Graeber – Lesson 1: Who was Graeber, and why does anthropology make you dangerous?
Graeber studied societies that organised without states, markets, or bosses. Then he came home and asked why we put up with ours.
Kia ora,
Welcome to the third course in The Kiwi Dialect’s free socialist education series. This course is about David Graeber — one of the most original and unsettling thinkers of the last thirty years. His work is not comfortable. It names things that most people feel but are not supposed to say. That is precisely why it matters.
Who was Graeber?
David Rolfe Graeber was born in New York in 1961, the son of a plasterer and a garment worker who had both been involved in left politics. He became an anthropologist, spending years doing fieldwork in Madagascar studying village politics and resistance to state power. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and taught at Yale before being denied tenure in circumstances his supporters attributed to his political activism. He moved to Goldsmiths in London and then to the London School of Economics. He died in Venice in September 2020, aged 59.
In between he wrote some of the most widely read political theory of the early 21st century, helped organise the Occupy Wall Street movement, and spent decades in anarchist politics and direct action organising.
What anthropology does
To understand why Graeber thinks the way he does, you need to understand what anthropology does — particularly the kind of anthropology Graeber practised.
Anthropologists spend time living in communities very different from their own, learning their languages and participating in their daily life. What this does, over time, is make the familiar strange. When you have seen societies organised without money, without states, without permanent hierarchies, without wage labour — you come back to your own society and you stop being able to take it for granted.
The things that are supposed to be natural and inevitable — the fact that some people own and others work for them, that debt must always be repaid, that there must be a government with a monopoly on violence, that most people spend most of their lives doing things they would not do if they had a choice — start to look like particular historical arrangements rather than facts of life.
This is Graeber’s most fundamental contribution: the application of anthropological defamiliarisation to capitalism. He kept asking: is this how it has to be? And the evidence from human history kept answering: no.
Graeber and anarchism
Like Kropotkin, Graeber was an anarchist. But his anarchism was less about programmatic demands and more about what he called the anarchist imagination: a disposition toward building non-hierarchical structures, practising direct democracy, and prefiguring the world you want to live in through the way you organise.
He was deeply suspicious of vanguard politics and the idea that a small group of enlightened people should lead the masses to liberation. He argued that the most interesting and transformative political experiments of recent decades — the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Kurdish liberation movement in Rojava, the global justice movement, Occupy Wall Street — had all been organised around anarchist principles of horizontal decision-making and direct democracy, not Leninist ones of centralised direction.
The three big ideas
Graeber’s work circles around three related problems, each of which gets a lesson of its own:
Debt: Graeber showed that debt is not a neutral financial instrument but a historically constructed tool of domination. The moral weight we attach to debt repayment — the idea that a debt must always be repaid, that owing money is a form of moral failure — is not natural. It is an ideology that serves those who lend.
Bullshit jobs: Graeber observed that capitalism, which claims to be the most efficient system for allocating labour, has produced an economy in which a large and growing proportion of work is experienced by those who do it as pointless. This is not an accident. It serves particular interests.
Bureaucratic violence: Graeber argued that the bureaucratic structures of the modern state and corporation are not neutral administration. They are forms of violence — slow, grinding, humiliating — that fall disproportionately on the poor and marginalised.
Why Graeber matters for socialist politics in Aotearoa
New Zealand is a small, highly administered society with a large state apparatus, a significant financial sector, and an economy in which a growing proportion of jobs are in management, compliance, administration, and financial services rather than in producing things of tangible value.
Graeber’s questions cut through the ideological fog of this economy. He asks: what is actually valuable? Who actually creates it? Why are the people who create the most value — nurses, teachers, cleaners, care workers, tradespeople — paid the least, while those who create the least — financial traders, corporate consultants, compliance managers — are paid the most? And what would it mean to organise an economy around actual human need rather than around the extraction of value for those at the top?
Questions for you
Have you ever had a job that felt pointless — where you spent most of your time on tasks that seemed to have no real purpose? What did that feel like?
Can you think of a way in which your own society is organised that would look bizarre or unjust to someone from outside it? Something that only makes sense if you are already inside it?
Reply or comment. The course gets richer the more people bring their experience into it.
Next up: Lesson 2 – Debt: the first 5,000 years and why you should never feel morally obligated to a bank.
In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect