An appreciation of the work of David Graeber (1961-2020)
I was sitting in a hospital car park in a facemask when I read that David Graeber had died. It was a period of Covid lockdown, and I was thumbing through news stories on my phone while waiting for a ‘safe to enter the building’ text.
I was devastated. In my opinion, there were only five dissident writers capable of preaching beyond the choir. They were Noam Chomsky (then aged 91); David Harvey (84); John Pilger (80); Mike Davis (74); and David Graeber, a sprightly 59 with, I had hoped, years of work ahead of him.
His unexpected death from necrotic pancreatitis robbed us of an energetic and compelling communicator. We also lost a genuinely innovative researcher; one who delved into issues seldom tackled by academics or activists. In that respect he ploughed the same furrow as the essayist and urban rambler Iain Sinclair but approached the task with greater academic rigour.
At some point during my seemingly interminable wait in the car park, I accepted it was futile to regret the books, articles and YouTube conversations we’d been denied in a future now cancelled. There were consolations. A plethora of articles, lectures and interviews were available online, and there were around a dozen books in print (there have now been further posthumous publications). For me, there was also the memory of a brief social media exchange with Graeber, concerning the absurdities of my former role as a European Social Fund Project Evaluator.
If you haven’t read David Graeber – or watched him on YouTube – you may be wondering what the fuss is about. Let me explain by focussing on the personal, political and social relevance of two strands of his work.
Sixty-five percent bullshit
What percentage of your employment has been futile and soul destroying? At this point, I estimate my own involvement in pointless paid activity to have been 65% of the total undertaken.
My first attempt to calculate this figure – just over a decade ago – was inspired by an article on the Strike! website. The piece in question, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, was written by an author new to me, David Graeber. Graeber, I learned, was an exiled American anthropologist based in London; he had been a involved in the Occupy movement; and his academic work was peppered with explanations and celebrations of the possibilities of left-wing anarchism.
The starting point of his Strike! feature is the curious fact that the maximum working week had not yet been set to 15 hours. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes and other economists predicted that within a few decades, technology would have advanced to the point at which we no longer needed to spend 40% of our waking hours producing goods and services. As we’re all too aware, Keynes’ prophecy remains unfulfilled despite huge increases in automation and the development of new communications technologies.
But some jobs have gone entirely. For example, the ‘typing pools’ employed by large organisations were rendered obsolete by the desktop computer boom of the 1980s. So, which vital activities have replaced those redundant roles? Why aren’t we all at liberty to spend more time on our passions and interests?
The reason doesn’t lie in the rise of consumerism: As Graeber pointed out, few of the new jobs created over the past century relate to “the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.” Instead, the failure to achieve a shorter working week lies in the massive growth in bullshit jobs. Sectors of dubious social value have expanded – corporate law, human resources and public relations – and a burgeoning administrative burden has been placed on established sectors such as health and academia. Graeber accepted there could be no objective definition of a bullshit job – some might see his work in anthropology as essential to human progress, others would deride it as meaningless. But there is evidence that many workers, often salaried professionals, are convinced their own occupations ought not to exist.
He asserted the reason so many of us are locked into jobs we see as “stupid and pointless” is the result of “profound psychological violence” committed against us by a ruling class that sees a population with time on its hands as a threat to their wealth and power. And, like many measures of control imposed by the one percent, it turns people against each other, with those engaged in bullshit busywork resenting those in more fulfilling occupations. This, Graeber suggested, can create irrational animosity towards essential workers taking strike action to improve their wages and conditions. Note the social media reactions to recent industrial action by teachers, nurses and refuse collectors.
Graeber’s article caused a stir. It was widely quoted and translated into multiple languages, and the Strike! website crashed due to the vast number of additional readers. The emergence of this enthusiastic and extensive audience led Graeber to formalise his research and extend his argument into a full-length book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).
For me, the impact of the book was a newly discovered sense of community. In Graeber’s terminology, I had worked as a ‘goon’ (freelance PR); ‘box ticker’ (in-house journalist, project evaluator, educational researcher); and ‘taskmaster’ (internal and freelance development consultant roles). I was deeply embarrassed by some of the ways I’d earned a crust, but it turned out that thousands of others felt the same about their ‘careers’.
More importantly, Graeber had exposed a profound but barely discussed malaise of twenty-first century capitalism. The puritan work ethic, portrayed as a virtue even in an era in which human agency is being replaced by algorithms, is merely a means of social control. Digital technologies have been repurposed to expand bureaucracies and drive consumption – trends which feed the deleterious global hunger for economic growth. ‘It is a scar across our collective soul,’ wrote Graeber, ‘yet virtually no one talks about it.’
His exposé of these absurdities was followed by a call for the establishment of a universal basic income. This, he argued, would support the development of work activities geared to the needs of our communities rather than the interests of billionaire oligarchs. Imagine a rational economy, based on urgency of need, natural productivity cycles, uneven work patterns and increased time for creative activities and leisure. What’s not to like?
For me, the original Strike! article had been a gateway drug to the rest of Graeber’s oeuvre. Over the next couple of years, I got high on a supply of his writing on debt, anarchist theory, neoliberalism, technology and bureaucracy. Sharply analytical but contemplative, iconoclastic but open to doubt, provocative but never hectoring, his work is sprinkled with wit and poetic expression.
From poetry to bureaucracy
One book of Graeber’s has profoundly affected the way I see the world. His 2015 essay collection, The Utopia of Rules, is a bravura investigation of bureaucracy. It tackles the factors that lead us to create and sustain rule-based systems and – in turn – considers the tendency of those systems to determine the way we use our tools and technologies.
Drawing on the deeply personal story of the processes relating to his mother’s declining health and death, Graeber exposes the inescapability and absurdity of officialdom. His efforts to gain power of attorney over his mother’s affairs is evocative of Arthur Clennam’s dealings with the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. The labyrinthine processes he describes are not merely risible but also imbued with a sense of dread. The state’s rules, he reminds us, are always upheld with the threat of violence, physical or psychological. And, returning to Dickens for a moment, it’s worth remembering that Athur Clennam’s adventures included a life-threatening spell in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison.
While I am writing this piece, there are battalions of redtop hacks and hypertensive keyboard warriors fighting ‘a war on red tape’. The colonisation of our lives by rule-based systems has, they claim, been accomplished by an axis of ‘do-gooding’ leftwing administrators. But, according to Graeber, this is a chimera. The Utopia of Rules highlights thesignificant role played by political conservatives and capitalist corporations in the encroachment of bureaucracy. Clearly, the language of systems, control and compliance has seeped from the boardroom and corporate prospectus into everyday language. How many of us have faced the challenge of KPIs, 360-degree feedback, SMART objectives and performance appraisals?
Graeber doesn’t grant the left immunity from prosecution on the theme of bureaucracy, but he does reveal that the financial services sector – and the politicians who championed its deregulation – have massively extended the imposition of bureaucratic processes as a means of consolidating their power.
At the heart of The Utopia of Rules is an essay I have referenced more frequently than any other in my own writing. Like many kids in the 1960s, I was an avid viewer of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Supercar, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Lost in Space and Star Trek. And a highlight of my week was the moment the latest issue TV21 comic tumbled through our letterbox. The programmes I watched and the comic strips I read promised a future of technological marvels – a future that would be “all highways in the sky”, to borrow a phrase from a song by Be Bop Deluxe. But this particular future was quietly cancelled at some point. There’s an obvious but seldom asked question here. Why?
In ‘Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit’ Graeber proposes an answer. The lack of colonies on Mars, ambulant androids, city-like space stations, force fields and tractor beams in the early twenty-first century has nothing to do with the limitations of technology, he argues, but relates to the “dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs”. Instead of funding the technologies of possibility – the ones that fired a schoolkid’s imagination in the 1960s – corporate power has lashed out on tools that facilitate control and stimulate consumer demand.
“I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies.” David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 2015.
This is why the defining tool of our era is not the jet pack but the smartphone – a device we use to collude in our own surveillance and to subject ourselves to the hard sell of advertisers and ‘influencers’. And this explains why the technological wonder of the age is not a spacecraft travelling to the edge of the solar system, but cinematic special effects that produce an immersive simulation of that phenomenon.
A jeremiad with a dash of optimism, sympathetic but exacting in style, the book is a massive achievement. It opened an honest conversation about the aspects of bureaucracy that damage lives and those that might enable us to establish a freer and fairer society. Search for The Utopia of Rules online and you’ll see that the discussion continues.
Something you do
I’ve focussed on the aspects of Graeber’s work that matter most to me, but the rest of his oeuvre is well worth a gander. Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) looks at debt from an anthropological perspective, considering its relationship with a range of social institutions including slavery, marriage, barter and government. The book contrasts informal, community-building obligations – based on reciprocity and linked to the concept of ‘everyday communism’ – with the variety based on formal arrangements, precise numbers and state-sponsored enforcement, often involving the threat of violence. In conclusion, Graeber calls for a ‘jubilee’ in which all sovereign and consumer debt is erased. A BBC audio series from 2017, Promises Promises: A History of Debt, read by Graeber and based on the book, is still available online [1].
Graeber’s online lectures and interviews are as insightful and entertaining as his writing – and there are many of them. To get a flavour, it’s worth listening to his 2014 Artangel / Longplayer conversation with the musician and artist Brian Eno [2]. The conversation covers the rise of bureaucracy, third world debt, anarchism, communism, markets, institutional orthodoxies, and education as preparation for a life of compliance and exploitation. The pitch and musicality of Graeber’s voice always takes me by surprise: his frame predicts a baritone, but the voice is that of a countertenor – and higher when his infectious laugh kicks in. It’s a fascinating exchange and an object lesson in making serious ideas accessible without oversimplification.
His activism included membership of the IWW union, aka ‘the Wobblies’; a role in shaping the Occupy Wall Street movement; and prominent contributions to actions against the World Bank and WTO through the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ – as an internationalist, Graeber disliked this label. Another label he rejected was ‘anarchist anthropologist’. “I see anarchism as something you do,” he said, “not an identity.” The are several articles at the official Graeber website setting out his views on the limits and possibilities of anarchism. ‘Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!’ (2009) is a beautifully written take-down of the negative clichés relating to left-wing anarchism [3].
It isn’t clear whether Graeber’s beliefs, activism and working-class background were factors in his Academic exile from America. He was denied tenure at Yale in 2004, despite his scholarship and academic achievements. As a result, he moved to London, teaching at Goldsmiths from 2007 and being appointed to a full Professorship at the LSE in 2013.
In the UK, he became a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in spite of deeply held reservations about traditional party politics. The attraction was Corbyn’s overt willingness to engage with communities and social movements. Believing the Guardian to have systematically undermined Corbyn’s campaign on the run up to the 2019 General Election, Graeber (an occasional contributor) declined to write further articles for the paper.
Just over a year after Graeber’s death, in October 2021, Allen Lane published his collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book draws on evidence from early human societies to challenge the conventional idea that humanity is on a linear path, progressing from primitivism to civilisation. In addition, it rejects the idea that complex, larger-scale societies can only be developed through top-down managerial control.
In his work with Wengrow, Graeber seemed to be setting off in another new direction. However, I believe there’s a single theme at the heart of his apparently polymathic work – a centripetal theme that draws his other ideas towards it. It’s a simple notion, originally expressed in The Utopia of Rules and repurposed in 2024 as the title of a posthumous collection [4]: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world,” wrote Graeber, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Andy Hedgecock
Notes
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054420y
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=cuBpOXGLn_o
[3] https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/
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