David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and public intellectual whose work reshaped economic anthropology and inspired countless activists and thinkers. Best known for his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021, co-authored with David Wengrow), Graeber combined rigorous scholarship with incisive critiques of capitalism, bureaucracy, and social inequality.
His involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement and his coining of the slogan "We are the 99%" cemented his place as one of the leading left-wing thinkers of his generation.
Born in New York City to a working-class family steeped in radical politics, Graeber's parents shaped his intellectual and political development. His mother, Ruth Rubinstein, was a Polish-born garment worker and the star of the 1930s labour musical Pins and Needles. His father, Kenneth Graeber, a plate stripper from Kansas, fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Graeber grew up in the Penn South cooperative in Manhattan, a community steeped in leftist ideals, and had his first taste of activism as a child, joining his parents on peace marches.
Graeber's academic path was unconventional but brilliant. A gifted student, he developed a childhood passion for translating Mayan hieroglyphics, which led him to the prestigious Phillips Academy Andover on a scholarship.
He earned a BA in Anthropology from Purchase College (SUNY) in 1984 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1996. His doctoral research, conducted in highland Madagascar under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins, explored themes of magic, slavery, and political memory, laying the groundwork for his first significant ethnography, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007).
Graeber's earlier works include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), a concise manifesto exploring the potential of anarchist principles to transform society, and Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009), a detailed account of the global justice movement. His first book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001), explored the concept of value in human societies.
In his seminal work Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Graeber reexamined the history of debt, tracing its origins and its role in shaping human societies. The book critiques conventional economic narratives, arguing that debt has historically been used as a social and political control tool. This text won him worldwide acclaim.
Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) explored the proliferation of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs in modern capitalism, arguing that such roles serve no social purpose yet persist due to the logic of bureaucracy and power. The concept, first introduced in an essay in 2013, resonated widely and sparked a global conversation about the value of work.
Another major work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously. This ambitious book challenged conventional narratives about the origins of inequality and human social development.
At the time of his death, David Graeber was a professor at the London School of Economics. He was a scholar who crossed disciplinary boundaries.
Photo credit: davidgraeber.org
