Progressives the world over are mourning the tragic and untimely death of anthropologist David Graeber. He was one of the few academics who truly “walked the talk,” blending his activism and anarchism with original and pathbreaking research. Graeber is possibly best known for his involvement with Occupy Wall Street (he is frequently credited with coining the term “the 99%”) and his controversial dismissal from Yale University. I did not know him personally but am familiar with some of his professional work, some of which I would like to discuss here.
My first encounter with David Graeber was reading his Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). It is a fascinating historical and anthropological account that greatly informs economics and economic thinking. One especially notable insight concerns how the outsized historical influence of the market on human affairs changes language in a way that suits the power structure. Graeber asks the reader to consider that our recognition of an “obligation” in a qualitative sense has, over time, been eroded and supplanted by quantitative debt. Today debt and obligation can almost be considered synonyms. Our sense of ethics, moral obligation, and justice has therefore, according to Graeber, been reduced to mere “business.” Money has turned morality into impersonal arithmetic and in so doing legitimized all kinds of barbarities and atrocities in the name of debt collection.
Debt, in other words, is and always has been about power, a fact that economists have worked hard to sanitize by emphasizing “free exchange” and “rationality.” But in so doing, Graeber argues, economics disregards how power is often brought to bear on unequal relationships, perpetuating and intensifying them. It is why our tendency to describe the present economic system as “markets” (instead of capitalism) is dangerously misleading. Traditionally, both Confucianism and Islam were decidedly pro-market, according to Graeber, in their belief that astute risk-taking should be incentivized and rewarded. I personally find nothing objectionable here. But today’s economic policies of bailing out corporations, socializing risk, and creating moral hazard could not be more far removed from the utopian market ideal.
Another of Graeber’s books, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory(2018), was conceived from an unexpectedly fervent response to his much shorter essay on the same subject. Hundreds of readers believing their jobs made no contribution to society furnished him with first-hand accounts to support his claim…well, that bullshit jobs are proliferating. Much of his book is devoted to reporting on the depressing experiences of his subjects and analyzing them from a psychological, historical, political, and economic perspective. His contrast among five different “types” of bullshit jobs – flunky, goon, duct taper, box ticker, and task master – is both highly original and colorful.
It was not without trepidation that I assigned Bullshit Jobs to my seniors this past Spring, wondering if Graeber’s explicitly anarchist views would provoke a backlash. But as it turns out, for many of my students the book resonated. A number of them identified with the suffering of Graeber’s subjects. Here is a sample of their feedback:
I was hired as an intern [at The Economist] just so the company could claim that they contributed towards the development of today’s youth; essentially, I was a flunky…My position required me to make useless spreadsheets…most days I was bored and stuck in a cubicle. I would browse YouTube and play ping pong with other interns for at least a couple of hours.
I spent my summer at JPMorgan as an intern. I was in the office 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing meaningless and pointless jobs and assignments. I don’t think that anything I was told to do was anything productive for the department…Most of the time they ran out of things to give me and I would try to find busy work to make the day go by…
I am sitting in the HR office by myself… I am able to do any homework I may have or catch up on shows that I am watching…I would consider this a box ticker bullshit job because I am only here so the company can say they have an HR associate for people to talk to…
Experiences such as these offer examples of “spiritual violence,” which, Graeber argues, is committed against the many millions who have to work at jobs that serve no social purpose. The worst indignity, according to many respondents, is having to pretend to be busy. Graeber repeatedly disabuses his readers of their cherished beliefs about human nature, here contradicting the conventional view that most people are inherently lazy. Another is the widespread idea that greed is what causes people to do evil things. Graeber relates an experience meeting a young Wall Street trader during the Occupy Wall Street movement who told him that he agreed with him about all the injustice in the system and that if it were not for all his debt burdens he would work with him to bring down the system instead of slaving away for the finance masters. A recurrent theme in both books is that debt, not greed, causes people to do evil things. He cites the example of Hernán Cortés, but he could just as well have been referring to Bernie Madoff.
We like to pretend that serious scholarship must be dispassionate, but David Graeber’s writings illuminate how ostensibly “objective” research is invariably laden with biases and preconceptions. Because those in power control most of the published media, the biases invariably serve to uphold the status quo. David Graeber was a serious scholar precisely because, unlike most, he allowed his scholarship to inform his activism, and vice-versa. He was the rare public intellectual who spoke truth to power. There should be more like him.