David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at LSE and colossus of social movements worldwide, died yesterday in Venice, his wife announced on Twitter. He was 59 years old.
The cause of death was not immediately clear. On August 28, Graeber posted a Youtube video saying that he had been feeling under the weather but was starting to feel better.
With his work on theories of value, debt, and bureaucracy, Graeber was considered one of the finest modern anthropologists, and his larger-than-life role as a public intellectual attracted a considerable following among members and intellectuals of the modern Left.
Graeber’s public writings, among them Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015), and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), did much to solidify his status as a world-renowned critic of modern value and trailblazer of modern anarchist thought.
As much as he was an academic, he devoted much of his energy to the social movements which formed the core of his political and academic life. He took part in the 2002 protests at the World Economic Forum, and later rose to great prominence as one of the leading figures in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, where he is believed to have coined the phrase “We are the 99%”.
He was a long-time fixture in the movement for Kurdish autonomy, traveling to Rojava, the Kurdish libertarian socialist project in northeastern Syria, and working closely with Kurdish comrades to make the case for Rojava to the outside world.
He was a regular speaker at protests on LSE campus, and his influence over activism at LSE and around London was unmistakable. To his students and mentees in the Anthropology department, he was an intellectual firebrand with a reputation for intense office hour debates and a teaching style which placed his classroom sessions at the centre of his intellectual life, using weekly sessions with students to sharpen his own theoretical work. To the broader LSE community, he was a rare breed of public intellectual tirelessly committed to developing the next generation of thinkers and activists.
Born in 1961 to working-class Jewish intellectuals in New York, Graeber’s childhood interactions with radicalism suffused his later intellectual life. His father once fought for the anarchists in Barcelona during the civil war, and Graeber once said that he was an anarchist by the age of 16. He later rejected the label, preferring to see it as a philosophy of action rather than an identity.
After earning his PhD at the University of Chicago with a thesis on magic, slavery, and politics, Graeber joined the anthropology faculty at Yale. Yale’s decision to not rehire him when he was otherwise eligible for tenure ignited substantial controversy, with allegations that had been targeted for his outspoken public activism, in particular his support for a student who had been identified for expulsion by the university for her membership in a graduate students’ union, which were barred by the school at the time. Between 2008 and 2013 he was a reader and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He joined the London School of Economics as Professor of Anthropology in 2013, where he taught courses on theories of value. He had previously given the 2006 Malinowski Lecture at the School, an honor reserved for early-career anthropologists who have made a substantial contribution to anthropological theory.
In a statement, Professor Laura Bear, Head of Department, LSE Anthropology said “We are very shocked and saddened to learn of David Graeber’s death. David was a hugely influential anthropologist, political activist and public intellectual. He will be greatly missed as a friend and colleague in our department. Our community of staff and students will not be the same now he is gone, but we know his brilliant work will be read by generations to come.”
He is survived by his wife, artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky.
