Graeber: Debt, Bullshit Jobs & Direct Democracy — Free email course from The Kiwi Dialect

Six lessons on debt as a tool of power, why most work is meaningless by design, and how ordinary people build direct democracy — from Aotearoa, for everywhere.

Kia ora,

The first two courses in this series gave us a toolkit for understanding power. Gramsci showed us how ruling ideas become common sense and how to build counter-hegemony. Kropotkin showed us that cooperation is the real basis of human survival, and that mutual aid is a form of politics in itself.

David Graeber takes these insights into the present. He asks: what does power look like in the 21st century? Why do so many people spend their lives doing work that feels pointless? Who designed the bureaucratic systems that humiliate and exhaust us? And what does real democracy — not parliamentary democracy but the kind where people actually govern themselves — look like when ordinary people build it?

Graeber was an anthropologist and anarchist who helped spark the Occupy Wall Street movement, coined the concept of bullshit jobs, wrote one of the most important books about debt in a generation, and was cancelled from Yale before finding a home at LSE. He died in 2020, unexpectedly, at 59. He left behind a body of work that is essential reading for anyone trying to understand and change the world we live in.

This course is for anyone who has ever:

Felt that their job produces nothing of real value but cannot say so out loud. Spent hours on hold to a government department to prove they deserve help they are legally entitled to. Wondered why they owe money to institutions they never agreed to deal with. Participated in a meeting where everyone pretended to have power but decisions were made elsewhere. Felt that the world is run for the benefit of people who shuffle money and paper while those who do actual work are treated as costs to be minimised.

Graeber gives a name and a theory to what you already know.

What this course covers

Lesson 1: Who was Graeber? Anthropology, anarchism, and seeing the world differently.

Lesson 2: Debt — the first 5,000 years. How debt was invented as a tool of domination long before capitalism, and what that means for the moral weight we give it today.

Lesson 3: Bullshit jobs. Why so much work under capitalism is meaningless by design, who benefits from that, and what it does to people.

Lesson 4: The bureaucratic violence of everyday life. How paperwork, means-testing, and administrative humiliation are tools of class power — not unfortunate side effects.

Lesson 5: Direct democracy and prefigurative politics. What Occupy Wall Street and other movements taught us about how to build the future in the present.

Lesson 6: Graeber in Aotearoa today. Debt, work, bureaucracy, and direct democracy through a New Zealand lens — and what we do with it.

How this course works

Free. By email. Twice a week. Fifteen minutes a lesson. Discussion questions at the end of every one. Reply or comment and your experience becomes part of the course.

This is the third course in The Kiwi Dialect’s free socialist education series. You do not need to have done the Gramsci or Kropotkin courses to follow this one, though each course builds on the others. Links to the full series are in the Courses section of this publication.

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Send it to someone whose job they hate, someone drowning in debt, someone who has given up on politics but not on their community. This course is for them.

First lesson arrives shortly.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect