David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero

Today’s Left spends an inordinate amount of time looking backwards. This is probably a symptom of defeat: with social progress curdling into identity politics, and the relentless advance of a new, revanchist global Right, it’s tempting to yearn for the resurrection of long-dead theoretical idols. What if Marx were alive and scribbling today? Or Lenin, or Zapata, or Rosa Luxemburg? For the most part, this type of nostalgia is to be resisted — after all, it is the Left’s keenness to hammer the world into defunct paradigms that got it here in the first place. Still, there is one name that never fails to make me wonder “what if?”: David Graeber.

When Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world. The obituaries all agreed on the breadth and eclecticism of his accomplishments: the graduate work he had done on the culture of Madagascar; his ultra-rapid attainment, then loss, of an associate professorship at Yale; the rumours that he had masterminded Occupy Wall Street; his uncanny knack for writing bestsellers on what, at first glance, seemed like some of the most mind-numbing subjects known to man.

Soon, however, a new, backhanded consensus took over in the academy. Yes, Graeber was “inventive” and “original”, but in the cold light of retrospection he was also ill-disciplined and unsystematic. Even worse, his footnotes were a mess. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to hear academics scoffing that for all his childlike imagination and rumpled charisma, David Graeber was not so much a thinker as a gadfly, a provocateur.

Perhaps the best illustration of Graeber’s PR problem is to be found in his most popular (and misunderstood) book: Bullshit Jobs. Bullshit Jobs was a full-length treatment of a viral article Graeber had written in 2013 to answer a simple question: why, given the advances in labour-saving technologies through the 20th century, have we not seen a comparable expansion of leisure time? Why do we not have robots to do our chores, computers to organise our lives, automated production lines to furnish us with every consumer good we could ever need? Graeber’s answer was that for various bureaucratic and political reasons, the gap has been plugged with millions of new, pointless jobs — compliance officers, telemarketers, middle managers, corporate lawyers, administrators of all types. Society was simply not geared towards being productive any more. We were all pencil pushers now.

Within weeks of publication, the establishment had settled on an orthodox line of rebuttal. Graeber’s problem, argued The Economist, was that he had confused people not understanding their jobs with those jobs being pointless. He was just another social theorist with his own pet theory of alienation. And Left-wing academics with pet theories of alienation are not exactly rare. In other words, Graeber’s critics reacted to him in the way they had been taught to react to Marxists in the academy: by insisting that drudgery was an inevitable feature of a rational economy, and that the swarms of miserable worker bees he described would ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production.

But David Graeber was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist — something far rarer in academic life — and by the time Bullshit Jobs was released in 2018 had amassed a vast and subtle theoretical back-catalogue that covered everything from Indian Ocean pirates and the German post office to West African fetishes, mid-century dreams of flying cars, and the entire history of Western metaphysics. All this Graeber could bring in to undergird his arguments: one 2015 book on the history of European bureaucratic institutions spent half a chapter offering a novel reading of Batman: The Dark Knight.

Behind Bullshit Jobs, in fact, lurked another book, in which most of the criticisms levelled at the later essay had already been answered: a little-known 2001 academic monograph called Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. Among other things, this was a kind of anarchist rejoinder to Marxism, with its tendency to justify social organisation with reference to “production” and “surplus value”. In politics, Graeber instead argued, there was a vast number of things you could call valuable, not just key performance indicators and productivity statistics, but unquantifiable things, like happiness, fulfilment, care. “Production” was a recent fetish, popularised by bureaucrats; when you asked people what was really valuable in life, you would invariably get an answer that sounded something like “helping other people”.

With hindsight, though, what is perhaps most striking about Graeber’s thesis is how conservative it looks. These days, the one political constituency that reliably talks about “values” as distinct from “value” is the Right; if there is one group that can be relied upon to antagonise bureaucratic and managerial types, and hold people like government employees and contractors to account for their bullshit, it is the partisans of Milei or Trump. We live, now, in a topsy-turvy world, where the New Right style themselves as the champions of the common man, while progressives and liberals tend to couch their prescriptions for society in the language of enlightened paternalism.

So does this mean that Graeber was really a Tory in anarchist clothing? Not quite: Graeber was still deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation. What it does show, though, is that since his death, the political Left has managed to forget many of his most fascinating and resonant ideas. Take, for instance, the critique of bureaucracy. These days, the “b” word is hardly ever uttered by progressives; we are supposed, as Left-leaning people, to react to the shuttering of NGOs and government agencies with howls of uncritical lamentation. Here, too, Graeber offers an important corrective.

In The Utopia of Rules, published in 2015, Graeber gleefully acknowledged the horrors of modern bureaucracy stressed by the Right: the endless ID-verifying and form-filling that the modern citizen must engage in if they want to keep a job, move house, or check into a hospital. Crucially, though, he then added another radical step. Bureaucracy, he argued, wasn’t just the preserve of the government. Now, there were private bureaucracies, too. Inescapable call centres. Murky “public-private partnerships”. Vast corporate compliance offices operated by people with annoying vocal tics. One can only imagine the rhetorical potency this kind of critique would have had in the age of Trump — whose main constituency, it seems, is Americans fed up with lanyard-wearing functionaries telling them they haven’t got the right forms, or credentials, or grievances.

This old anarchist insight — the inarguable point that any vanguardist administration becomes its own kind of elite class, every bit as entrenched and corrupt as the ancien régime — seeped into the very foundations of Graeber’s thought. Towards the end of his life, he even seemed to be questioning the usefulness of the idea of “equality” as a Left-wing ambition altogether, and for precisely these reasons:

“[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.”

This, needless to say, is a remarkable statement for the rumoured mastermind of Occupy Wall Street, not to mention the coiner of the slogan “We are the 99%”. In it, we glimpse a man who had realised that transforming the world would mean more than tinkering with numbers and arguing about Gini coefficients. At the deepest level, people don’t want to be thrown a few scraps by an administrator and told to shut up. They want to be free.

There is one Graeber video I have found myself coming back to again and again since his death. It is a debate he conducted in 2014 with Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir billionaire who has since become famous as the éminence grise of the New Right. Thiel is clearly fascinated by Graeber; he agrees with his points about bureaucratic stultification, and seems to find it rather novel to have a Left-wing interlocutor echoing his paeans to untrammelled human creativity.

Suggested Reading

How ‘hubs’ conquered Britain

By Louis Elton

Watching the video, indeed, you get the sense that in many ways, Graeber’s anarchism is the result of Thiel’s impulses being carried to their most logical, most humane conclusion. Thiel wants coercive bureaucracies to stop meddling in the likes of SpaceX and PayPal; Graeber, meanwhile, wants them to leave everyone alone, from professors in London to peasants in Bihar, so that they all have enough time and space to figure out something worthwhile, and do it.

It is tempting to treat Graeberism (a term its originator would have hated) as a kind of “road not taken” for the political Left. Graeber’s most important books — Possibilities, Direct Action, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules, The Dawn of Everything — are among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time. Certainly, they’re the only ones that manage to carry the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists. They manage this, moreover, without ever once canvassing coercion, intimidation, or brutality. But to lament roads not taken would be a mistake. Because if there was one thing Graeber stood for, it was the idea that, as he put it, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. You are always slightly freer than the world claims you are. There is no road, and there are no turnings. You can change direction any time you like.

view comments