumously published” is necessary to think about, particularly as one of the books released was The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World..., which was a collection of essays that could be found for free online and came off as a cash-grab for its editors (especially one of them who has been very invested in ensuring his legacy remains as one thing... by having an organisation where Noam Chomsky is on the advisory board—love it when an Epstein friend and defender is in my ~radical~ organisation).

Dealing with grief is one thing, making an organisation that sounds like it's entirely designed to dwell on him and his work alone is... weird.

Our 2023 co-edited book As If Already Free: Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber came out of these conversations.

Again, something else that I feel is weird. The conversations, the workshops... they seem interesting and even helpful as a concept. Creating a book with assumption of “after Graeber,” as if he was the pure originator of any ideas, is strange. Weird, weird, weird.

I hope, first, that the book will inspire others to turn to David’s scholarship to continue probing and prodding the injustices of today’s world.

This comment prompted me to look if any of the people in this article were on the advisory board for DGI, did a small search, and then saw that they post shit from fucking Unherd just because it's Yanis Varoufakis. For fuck's sake.

Anyway, none of them are, but it's just... Why does everything have to circle around Graeber?

But we also spoke about one important way he served the wider discipline: his ability to bring new students to anthropology. I’ve been teaching the introductory anthropology course at the University of Sydney this past semester and have been struck by how many students signed up as a direct result of having read something by Graeber. My hope is that this book can extend that legacy.

I'm going to point out the irony that Australia is one of the countries that have upped the fees on social sciences, making them more expensive. It's worth asking... who is becoming anthropologists here?

While I'm glad people can find inspiration in his work, I find the explicit circling for years... strange.

By: Crispin Sartwell / 20 January 2024 related tags: #GraeberStuff

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.)

By: Dayton Martindale / 10 May 2018 related tags: #GraeberStuff

From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much.

I mean, we all have. But I will say that one of the few things that I kind of (but not entirely) agree with both Peter Shamshiri and Michael Hobbes about (regarding the If Books Could Kill episode on Bullshit Jobs) is that Graeber really didn't have a full understanding of work outside of academia. Despite growing up working class, he had very little (if any) personal experience in realms outside of academia.

And it's also interesting because a lot of his own personal exploration of academia is very... cis white man. This makes sense (that's who he was), but he very rarely explored the ways in which academia treated everyone else (unless someone reminded him to do so).

A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers believe their job makes no ​“meaningful contribution to the world” — more than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and researching the political, cultural and economic structures that encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on what he calls ​“a scar across our collective soul.”

This feels like they're trying to make Bullshit Jobs more than it was. It was a sell-out book, and he knew it. (Even the Peter and Michael figured it out... sort of. They didn't explicitly state it, but they said that the essay felt too short and that the book was too long... and neither really incorporated a lot of evidence and often veered into vague territory. This is also something I agree with them on to an extent.)

David Graeber: A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.

I think I actually have come to hate David's definition of a bullshit job because it doesn't actually engage with trying to understand the world and the context of those jobs.

In fact, I think a lot of jobs that people think “make a difference” or “should exist” are bullshit jobs. Working with children and guiding them to participating in the world in healthy ways isn't bullshit, yet teachers really do embody a lot of bullshit elements of the world, including things that they “must teach” according to the curriculum and how a lot of their curriculum ties directly to a poor organisation of society, continued colonialism and imperialism, anti-immigrant policies and coerced assimilation, training people to engage in 'civility' rather than contextualising different kinds of confrontation (along with a shit-ton of both-sidesing behaviours when a problem occurs, and forcing people to participate in a hierarchical structure that actually creates more issues than it ever solves (including the expectation that all adults inherently deserve children's respect because they “have authority”).

Would all teachers say they have a 'bullshit job'? I suspect most would not. But I think it largely is because it's not actually doing anything to change the world for the better and it's not about supporting both children's autonomy or communal care; even in the best of cases, it's about sustaining the status quo. (When even my anarchist friends who are teachers still frame it as “civilising children” and mean it positively, I think we should start asking a lot of questions about what it is that school does. And a lot of people do not.)

In fact, Graeber also wouldn't have recognised the bullshit of professorship because.... that was his bread and butter. He could just recognise the elements of bullshit in academia, and none of them were outside of the managerial and administrative aspects of academia.

Graeber: I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.

A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.

Besides, they’re unhappy, those intrusive bureaucrats about whom you wonder, ​“How can they live with themselves?” Well a lot of them can’t. Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or restore antique furniture or do something nice.

I'm quoting this part in whole because it highlights perfectly the failures of Graeber's understanding of policies and connections. While I would not mind getting UBI so I can stop pretending to give a shit about some of the lessons I do (and could also stop having to play games of price negotiation, which I hate), I think it's mistaken to believe that it's inherently good or even something that should be desirable.

UBI wouldn't “decrease” the number of bureaucrats because UBI would also become a safeguarded policy in the way that all other welfare policies have been. It might not become a means-tested item, but it certainly would not support a whole range of people because that is not how governments work (and any anarchist should know this). As a good example, just check how many governments would gladly give any kind of welfare to immigrants.

If we look at social security or social insurance (unemployment, retirement, sick leave, etc), these policies are entirely unequal despite the fact that they are provided to people to access them. Each designation of social insurance has their own bureaucrats (first) who then tease out who gets what and how much. Accessing these services as an immigrant is near impossible, despite the fact that we most certainly pay into them. Despite paying into unemployment, I am entirely unable to access it both due to my status as an immigrant and because I'm a freelancer; if I lose work, it is put squarely on my shoulders. Despite paying into sick leave, I don't even get paid a percentage of an average month of income because I am a freelancer. I do not get to access this.

Who is to say that UBI wouldn't become like this? (And honestly, who is going to pay immigrants UBI anyway? We're exploitable because we're coerced into participating in capitalism just so we don't get deported from places we've lived for years, all because a visa or a policy shift requires it.)

Not only that, but if you're working on projects like UBI and knowing the government will get good press from it? Trying to get people to fight that government when they work on shittier things later is going to be even more difficult because they might fear losing the one thing keeping them afloat. It's a useful short-term solution, but it's not a good long-term one; it's also one that requires significant amounts of planning to deal with. (I also don't like the idea that a government can change and UBI can either diminish or just disappear because of that.)

Graeber: The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating.

If only more would do that instead of lean in on the status quo.

By: Jessica Stites / 9 December 2021 related tags: #GraeberStuff

David Graeber may be best known as a founder of Occupy Wall Street (a reputation he worked hard to disavow, always instead deferring to the collective decision-making process)

... Maybe, if he wanted to disavow it, you could actually stop referring to him as the founder of OWS. And also, he'd be correct in saying he wasn't the founder of it? Especially when he didn't call for shit and didn't start shit? Like, he was there and was a recognisable face, but that doesn't make someone a founder. (It'd be like saying Bruce Willis is the founder of McDonald's because we saw him in a lot of them and he became very noticeable.)

Anyway, despite him being dead, it's still disrespectful to refer to people as things they did not want to be known for (especially if it's not true).

He died unexpectedly, in September 2020, of pancreatitis. He was 59. Just three weeks prior, Graeber had announced to archaeologist David Wengrow that their book, which they’d been cowriting for a decade, was complete.

I think this is something worth recognising in contextualising a whole a lot about The Dawn of Everything. In some regards, a lot of it reads more like Wengrow than Graeber (at least according to my own memory of Graeber's works), even though there are arguments that Graeber was starting to shift more towards liberal than anarchist (which I'd also agree with—a lot of his later views fit this, and it's also worth recognising the people he surrounded himself with who now cling tight to his legacy and what all of that looks like).

It also contextualises a lot of translation-related stuff, though I doubt Graeber would've paid much attention to them. (Just thinking about how one of my friends pointed out that the phrasing around indigenous peoples in German was uh... awful. But it was translated post-mortem, so his ability to even engage with those critiques was impossible. But Wengrow, on the other hand...)

Wengrow: One might assume the idea of social housing — a little bit like the abolition of slavery — is an idea that took an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it and arose from moral and ethical concerns in very recent European cultural media. But neither is true. We have examples in the book not just of social housing but of non-agricultural groups adopting and then abolishing slavery.

I think, when I read things like this, it's where I wish more people would start disputing this understanding of 'progress'. To act as if we have all been 'progressing' to this point, as if everything is a straight line, is part of why people view that these ideas take “an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it.” This is part of the issue I've long held with presentations of history and our contemporary moment; we are not progressing in a straight line, and we never have. We see multiple ideas pop up time and time again because people think they're useful; we also see many of the actual good ideas get tossed in favour of propaganda about who abuses those good ideas, courtesy of the few who view themselves as most important.

Progress isn't even cyclical. There are patterns, but they're not consistent in timing.

Anyway, I wish this would be a larger focal point of these historians and social scientists trying to make this point while never actually making that point.

I sense some reviewers might have been expecting a more political or politicized tract, something we deliberately stepped away from — and actually David was the one pulling back.

If what Wengrow says is true, then it makes sense why people continually view Graeber as distancing himself from anarchism in a lot of ways. Again, when a person is dead, it's also possible that the other person gets to put a lot of the criticisms on their shoulders. They can't fight back. (I don't think Wengrow has reason to lie, but we can't even see the push-back that Graeber would have if it were exaggerated.)

Note: I don't like this interview. Parts of it are written in a fawning nature, and I find that infuriating. People can like a book they interview someone about (it does make the interview easier), but it doesn't come off as anything but fawning to repeatedly be in awe over sections mentioned. (It feels more natural when some is like “Okay, I really liked this one section and have some questions about it.”)