Economic history states that money replaced a bartering system, yet there isn’t any evidence to support this axiom. Anthropologist Graeber presents a stunning reversal of this conventional wisdom. For more than 5000 years, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods. Since the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have been divided into debtors and creditors. Through time, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and the system as a whole went into decline. This fascinating history is told for the first time.
Debt is the most effective way to take a relation of violent subordination and make the victims feel that it’s their fault.
借金は、暴力的な従属関係を取り、被害者にそれが自分のせいだと感じさせる最も効果的な方法です。
Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
直接的な行動とは、結局のところ、あたかもすでに自由であるかのように行動するという挑戦的な主張です。
It’s a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
これに代わる新しい文明を創造するのは困難な仕事です。
In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.
時計のない場所では、行動が時間によって測られるのではなく、行動によって時間が測られます。
We have become a civilization based on work – not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.
私たちは仕事を基盤とした文明になっています。「生産的な仕事」ですらなく、仕事自体が目的であり、意味があるのです。
There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
自分の仕事が他の人に利益をもたらすことが明らかであればあるほど、その仕事に対する報酬は少なくなる可能性が高いという一般的な法則があるようです。
Consensus isn’t just about agreement. It’s about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
コンセンサスは単に同意することではありません。 それは物事を変えることです。あなたは提案を受け、何かを考え出し、人々は問題を予測し、創造的な総合を行います。 最終的には、誰もが大丈夫だと思うものを思いつきます。 ほとんどの人がそれを好みますし、嫌いな人はいません。
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. –.
あらゆる微妙で複雑な質問には、完全にシンプルで単純な答えがありますが、それは間違っています。
As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it.
マックス・ウェーバーがずっと前に指摘したように、一度真に効果的な官僚制度を作り上げてしまうと、それを取り除くのはほぼ不可能です。
Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wrong, we might well get a lot closer.
根本的により良い世界が不可能であることは誰にも分からないので、今日の混乱を正当化し、再生産し続けることに固執することは、すべての人を裏切っているのではないだろうか？ とにかく、たとえ私たちが間違っていたとしても、かなり近づくことができるかもしれません。
Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
アナキズムと人類学はうまく調和します。なぜなら、国家が非常に多く存在するため、国家のない社会が可能であることを人類学者が知っているからです。
What is debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
そもそも借金とは何でしょうか？ 借金はまさに約束の倒錯です。 それは数学と暴力の両方によって損なわれた約束です。
Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us all into part or full-time administrators.
18 世紀から 19 世紀にかけて新しい形式の産業オートメーションが発明され、世界中の人口がますますフルタイムの産業労働者になるという逆説的な効果があったのと同じように、最近ではすべてのソフトウェアが私たちを管理上の責任から解放するように設計されています。 数十年が経ち、最終的には私たち全員がパートまたはフルタイムの管理者になりました。
A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.
世界に意味のある影響を与えることができない人間は存在しなくなります。
Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore.
資本主義は外部の力によって押しつけられるものではないと彼は指摘した。 それは私たちが毎日起きてそれを生み出し続けるからこそ存在するのです。 もし私たちがある朝目覚めて、何か別のものを生産しようと集団で決めたら、もう資本主義は存在しないでしょう。
What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.
官僚制度の魅力の背後にあるのは、最終的には遊びへの恐怖です。
Police are bureaucrats with weapons.
警察は武器を持った官僚です。
All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.
現在、すべての富裕国は大勢の役人を雇用しており、彼らの主な役割は貧しい人々に自分自身について嫌な思いをさせることである。
As it turns out, we don’t “all” have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
結局のところ、私たちは「全員」が借金を支払う必要があるわけではありません。 私たちの一部だけがそうします。
Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.
特にヨーロッパと北アメリカの若者が、ますます世界中で、役に立たない仕事に向けて心理的に準備され、働いているふりをする方法を訓練され、その後、さまざまな手段によって、意味のある目的を果たすとほとんど誰も本当に信じていない仕事に誘導されています。
If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.
歴史が何かを示しているとすれば、それは、暴力に基づいた関係を正当化し、そのような関係を道徳的であるように見せるには、債務という言葉で枠組みを変えることよりも良い方法はないということだ――何よりも、それは即座に、被害者こそが被害者であるかのように思わせるからである。 何か間違ったことをしている。
Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.
どこの女性も常に、ある状況が男性の視点からどのように見えるかを想像し続けることが求められています。 男性が女性に対して同じことを期待することはほとんどありません。 この行動パターンは非常に深く内面化されているため、多くの男性は、別のことをするかもしれないという提案に対して、それ自体が暴力行為であるかのように反応します。
If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
予期せぬ突破口が見つかる可能性を最小限に抑えたい場合は、自分たちが何を発見するのかを事前に知っていると説得するために、時間の大部分を費やして互いに競い合わない限り、リソースはまったく受け取らないと人々に伝えてください。
It’s legitimate for the police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then: How does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob?
警察は法律を執行しているので、暴力を行使するのは合法です。 法律は憲法に根ざしているため合法です。 憲法は国民から発せられたものであるため合法である。 人々は違法な暴力行為によって憲法を制定した。 そこで明らかな疑問は、「人々」と単なる暴れ回る暴徒の違いをどうやって見分けるのかということです。
If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place.
誰も軍隊を持たなければ、軍隊は必要ありません。 しかし、ほとんどのロビイスト、PR専門家、電話勧誘員、企業弁護士にも同じことが言えます。 また、文字通りの悪党と同様に、彼らは社会に大きくマイナスの影響を与えます。 電話勧誘業者がすべていなくなったら、世界はより良い場所になるだろうということには、ほとんどの人が同意すると思います。
Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
革命の支持者には常に、最も疎外されている人々と最も抑圧されている人々との間の暗黙の同盟が関係している。
Bureaucracies, I’ve suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity – of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.
私が示唆したように、官僚制はそれ自体が愚かさの形態ではなく、愚かさを組織する方法、つまり構造的暴力の存在によって存在する想像力の極めて不平等な構造によってすでに特徴づけられている関係を管理する方法である。
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness.
自由は何かと緊張関係にある必要があり、そうでなければそれは単なるランダムです。
In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
最も大きな枠組みで言えば、誰も私たちの本当の価値を語る権利がないのと同じように、私たちが本当に負っているものを語る権利も誰にもありません。
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
学術界が、風変わりで優秀で非現実的な人々にとって社会の避難所だった時代がありました。 もはや。 それは現在、プロのセルフマーケティング担当者の領域です。 風変わりで、優秀で、非現実的な人々について言えば、今の社会には彼らの居場所がまったくないようだ。
In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
非常に暴力的な場所であるアメリカの刑務所では、最も悪質な刑罰は、何もせずに何年もの間、人を空の部屋に閉じ込めることです。 このコミュニケーションや意味のあらゆる可能性を空にすることが、暴力とは実際に何であるか、あるいは暴力が行うことの本質である。
After all, as we’re constantly reminded, the Internet has unleashed all sorts of creative vision and collaborative ingenuity. What it has really brought about is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends and means, where creativity is marshaled to the service of administration rather than the other way around.
結局のところ、私たちが常に思い出しているように、インターネットはあらゆる種類の創造的なビジョンと共同の創意工夫を解き放ちました。 それが実際にもたらしたのは、目的と手段の一種の奇妙な逆転であり、創造性がその逆ではなく、行政への奉仕に動員されるというものである。
If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.
歴史を見てみると、最も強力な軍事力を持った国がたまたま世界貿易通貨を持っている国でもあるという規則的なパターンがあるようです。 それは彼らに多大な経済的優位性をもたらし、それによって商品が彼らの国に流入するようになります。
If I’m not constantly being met by challenges that I am overcoming, how do I know that I’m capable?
常に困難に直面して克服しているわけではない場合、自分に能力があることをどうやって知ることができるでしょうか?
The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.
想像力との戦いは、資本家が実際に勝利することができた唯一の戦争である。
States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
国家が市場を作った。 市場には国家が必要です。 少なくとも今日私たちが認識しているような形では、どちらも他方なしでは継続できません。
The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.
ケンブリッジのキャロライン・ハンフリーによる物々交換に関する決定的な人類学的研究は、これ以上に決定的な結論を下すことはできません。 あらゆる入手可能な民族誌は、そのようなことは決して存在しなかったことを示唆しています。
I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.
私は「ボックスティッカー」という用語を、組織が実際には行っていないことを行っていると主張できるようにするためだけに、または主に存在する従業員を指すために使用しています。
After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead.
結局のところ、私たちは自分の存在すべてを他人に負っているのです。 これは単純に真実です。 私たちが話したり考えたりする言語、習慣や意見、食べたい食べ物の種類、電気を点けたりトイレを流すための知識、さらには反抗や反逆の行動を行うスタイルさえも。 社会的慣習 – これらすべてを私たちは他の人たちから学びましたが、そのほとんどはずっと前に亡くなっていました。
What “the public,” “the workforce,” “the electorate,” “consumers,” and “the population” all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.
「国民」、「労働力」、「有権者」、「消費者」、「国民」のすべてに共通しているのは、それらが本質的に官僚的であり、したがって非常に深刻な、制度化された行動の枠組みによってもたらされているということである。 疎外する。
Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.
次に、この宇宙の中で吸血鬼の反対は何ですか?と尋ねます。 答えは明らかです。 吸血鬼の反対は狼男です。
Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds.
管理主義は、富と地位が経済的ではなく政治的理由に基づいて割り当てられる、新しい形の封建制を生み出す口実となっています。
The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what’s in front of them.
その結果、官僚的な行政に対処することを余儀なくされている人々は、何らかの恣意的な理由で、目の前のものの2パーセントしか見えないメガネをかけることを決めた人々を相手にしているような印象を抱くことがよくあります。
The reasons why anthropologists haven’t been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there’s no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever “invented” than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call “money” isn’t a “thing” at all; it’s a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought.
人類学者がお金の起源について単純で説得力のある物語を思いつくことができなかった理由は、そのような物語が存在すると信じる理由がないからです。 お金は、音楽や数学、宝石と同様に「発明」されたものではありません。 私たちが「お金」と呼んでいるものは、決して「物」ではありません。 これは、物事を数学的に、比率として比較する方法です。つまり、X の 1 つが Y の 6 つと同等であると言う方法です。そのため、それはおそらく人間の思考と同じくらい古いものです。
Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn’t just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.
アメリカ人が郵便労働者に対して抱いている一般的なイメージは、ますます卑劣なものになっている。 しかし、これはただ起こったわけではありません。 それは意図的な政策選択の結果です。 1980年代以来、政府は実際には機能していないということをアメリカ国民に納得させるための継続的なキャンペーンの一環として、議員らが率先して郵便局の資金を組織的に廃止し、民間の代替手段を奨励してきた。
The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.
リベラリズムの鉄則は、いかなる市場改革も、官僚主義を減らし市場原理を推進することを意図した政府の取り組みも、最終的には規制の総数、事務処理の総量、政府の官僚の総数を増加させると述べている。 雇用している。
It’s not just that some people get to break the rules – it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.
単にルールを破る人がいるというだけではありません。組織への忠誠心は、それが起こっていないふりをする意欲によってある程度測られるのです。
It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say.
世界の多くの地域では、民主主義とは、特定の問題に直面し、誰もが平等に発言権を持ち、問題を解決するために団結する人々の集団であると考えられています。
I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it’s going to be a disaster.
今起きているような大規模な人口流出が起きたら、それは大惨事になると思います。
David Graeber’s Possible Worlds The Dawn of Everything author left behind countless fans and a belief society could still change for the better.
by Molly Fischer
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html
**
Lately it has seemed possible that everything must change. Basic fixtures of American life, rules and institutions that had come to feel inevitable — in 2020 and 2021, they felt less inevitable than before. They felt perhaps untenable. Things like the cost of health care and the cost of child care. Offices, prisons, and police. Fossil fuel, the filibuster, Facebook. The pursuit of happiness via nonstop work. The monthly payments on a student loan. Every month the rent was due — unless it wasn’t anymore.
To David Graeber, it was a matter of plain fact that things did not have to be the way they were. Graeber was an anthropologist, which meant it was his job to study other ways of living. “I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities,” he once explained. Graeber was also an anarchist, “and in a way,” he went on, “there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.” A better world was not assured, but it was possible — and anyway, as Graeber put it in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce the mess we have today?”
Graeber died unexpectedly a year ago this September, at the age of 59, and though he’d never sought to be a leader, he left behind a multitude of followers and fans, from artists to economists to Kurdish revolutionaries. They were people whose imaginations he had captured as a scholar and a teacher, as the public intellectual of the Occupy movement, and as the best-selling author of Debt and Bullshit Jobs, books that swept across eras and disciplines to offer scholarly provocation in layperson’s terms. After his death, friends and acolytes from around the world — from Brazil, Japan, and New Zealand — submitted video tributes for an online celebration of his life. A year later, his widow, the artist Nika Dubrovsky, still hasn’t managed to make her way through all the footage she received.
Graeber also left behind the staggeringly large project he finished three weeks before he died: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Written in collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow, the book draws on new research to challenge received wisdom on civilization’s course. The story of humanity, as it is typically told, proceeds along a linear path. It passes in distinct stages from foraging bands and tribes on to agriculture, cities, and kings. But, surveying the historic and archaeological record, Graeber and Wengrow saw a wealth of other stories, taking humanity on varied and unpredictable routes. There were societies that farmed without really committing to it, for example. There were societies whose authority figures’ power applied only during certain parts of the year. Cities coalesced without any apparent centralized government; brutal hierarchies took shape among people who later reversed their course. The book’s 704 pages teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors’ view, to human agency and invention — a capacity for conscious political decision-making that conventional history ignores. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” write Graeber and Wengrow. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?”
Lauren Leve, an anthropologist at UNC-Chapel Hill who was Graeber’s girlfriend for many years and, later, his friend, remembers his crackling enthusiasm for his work on The Dawn of Everything. “We would be on the phone, and I could just hear him sort of wringing his hands and grinning with excitement and a sense of mischief — ‘This is going to mess things up!’” she recalls. He’d laugh as he described the discoveries he and Wengrow were making, the revelations they planned to unleash. People are just going to go crazy, he would tell her, but it’s true!
**
In 1975, David Graeber arrived at Phillips Academy Andover as a tenth-grader — a “lower,” in the boarding school’s parlance. He was 14 and a stranger to Wasp aristocracy, a child of proudly working-class New York. His mother, Ruth Rubinstein, had met Kenneth Graeber at a communist youth camp; he was a Gentile from Kansas and, when they married, her Jewish immigrant family disowned her. Kenneth worked as a plate stripper for printing presses, and Ruth sewed brassieres. During the 1930s, he’d joined the International Brigade and driven an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. She, meanwhile, performed in Pins and Needles, a union-backed musical that brought its garment-worker cast to Broadway. (After its run, she returned to sewing bras.) Ruth’s big number, “Chain Store Daisy,” concerned a Vassar graduate selling girdles at Macy’s. Ruth herself never went to college. She was a constant reader, however, and years later, she was the audience her son kept in mind when he wrote. Graeber, Leve recalls, used to say that “if he understood something, he should be able to write it in a way that would be accessible and interesting to her.”
Ruth and Kenneth were in their 40s by the time they had David, their second son, and the family had achieved a measure of security. Early in his childhood, they moved into an apartment in the Penn South co-ops, an affordable-housing development in Chelsea sponsored by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The family had a tiny A-frame beach house on Fire Island with bookshelves full of sci-fi paperbacks. (One of Graeber’s first memories of political engagement was a late-’60s antiwar march on the beach.) After developing a youthful hobby of translating Mayan hieroglyphics, he began a correspondence with an archaeology professor at Yale, who helped arrange an Andover scholarship. The sudden immersion of a brilliant, observant, and class-conscious adolescent in the world of prep school would seem to be excellent training for a radical anthropologist.
Graeber’s education continued at SUNY-Purchase and the University of Chicago, where he got his anthropology Ph.D. His adviser, the eminent scholar Marshall Sahlins, suggested that fieldwork in Madagascar might suit him; Graeber spent nearly two years there on the research that became his dissertation, and eventually his book, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. The ambition for ethnography he set out in its preface was to “give access to a universe, a total way of life.” Thomas Blom Hansen is chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford; a friend and onetime colleague, he told me Graeber had always been interested in the “large, universal questions” of their discipline’s early days.
What Graeber came to realize, during his time with the Malagasy, was that their daily lives carried on effectively outside state control. They weren’t paying taxes, they weren’t calling police, and, rather than relying on hierarchical structures of authority, they were making decisions collectively. The Malagasy didn’t call attention to this state of affairs. They just went about their business, behaving — as anarchist principles would have it — as if they were already free. Graeber had considered himself an anarchist since he was a teen, but now he could see how anarchism worked. “The way I always put it is: Most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea; they think it’s insane,” he told one interviewer. “I come from a family where that was not assumed.” Still, before Madagascar, “I never actually lived in a place without state authority,” Graeber explained. “I got to observe firsthand how people can actually organize things without top-down structures of command.”
The quotidian anarchism Graeber saw in his fieldwork was an epiphany he would later work to translate for a wider audience. Anarchism was a matter of “having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions,” he wrote in an essay called “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” He explained that when people waited politely in line to board a bus — waited, that is, even though nobody was making them — they were acting like anarchists.
This carefully palatable account of anarchism notwithstanding, Graeber spoke out over the years in defense of anarchist activity more alarming to some observers, like Black Bloc actions that damaged property. He was not trying to soften his politics for popular appeal, exactly. Rather, he was challenging accepted fictions and revealing how they diverged from reality. Such a fiction might be “The government is in charge here.” It might also be “Human beings are fundamentally selfish and act accordingly.” To unthinkingly accept the latter worldview, for example, we blind ourselves to “at least half of our own activity, which could just as easily be described as being communistic or anarchistic,” Graeber explained. A basic optimism about humanity united Graeber’s politics and his anthropology: The problem, in his view, was the tendency not to give people enough credit.
**
Teaching at Yale, where he started as an assistant professor in 1998, was not a job that Graeber expected to last. “David was open about it,” Leve said. Knowing that tenure offers at Yale were rare, he intended to treat it as “the best temporary job you could ever have.” At the time, associate and assistant roles were not so much pathways to tenure as short-term contract jobs. The result was a sharp sense of division between the senior faculty and their precariously employed junior colleagues. The anthropologist Kamari Clarke (now a professor at the University of Toronto) was hired as an assistant professor at the same time as Graeber. She remembers how the department’s hierarchies permeated daily life. “We had faculty meetings, and junior faculty were there for the first, say, 45 minutes, and then we would be asked to leave,” Clarke said. “And then senior faculty would continue on with the meeting. That was the Yale way during that period.”
In Graeber’s classroom, such questions of status had little weight. Even the big-name theorists he discussed — in Graeber’s telling, “they were just dudes,” said Durba Chattaraj. One of his Ph.D. students at Yale, she remembers lectures speckled with the personal foibles of the greats. Apart from the entertainment value, there was a message: These thinkers “were smart, but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”
“To be honest, meeting David was kind of like meeting another student — he wasn’t all that much older than us,” said Christina Moon, who was an anthropology Ph.D. student at the time. Graeber would join the graduate students for Buffy TV nights; he’d take them out to dinner and pick up the check. His office was crowded with rugs, old lamps, tchotchkes, and piles of papers and books. “Crap! All of this crap everywhere,” Moon fondly recalled. “It was messy, but it was this warm little place within a very stoic and cold-feeling institution.” She and Graeber bonded over their family roots in the Garment District: Her parents had once worked at a factory on 23rd Street, not far from his family’s ILGWU apartment on 24th. Moon often felt like an outsider at Yale. As her adviser, Graeber became “a refuge,” she told me, someone who helped her “overcome those feelings that I didn’t belong.”
Graeber saw himself as an outsider at Yale, too — despite publishing at a daunting clip, despite teaching classes that were reliably packed. Being an anthropologist meant being attuned to the meanings a community built into its structures. At Yale, to someone who’d grown up without much money, the meanings were clear. Clarke remembers him talking about going to Sterling Memorial Library and “feeling freaked out by the grandeur.” Sterling is a massive Gothic Revival tower; its vast hush and soaring ceilings are the academy’s fantasy of itself made manifest. It is a building that invites the visitor to revere that fantasy, in all its storied elitism — but Graeber resisted doing so. He had parents who had embraced their working-class identity; he embraced it, too. “He didn’t want to give that up completely. He didn’t think he should have to give it up completely,” Leve said. Trying to ingratiate his way to insider status would have felt like a betrayal — “but,” she said, “mostly it was just that he didn’t know how.” Graeber was “unclubbable,” a colleague he considered an ally once told him. “His affect was so disorganized,” Leve told me. He looked different from the other professors. His hair was untidy; his clothes were perpetually disheveled; he was ashamed of his terrible teeth.
Graeber had just delivered a lecture for the class Power, Violence, and Cosmology one day in 1999 when a headline about the Seattle WTO protests caught his eye. “I discovered the political movement I’d really like to have existed had come into being when I wasn’t paying attention,” he later said. Here was a practical enactment of the principles he’d long embraced. He wound up taking a sabbatical year, during which he immersed himself in the global justice movement with New York City’s Direct Action Network. DAN was part of a loosely organized national activist confederation that had come to prominence after Seattle. It operated along anarchist principles, making decisions through a consensus process and planning actions through spokes-councils and affinity groups. It was just like Madagascar — albeit “much more formalized and explicit,” he’d later write, since “in Madagascar, everyone had been doing this since they learned to speak.”
Just as he had in Madagascar, Graeber was taking extensive field notes on the customs he observed: how the activists defused their conflicts, how they shared their cigarettes. The London School of Economics sociology professor Ayça Çubukçu remembers meeting Graeber through DAN at a community center on the Lower East Side. She was impressed with the work that would become his book Direct Action: An Ethnography. The social sciences tend to rely on “this distinction between the subject of analysis and the object of analysis — and David exploded that distinction,” Çubukçu told me. “His method was classical in the sense that he was teasing out the implicit logics and the symbolic worlds of activists. But the reason he had such an intimate understanding was because he was one of us.” Soon Graeber was helping organize actions and speaking on behalf of DAN in the press. “Yes, it’s fun,” he told a Boston Globe reporter, regarding the spirit of camaraderie at the 2000 Republican-convention protests. “We believe politics should be fun, but this is also serious. We are facing police records and getting our faces smashed in.”
When he returned to Yale after his sabbatical, previously friendly members of the senior faculty froze him out, he said. He believed that his outspoken activism had turned colleagues against him. Meanwhile, graduate students were working to organize a union, a fight that grew increasingly intense. Approached by student organizers, Graeber quickly offered his support; many colleagues did not. He saw hypocrisy in the academy’s supposed radicalism. As he wrote in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology:
It was becoming apparent that the principles at the crux of Graeber’s work ill suited the academy. He didn’t believe in hierarchy, and he behaved accordingly. Whatever his beliefs, however, his colleagues still had power over him. Graeber’s first contract renewal passed uneventfully. At his second, a group of colleagues moved not to renew him, saying he’d done insufficient committee work. His failure to live in New Haven full time had further marked him as an outsider — but Graeber’s family had been pulling him back to New York. His older brother was dying of cancer, and then, following a series of mini-strokes, his mother’s health was in decline. Struggling to balance his work obligations with caring for her “was awful,” Leve told me. “It was just utterly awful.” Graeber agreed to take on more departmental work, and Yale made the unusual decision to revisit the contract in one year’s time.
Then, in 2005, Graeber joined Moon, his advisee, in a contentious meeting. Moon was one of the students involved in the organizing effort among grad students, which had become a source of friction, and she was pursuing a dissertation that seemed to perplex some senior faculty. She wanted to study emergent forms of labor in the U.S. garment industry. “Her work was brilliant, but it didn’t fit the old-school configuration of anthropological work,” Clarke, who also taught Moon, told me. Moon felt there had already been “passive-aggressive” efforts to nudge her out of the program, but in this meeting the conflict came to a head. One of the senior faculty, she remembers, told her she didn’t belong at Yale. Graeber spoke up, outraged on her behalf. “He pulled out his notebook, and he said, ‘Keep on talking. Now I’m going to start writing down every single thing you’re saying to my student.’” Moon was crying — she was terrified her academic career was over. Graeber started making jokes, stage-whispering asides, “giggling in anger” as he read back what was being said. “He just sucked all the power out of the room,” Moon said. Don’t be afraid of them, she felt he was telling her. They are ridiculous.
Moon stayed on at Yale and got her doctorate; she is now a professor at the New School. For Graeber, though, the meeting marked a turning point. “After that my dismissal was a foregone conclusion,” he later wrote. Yale’s decision not to renew Graeber’s contract attracted widespread attention — there were stories in the New York Times and the AP. Anthropologists from across the country and abroad sent letters in support of his work; Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics called Graeber ”the best anthropological theorist of his generation.”
Given this outpouring, Graeber believed he’d be able to find another job, but after applying for more than 20 positions, he failed to make the first cut for any of them. “Once you’ve been at the center of a scandal, you’re scandalous,” Leve told me. Graeber believed Yale’s decision was about politics. “Whether the man was a good anthropologist — that was indisputable,” Hansen said. “It was more a question of whether he was someone you could see as your future colleague.” Hiring a figure like Graeber would have meant “bringing in somebody who’s going to have a great deal of weight in the department and in departmental politics,” Leve explained. “And if you’re not sure that this is going to be an ally, or you think this is somebody that could complicate things, I think a lot of people may hesitate.”
When Ruth Graeber died in 2006, her son was still out of work. Invited that year to deliver a lecture at the London School of Economics, he spoke about the crushing bureaucracy that accompanied the end of life. He described it as a series of ”dead zones” that stifled the human imagination, leaving only blindness and stupidity. Back in New York, he continued to live in the apartment where he’d grown up. “It was like a mausoleum, full of things that had belonged to his parents that he didn’t want to change or part with,” Leve said. The interiors remained a mid-century cocoon of orange, green, brown, and burgundy. Paintings by his parents’ friends hung on the walls; books that they had read lined the shelves. The apartment was a boon — a large two-bedroom in Manhattan — that Graeber shared lavishly. Friends, along with their partners and children, moved in for months or years rent free. As Graeber began teaching at Goldsmith’s in London, he was an intermittent roommate.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Graeber maintained an extended community of friends. He was an extravagant correspondent, a sender of pages-long emails. “I don’t know how it was humanly possible to have so many intimate relationships,” Çubukçu said. “At any point, he was dealing with multiple personal crises that his wide network of friends were going through.” The journalist Dyan Neary, a friend who lived for a time in the apartment, remembers Graeber as a constant visitor during the months she spent in the NICU following her daughter’s birth. He’d bring jelly candies and distract her with stories from the new book he was working on — Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
**
In a typical economics textbook, money gets invented because it is annoying to trade your chickens for your neighbor’s cows. Maybe you don’t want a cow when your neighbor needs some chickens; maybe what you want is shoes instead. Money: the solution to barter’s woes. Barter leads to money leads to banking and credit; this is “the founding myth of our system of economic relations,” Graeber wrote in Debt. There was, however, one notable problem. “There’s no evidence that it ever happened.” His fellow anthropologists had been “complaining about the Myth of Barter for almost a century,” and still it persisted — despite the fact that “to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of ‘I’ll give you 20 chickens for that cow.’”
And why would it? Such a scenario presupposes bizarre neighbors—detached from any kind of ongoing social existence, operating as economic automatons. Realistically, if you have cows and I have chickens, I give you a chicken and we say you owe me one. (Next week, maybe I come by and ask for milk.) People have always run tabs and relied on credit. More than that, they have always lived in webs of mutual dependence and obligation; the life of any community was threaded through with debts of different sorts. But debt changes when it breaks loose from actual human relations, when it becomes an impersonal asset to be bought and sold. This, Graeber wrote, was what had happened in our recent economic history. Debt had long served to shore up hierarchy, but lately, debt had also come to be treated as immutable. We’d lost what had once been the natural partner of debt: the possibility of forgiveness.
In his scholarly work, Graeber had studied value theory, asking how societies determine what is worthy and desirable — qualities more capacious than the field of economics would suggest. In Debt, he translated those questions for ordinary readers, yoking them to a contemporary problem of undeniable urgency. “I devoured that book,” the artist Thomas Gokey told me. Gokey’s work had dealt with debt in the past, so he’d done plenty of reading on the subject, and plenty of that reading was dull. “But when he wrote about it, it was lively. It’s about your relationship with your mother, it’s about your relationship with the gods — the entire cosmos is wrapped up in this thing that was also this absolutely brutal club that was just banging us over the head.”
The book arrived in the summer of 2011: after the bank bailout, after the subprime-mortgage crisis, as the effects of the Great Recession dragged on. It found many readers as eager as Gokey to understand the brutality of debt. That summer, a collection of activists began meeting in New York to plan an occupation in the Financial District. Graeber was among them. “We have a genuine horizontal structure up and running and it’s really fun (for geeks like me anyway),” he wrote in an email to a friend, the activist and writer Astra Taylor. “We wrested control from the WWP/ISO (did I mention this?) and even though it’s a silly Adbusters action we have to work with, it’s looking like the action might work out.” That fall, when Taylor showed up in the first days of Occupy Wall Street, she remembers Graeber greeting her like “a radical maître d’.”
“One thing that always struck me about David,” she told me, “is how much he enjoyed meetings.” Under the fluorescent lights of a church basement or at Zuccotti Park, Graeber was in his element. He seemed “almost gleefully” to savor the experience of being in a group doing direct democracy. The model of activism he’d first embraced ten years earlier (with consensus decision-making, many working groups, a leaderless general assembly) was attracting new attention with Occupy Wall Street — frequently, in the mainstream media, it was attracting skeptical condescension. But to Graeber, its structureless fluidity was the point. “He had an infinite patience for the frustrating aspects of that type of culture,” Taylor said. “He was really comfortable sitting there cross-legged and just listening, letting other people speak. He did not dominate. He never pulled rank.” As the guiding intellect of a horizontal, egalitarian movement, Graeber played a slightly paradoxical role. Bloomberg Businessweek hailed him as “the anti-leader of Occupy Wall Street.” When given credit for the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” Graeber declined to accept; he’d said something about 99 percent, he explained, but “two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them.” (The only reason he wasn’t naming his collaborators, he added, was “the way Police Intelligence has been coming after early OWS organizers.”)
Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and the author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal. “There’s a brilliance of a certain kind of philosopher that weaves incredibly dense — you know, Heidegger or something. David was the absolute antithesis of that,” he said. “He’s the kind of guy that will sit in a park and change your life.” And with Occupy, for many, Graeber did. Nicholas Mirzoeff, an NYU media-studies professor, met Graeber during this period. “There are certain people whose generosity makes you be the best version of yourself,” Mirzoeff said. “He would see something that you would say, and say, ‘That’s so interesting,’ and just ever-so-slightly recast it to make it a good deal smarter than maybe it necessarily originally was.” It was a tendency that seemed to spring from genuine curiosity about other people.. “I hesitate to use the word ‘empowerment,’” Çubukçu told me, “but he empowered people.”
In his 2013 book The Democracy Project, Graeber held that Occupy had “worked,” and the experience of Zuccotti Park left his enthusiasm for direct democracy undimmed. Others remembered the day-to-day reality with less warmth. “There’s this phrase, ‘Freedom is an endless meeting,’ and it’s not meant as a positive phrase,” Taylor said. “He just had really rose-colored glasses.” But whatever its frustrations, Occupy was the arena where ideas that later took hold much more broadly emerged. Gokey was part of an Occupy listserv where one day, he remembers, Graeber sent a message “that didn’t make sense to me” — something about secondary markets and buying up medical debts to forgive. “A week later I went back and reread it and I thought, Certainly this can’t be true,” Gokey told me. But he was intrigued enough to investigate further. The suggestion sent him deep into research on a “world where people’s pain is other people’s investment opportunities.” In time he had the beginnings of a strategy for a modern debt jubilee.
Graeber’s ability to forge connections was an asset in organizing — Strike Debt grew out of Occupy Wall Street, eventually uniting Gokey, Ross, Taylor, and other Graeber allies. ”It’s like he put a band together,” Taylor said. The members of the group realized they could purchase strangers’ high-risk loans for pennies on the dollar. Then, instead of trying to collect on the loans (as another investor would), they forgave them and sent the borrowers letters telling them they were free. In an early video produced by the group, Graeber and his friends burn collection notices and dance, their faces hidden behind balaclavas. Wrote Graeber in the video’s voice-over script: “Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities.”
By the end of 2013, the group had raised some $400,000 and used it to forgive nearly $15 million in loans. This was, of course, an infinitesimal fraction of the problem. But their goal (in addition to helping those they could) was to change the way people thought about debt. In The Democracy Project, Graeber discussed how, “in the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.” In this sense, Strike Debt — which forgave some $32 million, before shifting its focus to collective action as a debtors union — succeeded to a staggering degree. “During Occupy, we made a demand for full student-debt cancellation and to fully fund public universities,” Gokey told me. “We were ridiculed by everyone. By the media, by politicians, by the knowing, smug policy wonks.” At the time, their goals were treated as self-evidently absurd: “They want all student debt in the country forgiven. All $1 trillion of it. And if the government would be so kind, they’d appreciate it if it would pay for higher education from here on out, as well,” one Reuters commentator wrote.
Ten years later, a figure as unimpeachably Establishment as Chuck Schumer was calling for the forgiveness of student debt. Bernie Sanders had brought free college to the presidential stage in 2016, and by 2020, Democratic presidential candidates were arguing less over whether debt forgiveness was a good idea than over precisely how much to forgive. The safe-choice centrist who won the primary and then the presidency, Joe Biden, made free college access part of his platform. In one of her recent calls to cancel student loans, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed supporters to the Debt Collective, Strike Debt’s debtors-union successor. Full forgiveness may not be a political reality yet, but the terms of debate have changed.
**
In the years surrounding Occupy, Graeber was teaching in London, but he continued to see New York as his home. Then, in 2014, he lost his foothold in the city: the family apartment. Back in 2006, as his mother was dying, they’d tried to get him added to the lease. The paperwork had never gone through. Graeber remained in the apartment for years with no objection, but after Occupy, the co-op asked him to leave. He believed the timing suggested police interference. “Almost everyone mentioned in press as involved in early days of OWS has been getting administrative harassment,” he tweeted. “Evictions, visa problems, tax audits … Endless minor harassment arrests.”
Though he was perhaps slow to embrace it, London was where Graeber “really became the person he wanted to be,” Moon told me. After teaching for a time at Goldsmiths, he was hired as a full professor at LSE, an “institution that gives a little more space for people who fit into that classic public-intellectual mode,” as Hansen put it. Graeber still chafed against workplace habit — running late to meetings, avoiding his office phone — but he found a community of colleagues who welcomed him. He settled down in an apartment near Portobello Road, getting to know neighborhood shopkeepers and perusing the street market on weekends. When friends visited, he’d introduce them around, maybe take them to a local bookseller’s reggae band or go shopping for vintage clothes. Dubrovsky, who became his partner in London, remembers visits to their local coffee shop. “Every time we went in, David would have a chat about the merits of different kinds of ground coffee with a lovely employee,” she recalled. “Every time, he bought the same type of ground coffee.”
Dubrovsky and Graeber were friends and correspondents for years before they got together. The emails he sent were so extensive that she was sure at first she was “his major pen pal.” Soon she came to see that in fact he managed to send a great many people such long and thoughtful emails. (She later realized that he slept roughly five hours a night.) One of Graeber’s other correspondents was Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London. They met in professional circles and struck up a rapport after Graeber impressed him with his knowledge of Mesopotamian cylinder seals. Wengrow gave Graeber a copy of his book; Graeber read it and wrote him “this extraordinary email,” pages of ideas and feedback, Wengrow remembers, “and I thought, Wow, this is really fun!” He replied, the emails grew longer, and they had “probably written half a book” before they officially decided to collaborate on what would become The Dawn of Everything. Their plan was to pursue it strictly “in a spirit of fun,” as a respite from their other work. It was how Graeber liked to approach writing generally, said Dubrovsky. He’d write propped up in the bathtub or lying on the floor; that way, it didn’t feel like work.
He and Wengrow were serious in a certain sense: They were determined to publish extracts in peer-reviewed journals, to establish scholarly credibility. When they made their first submission, to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, they received brief comments dismissing their work as insufficiently “new.” Graeber was immediately distressed, convinced the anonymous reviewers had “some ax to grind.” Wengrow managed to calm him down while he replied on their behalf. Politely, Wengrow asked for examples of where exactly work like theirs had appeared before. The Journal was unable to produce any. It accepted the paper. Graeber was amazed. “How do you do that?” Wengrow remembers him marveling. “The man did not know how to handle stress,” another friend told me. A heated exchange on Twitter could derail him. Still, he refused to shy away. One persistent bugbear was the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong — after DeLong’s blog took him to task for a handful of factual errors in Debt, the two became entrenched in a protracted flamewar. (DeLong recently resurfaced, amid positive press for The Dawn of Everything, to affirm his stance that “nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.”)
But some economists (not Brad DeLong) embraced Debt; proponents of modern monetary theory saw him as an influence. Bullshit Jobs, another best seller, found language and theory for another widespread ill — meaningless work — and further expanded his readership. Chattaraj, Graeber’s Yale student, told me that the undergraduates she teaches as a professor at Ashoka University in India now come to her fired up to discuss the book. Graeber had new professional stability and new audiences, and he was conscious of the power his stature gave him to wield. “He had, in a way, very practical politics,” Taylor said. The goal, as he saw it, was to make people’s lives better. “Sometimes you do that by opening people’s imaginations, changing their self-understanding. Sometimes you can actually change policy — give people some fucking health care.”
It was in that spirit that he became a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. “I am not a political party guy,” Graeber told one interviewer. “The reason I support Corbyn, or am happy about him, is because he is willing to work with social movements.” Graeber had struck up a connection with John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer, through the People’s Parliament, an effort to bring ordinary Britons into the workings of government. James Schneider, who served as Corbyn’s communications director, said that Graeber was someone “sparking the imagination for what’s politically possible,” opening space for new ideas beyond positions the party was able to take. He was also a forceful ally in political fights. When the Labour Party faced accusations of anti-Semitism, Graeber recorded a video in Corbyn’s defense.
In a talk at the London Review Bookshop, Graeber described changing one’s mind as a kind of “political happiness” — the pleasure of realizing that you don’t have to keep thinking the things you’ve thought before. “I’m absolutely certain that for him to throw in so profoundly with an electoral campaign was a big deal,” Taylor told me. At the same time, “It’s not like he was a quiescent supporter of ours,” Schneider said. “He would challenge, he would push.”
One of the causes for which Graeber pushed was Rojava, and the Kurdish political project under way in northern Syria. Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, held prisoner by the Turkish government, had undergone a political conversion after reading the work of American anarchist Murray Bookchin. Where once Ocalan had been a fairly conventional leader of a conventional Marxist party, he was now urging his followers to look beyond such structure. Rojava, the Kurdish word meaning “West,” came to identify an autonomous region in northern Syria where the Kurds embarked on an experiment in local democratic government and cooperative economy with guiding principles that included equality for women and ecological responsibility.
For Graeber, the Kurdish project (and the wider world’s indifference) called to mind the Spanish Civil War. The revolution his father had been moved to defend had brought about “whole cities under directly democratic management, industries under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women,” he wrote in the Guardian. But the Fascists had crushed the Spanish Republic, and now ISIS menaced the Kurds. “I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we cannot let it end the same way again,” Graeber wrote. As an anarchist, he had a certain discomfort with the portraits of Ocalan that were everywhere in Rojava, Graeber told one interviewer — but a leader in jail for life was a leader he could tolerate.
Elif Sarican, a Kurdish activist and anthropologist, said that Graeber was “one of the first big names” to visit Rojava. “He was always so clear on the strategic and political importance of defending this revolution,” she told me. “He would say, ‘It’s not to say it’s perfect, and they’re not claiming it’s perfect themselves, but this is an objectively crucial and historic revolutionary situation happening, and we need to put our weight behind it.’” Debbie Bookchin, a journalist and Murray’s daughter, remembers discussing his plans for a quick 2019 trip to New York: He and Dubrovsky were getting married at City Hall, and he wanted Bookchin to attend. “I said, ‘Great! And by the way, while you’re here, how do you feel about doing a panel on Rojava?’” she told me and laughed. “Anybody else would have said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m flying in for four days. I’m going to have jet lag. I’m getting married. And now you’re asking me to do this?’ David, without a beat of hesitation, said, ‘Of course, absolutely.’ And of course, because David was on the program, we had an overflowing crowd.”
As part of international delegations traveling in support of the region, Graeber ate falafel amid ruins in Raqqa. He smoked his one annual cigarette (he’d been a heavy smoker in his youth) with Yazidi women fighters while visiting a training base. He had a tendency, sometimes exasperating to fellow travelers, of wandering off unannounced. One time he’d “gone for a wander” only to be found at a kiosk buying candy for Kurdish children, Sarican recalled. Visiting archaeological sites in Rojava, Graeber sent Wengrow exuberant texts about their book — years into their project, the two were still having fun. Indeed, they were still having fun after ten years, at which point the book was essentially complete. “We both found it too depressing — the idea of actually finishing,” Wengrow told me. Yet the conclusion had begun to sprawl. In August 2020, they called the book finished; they decided to continue in a sequel.
**
Pandemic life in London had been a challenge for Graeber: He was constitutionally averse to quarantine. “It was tough for David to abide by the rules of isolation, not go to the cafés, not meet with neighbors,” Dubrovsky recalled. He hated wearing masks. Early in 2020, they’d both felt sick but couldn’t get tested; out of loyalty to the NHS, he refused to see a private doctor, even as his symptoms dragged on. As the summer ended, Çubukçu was finishing a book review. She sent a draft and he wrote back right away. He told her that he’d read it, that he was on the train to Venice, and that he wasn’t feeling well at all.
He hoped, in somewhat the manner of a Victorian invalid, that the trip might improve his health. He’d been nursing “strange symptoms” for months, Dubrovsky remembers: aches, exhaustion, tingling fingers, a soapy taste in his mouth. But then: “He was never really in tip-top shape, from the moment I knew him,” Sarican pointed out. She was one of the friends who met Dubrovsky and Graeber in Venice, and on their second day, a group went to the beach. Graeber was eager to swim. “We were just being silly, jumping through the waves,” Sarican remembers. Graeber was saying how much it was like Fire Island, although the waves were bigger on Fire Island, he thought. “He just kept talking about his childhood in a way that I never really remembered David doing so much,” Sarican told me. “He spoke about his childhood quite a bit that day.”
After a walk and some ice cream, Graeber retreated to a café. When Sarican returned from one last swim, “he just seemed very unwell” — sweating profusely and in pain. She assumed he was having a bad reaction to something that he had eaten, but the paramedics, when they arrived, seemed more concerned. As he rode to the hospital, Dubrovsky followed behind in a cab; COVID regulations were in effect. She waited hours in an empty hall of the Ospedale SS Giovanni E Paolo for news. She called her adult daughter, who spoke a little Italian, and who did her best to translate what Dubrovsky was told. A scan had discovered internal bleeding, and doctors were preparing Graeber for surgery when he went into cardiac arrest. “He was joking with me,” Dubrovsky remembered — saying that things weren’t really so bad, that he’d be fine — “and then suddenly the doctors said he died.” The autopsy found that his cause of death was internal bleeding caused by pancreatitis necrosis. Later, the ER doctor who’d treated him told Dubrovsky that the condition could be triggered by a virus — perhaps COVID, but there was no way to know.
Graeber had been working on a short essay about COVID that was published after his death. The pandemic was “a confrontation with the actual reality of human life,” he wrote. “Which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated.” Surely it was the moment to stop taking such a state of affairs for granted, he wrote. “Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?”
This was not so different from things Graeber had been writing for years, but now it seemed more people were saying the same thing. Value and vulnerability and how each was assessed: the familiar understanding no longer served. Circumstance demanded the supposedly impossible.
デヴィッド・グレーバー
ウィキペディア
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/デヴィッド・グレーバー
デヴィッド・ロルフ・グレーバー（David Rolfe Graeber、1961年2月12日 – 2020年9月2日）は、アメリカの人類学者、 アナキスト・アクティヴィスト。 ロンドン・スクール・オブ・エコノミクスの人類学の教授を務めた 。妻がおり、グレーバーの死去を伝えたのも妻である。
『負債論──貨幣と暴力の5000年』、『官僚制のユートピア──テクノロジー、構造的愚かさ、リベラリズムの鉄則』、『ブルシット・ジョブ──クソどうでもいい仕事の理論』などの著作で知られる。
1998年から2007年までイェール大学で人類学の助教および准教授として、 価値の理論や社会理論の研究に従事する。 在職期間中にイェール大学が契約を更新しないと決定した際には、学術界で論争が起こった。2007年から2013年まではロンドン大学ゴールドスミス・カレッジで社会人類学を教えた。
2001年にはケベック・シティーの第3回米州首脳会議で、2002年にはニューヨークの世界経済フォーラムで抗議運動に加わる。2011年のウォール街を占拠せよ運動では指導的な役割を果たし、「私たちは99％だ（We are the 99%）」 のスローガンを考案したとされるが、 グレーバー自身は「99％」の部分を考えただけで、他の人間がそれをスローガンに発展させたと述べている。
2020年9月2日、イタリア・ヴェネツィアの病院で死去。享年59。
負債論 貨幣と暴力の5000年
by デヴィッド・グレーバー
translated by 酒井隆史、高祖岩三郎、佐々木夏子
重厚な書として異例の旋風を巻き起こした世界的ベストセラーがついに登場。
現代人の首をしめあげる負債の秘密を、貨幣と暴力の5000年史の壮大な展望のもとに解き明かす。資本主義と文明総体の危機を測定し、いまだ書かれざる未来の諸可能性に賭ける、21世紀の幕開けを告知する革命的書物。
人類にとって貨幣は、交換という利便性の反面、バブルなどの破局に向かう幻想の源泉でもある。人類史的な視座から、このような貨幣の本質からリーマン・ショックやギリシア・デフォルト問題などの国際的金融的危機を解明する壮大な構想を展開する。産業資本が衰退し、金融資本が質的、かつ量的に拡大する今日、現代資本主義を理解する上で必読の文献である。