David Graeber

David Wengrow

A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

A New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything

From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

A Theory

Bullshit Jobs

Presents a tour through ancient and modern history to trace the evolution of bureaucracy while assessing the efficiencies and casualties of its practices in the modern world.

On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

The Utopia of Rules

In this work, David Graeber explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of the state, political violence, and social inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of the state? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Explores the idea of democracy, its current state of crisis, and its potential as a tool for change, sharing historical perspectives on the effectiveness of democratic uprisings in various times and cultures.

A History, a Crisis, a Movement

The Democracy Project

A radical anthropologist studies the global justice movement.

An Ethnography

Direct Action

A fascinating chronicle of little known history of Debt Must we always repay our debts? Wasnt money invented to replace ancient barter systems? Apparently not, according to Yale-bred anthropologist David Graeber. In a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom, Graeber radically challenges our understanding of debt. He illustrates how, for more than 5000 years long before the invention of coins or bills there existed debtors and creditors who used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods. He argues that Madagascar was held to be indebted to France because France invaded it, reminds us that texts from Vedic India included God in credit systems and shows how the dollar changed European society forever in the sixteenth century. He also brilliantly demonstrates how words like guilt, sin and redemption derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history of how it has defined the evolution of human society, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

The First 5000 Years

Debt

An anthropologist investigates the revolution of everyday life.

Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire

Possibilities

Today's capitalist systems appear to be coming apart. But as financial instutions stagger and crumble, leaving chaos in their wake, their seems to be no obvious alternative. Yet there may be good reason to believe that, in generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist for the simple reason that it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. In this collection of essays, anthropolgist David Graeber explores political strategy, global trade, debt,imagination, violence, alienation and creativity looking for a new common sense.

Revolutions in Reverse

El nuevo esclavismo. Pasarse la vida trabajando en algo totalmente innecesario. Un trabajo de mierda. ¿Su trabajo tiene algún sentido para la sociedad? En la primavera de 2013, David Graeber hizo esta pregunta en un ensayo lúdico y provocativo titulado "Sobre el fenómeno de los trabajos de mierda". El artículo se volvió viral. Después de un millón de visitas en línea en diecisiete idiomas diferentes, la gente sigue debatiendo la respuesta. Hay millones de personas: consultores de recursos humanos, coordinadores de comunicación, investigadores de telemarketing, abogados corporativos..., cuyos trabajos son inútiles, y ellos lo saben. Estas personas están atrapadas en unos trabajos de mierda. Olvide a Piketty o Marx; es Graeber, uno de los antropólogos y activistas más influyentes del momento, quien dice alto y claro que muchas de las tareas que se realizan en una economía de esclavos asalariados son una forma de empleo tan carente de sentido, tan innecesaria o tan perniciosa que ni siquiera el propio trabajador es capaz de justificar su existencia, y pese a ello se siente obligado a fingir que no es así. La crítica social que persigue el libro es sólida y aguda, especialmente cuando introduce categorías tan refinadas como los "trabajos chapuza", que realizan determinados empleados para, por ejemplo, mantener en funcionamiento máquinas viejas y ahorrarle a la empresa la compra de nueva maquinaria. No deja de tener su lógica, ya que, como dijo Orwell, "una población que está ocupada trabajando, aunque sea en tareas totalmente inútiles, no tiene tiempo para hacer mucho más". De ahí que, como concluye Graeber, lo que tengamos sea una mierda permanente.

Una teoría

Trabajos de mierda

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century's end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks. But instead, something curious happened. Today, average working hours have not decreased, but increased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services or admin, jobs that don't seem to add anything to society- bullshit jobs. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.

Capitalism is Just a Really Bad Way of Organizing Communism

Marshall Sahlins

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world's most distinguished anthropologists--David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins--explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition. Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia--not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial--Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world, from the BaKongo to the Aztec to the Shilluk to the eighteenth-century pirate kings of Madagascar and beyond. Richly delivered with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of Graeber and Sahlins, this book opens up new avenues for the anthropological study of this fascinating and ubiquitous political figure.

On Kings

David Graeber is not only one of today's most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He is also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact on the international left cannot be overstated. Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism--as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or "bullshit jobs" as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile from the American academy. In short, Anarchy--In a Manner of Speaking presents a series of interviews with a first-rate intellectual, a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk. Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman ask Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discusses the meaning of anarchist ethics--not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) "anarchist morality" today.

Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman

Anarchy--In a Manner of Speaking

Praca bez sensu. Teoria

Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems--to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There's not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods--that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like "guilt," "sin," and "redemption") derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history--as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

David Graeber

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