AS A COMPILATION of the late David Graeber’s work, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . has several tasks, each of which it executes more fully than one might expect from a posthumous odds and sods collection. Capturing what this rogue anthropologist thought and how he thought is not that easy, as he occupied an uneasy kind of pole position in both academia and activism, where he was referenced as much as he was resented. This book shows the breadth of Graeber’s subjects of engagement—from anarchist pirates to hunter-gatherers—and his core strength, which was also an impediment: a dogged interest in root causes and a voracious need to help effect material change, both of which revved him up way past the safe operating speeds of academic research. Who else but a reckless omnivore would dare write (with David Wengrow) a book called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity? As to whether this variety of omnivore is what people, or the American left, needs, the jury is very much out. Me? I side with the reckless while noting that I have more often consulted Marxists like Stuart Hall or Mike Davis, who scan the world at a slower pace. But it might be Graeber whose agitations put me in mind to do the consulting in the first place.
He found a way to be both a public intellectual and an academic, a scholar with the fervor of the preacher and a pundit with the depth of a teacher. After losing his position at Yale in 2006, Graeber unexpectedly got a public upgrade in 2011 with Debt: The First 5,000 Years, an actual hit book by an actual anthropologist (with another modest title). That same year, his central role as part of Occupy Wall Street, where he helped coin the phrase “we are the 99%,” made him the face of a movement that didn’t typically look to present faces. He went on to secure a position at the London School of Economics, where he thrived until a very unexpected death at fifty-nine in 2020 from pancreatitis, possibly brought on by Covid.
The American left is a strange cohort, stocked with strong writers and rhetoricians, few of whom ever manage to find any leverage when it comes to affecting the operations of the State. Graeber stuck out of the academic pack not just for being a loud anthropologist in the midst of bitter theorists but for being generally affable and optimistic, definitely a soft fruit in the hard stollen of left doomism after the failures of the anti-war movements of the 2000s and the dissolution of Occupy. (Of the ten reasons Graeber offered to explain why he fired from Yale, one reads: “In extremely hierarchical environments, being nice is often seen as impertinent or subversive—at least, if one is equally friendly and sympathetic to everyone.”) In Britain, a country small enough to offer the left some purchase, Graeber threw his weight behind Jeremy Corbyn, a move that hinged, in part, on their mutual support of Palestine and a shared fight against Israel’s aggression. Though there are no pieces about Israel in The Ultimate Hidden Truth, Graeber has floated back to the surface of left-adjacent discourse during the genocide thanks to his vocal support of Palestine, especially one clip where he defends Corbyn against accusations of anti-Semitism, describing himself as a New York Jew raised “as a left-wing Zionist.” It is not hard to imagine that he would have been in the streets over these past sixteen months. As his friend and comrade Astra Taylor put it to me, “He would be such a powerful voice for Gaza and such a powerful caller of people’s bullshit, probably on Twitter. I think he would be unappreciated by a lot of people because he definitely liked to get into it on social media, but I think he’d be beating up on the right folks right about now.”
You get some of that vernacular flavor in this collection. Most of the pieces in Ultimate Hidden Truth originally ran in general-interest magazines like The Baffler and Harper’s,as well as academic journals and more partisan titles like STRIKE!. A long interview with Hannah Chadeayne Appel for Radical History Review in 2014 is, as the greengrocers say, worth the price of admission. After going over his parents’ lineage—father descended from “radical shoemakers” in Prussia, mother a Polish singer (on Broadway, even) and member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—and his childhood passages in New York between public and private schools, he cracks open his relationship to anarchism, possibly the idea that he did the most to rehabilitate or at least repopularize (not that it needed rehabilitation or became popular). Anarchism was known to him through his father and a cousin, but only kicked in as a practice for Graeber after he heard about the repression of the WTO protest in Seattle in 2000. After becoming involved in direct action for a decade, Graeber saw the Occupy movement as the proof of concept he had hoped for.
Graeber told Appel, “One of the things I would say about the emergence of Occupy is, at some point, you find yourself organizing your life around something that, on some level, you don’t think is going to happen. We’d always had this idea that direct democracy is contagious. It will be. You can’t explain it to people, but if people actually experience it, it changes their life; they can’t go back.” He describes being a “generational bridge,” calling up older activists to enlist their help. This is where the interview hits Graeber ore, the material that made his contributions so crucial to the left. He mentions that the Occupy movement “is constantly reinventing itself” and nods to Strike Debt, a decentralized network of debt resisters he helped establish in 2012, which buys and erases portfolios of unsecured debt. (Strike Debt relieved some $32 million in loans before shifting to become the Debt Collective, a union of debtors that remains active.) Graeber goes on to talk about “the holding-space tactic—the importance of the camp or the community,” attributing the origins of the technique to “Tahrir Square and Tunisia,” and also name-checks Syntagma and Plaça de Catalunya. He described the Zuccotti Park encampment “as the most potent way of destroying their legitimacy and authority.” When Graeber talks about “performing exemplary love in front of this symbol of the impossibility of a society based on that,” it is impossible not to think of the 2024 Columbia University encampments. In my brief time there last year, in the summer heat that obtained right up until the NYPD raid, the students and comrades in the encampment lived out a minor example of lived love, right in front of Miller Library. Volunteers kept spritzing me with water and offering me pizza, all of it unprompted. When somebody bumped into somebody else, a volunteer said, “Walk kindly!” This is all, of course, fodder for mockery on the internet, but the “Another World Is Possible” bumper sticker was not at all abstract inside the encampments. And that feeling is the kernel of political action, of a life lived with the belief that politics is not participation in abstracted debates but a commitment to keep reorganizing your thinking about how you relate to others. (This approach to politics works agnostic as to ideology; it holds true even for a formation like fascism, in which people definitely exist, if only as bodies to be bulldozed.) “Feeling” is an unfortunate word to describe all the instances in which solidarity and “exemplary love” prove themselves as sustainable ways of life, especially on the tundra of Marxist mansplainery. But real does, in fact, recognize real, and feelings can, very dialectically, be facts.
“His perception that the world could be made and remade or made differently was also very much rooted in his work as an anthropologist and the studying of different cultures,” Taylor told me. “People have completely different value systems. They have different conceptions of metaphysics and theology. They have different rituals. They have different conceptions of mental states. These are real things.”
The idea that Graeber helped turn into something that people could hold, and possibly throw away, was debt, whose nature was newly scrutinized in the wake of the 2007–08 collapse. “The way we talk about finance, it’s almost completely removed from actual social relations, let alone class, which is of course what Occupy has always been about,” Graeber told Appel. Graeber explains that Wall Street types practicing financialization were not actually extracting their profit from industry. He clarifies that “what financialization actually means is they collude with the government through various elaborate forms of bribery to change the law so as to put everyone deeper and deeper in debt.” You can feel him, in this interview, polishing his guillotine when he cites “rent extraction” as the primary source of profit for the “ruling class” (a phrase whose nineteenth-century overtones never disappoint). It is hard not to think of Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s brilliant Abolish Rent, in part, as rain from Graeber’s cloud of thought.
You can feel Graeber getting in front of his skis and calling attention to it as the interview with Appel goes on. He says that “Marxists take me to task for ignoring the basic tenets of Marxism,” clarifying that this is not necessarily a problem because there are tenets he takes “for granted.” When Appel asks Graeber about writing Debt: The First 5000 Years and how an anthropologist might deal with “five thousand years differently from a historian,” his answer is perhaps more of a confession than a mission statement. He says, in part, “historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane.” As hard as I ride for Graeber and his love of results, this is, in fact, an insane thing to say about all historians, many of whom routinely engage in fruitful speculation and theoretical elaboration.
What this reminds me of is the split between abolitionists and criminal-justice-reform workers around the issue of closing the Rikers Island prison complex. On the larger issue of the present carceral state, there is very little disagreement: it must go. But the approaches vary wildly when it comes to the fate of the people on Rikers Island (now above six thousand in population because other jails have closed). The tension between the horizon work of abolitionists and the incrementalism of people working inside state agencies is never more clear than in the struggle around the prison island, and this is the seam where his activist and academic work meet. For example, abolitionists have been opposing what is called the “borough-based” plan, a form of “community-oriented” incarceration which will build new jails in four out of five boroughs. That outcome is the goal of the incrementalists, who are giving the incarcerated bigger facilities that are closer to the courts, with air-conditioning (unlike Rikers) and more parking space for their relatives. But any new jail is anathema for abolitionists. That said, their slogans and horizons are what bring in the younger activists. If you say “no new jails,” people show up. And when you say “no new jails,” and that succeeds, who bears the brunt of that decision? In a very bitter irony, the incarcerated. Graeber grappled with the contradictions that reform and revolution pose to each other, a tension that Bakunin and Marx brought to list, as did a few before them. Graeber brought in new recruits with “we are the 99%” and then also made it concrete with initiatives like Strike Debt! And always through collective processes. His ability to walk his own talk is as much a model as anything he wrote.
Graeber’s 2013 article for Strike! on the “phenomenon of bullshit jobs” led to the 2018 book of (almost) the same name and is a perfect encapsulation of Graeber’s ability to see a social problem and launch it into the mainstream of discourse. He loved generalizing principles from anecdotal instances—always tempting for a writer and often a long shot that can sink the whole enterprise—like his indie-rocker friend who went into corporate law. “He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist,” Graeber writes. We trust this, sure—they knew each other and we believe his friend said this. But Graeber rarely found a penny he didn’t instantly try to sell as a hundred-dollar bill: “I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit,” he extrapolates, shaking the podium.
But this is what made Graeber Graeber, and those leaps between buildings are both dangerous and convinced people he was brave enough to be followed. Who is going to look up to the person who writes something like “Corporate lawyers aren’t all bad, of course”? Not me! You want Graeber to swing for the fences and he did not let strikeouts deter him. Defend nurses? My guy was on it.
For instance: in our society, 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. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.
I love the moments when Graeber tips his hand and acknowledges that he is researching like a prospector, feeling the truth in his bones. Specifically, it is genuinely amusing to say “an objective measure is hard to find” about an idea that is at least partly available through slow parsing of labor statistics. You likely get his point, that it is hard for anybody to assert with authority which jobs do and don’t benefit others, but this is certainly not beyond the scope of scholarship. An “objective measure” for this idea does not seem like an impossible task for a more patient researcher, but that particular kind of patience does not create titles like Bullshit Jobs. And in the wake of Graeber’s book, it has become fairly common to see discussion of the PMC, aka the Professional Managerial Class, one of the most bullshit examples of Graeber’s bullshit categories. But the real spike in the use of PMC came in 2008, after the financial crash. Graeber’s careening way of dowsing, whether it was in the name of dismantling Keynes or tossing out ready-mades about bartering chickens for cows, tended to follow the course of very real events, some of them so big you had to run away to see them clearly.
Sasha Frere-Jones, a writer and musician living in the East Village, is the author of Earlier (Semiotext(e), 2023).