David Graeber - American Anarchist

Full transcript: David Graeber on London Real

0:00 David Graeber: Democracy. We live in a democracy, democracy is what makes us great, we’re going to kill people to defend democracy, but we don’t actually believe in democracy.

Everything we do is regulated, but we don’t think about it. The fact that you’re constantly being threatened with violence every moment of the day.

Direct action means trying to solve your own problems rather than trying to get other people to intervene.

When there’s a natural disaster, everybody reverts to communism, ironically, because it’s the only thing that works.

The whole idea of not forming links with political parties, not taking money, is that you’ll never be in a position where you say one thing in public and another thing at home.

Brian Rose: London Real presents David Graeber, American Anarchist.

David Graeber: I think we managed to get the government really scared.

1:08 Brian Rose: This week on the show we have the London School of Economics professor, Mr David Graeber. He is an anthropologist and anarchist activist, and he was one of the guys literally on ground zero for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He coined the term “We are the 99%”.

David is the real deal. He’s been pushing against government in a huge way his entire career. He was thrown out of Yale in America, which is why he’s here in London. He’s got amazing ideas, including a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and he talks about the concept of bullshit jobs. It took me, I think, nine months to finally get David to come on our show, but it’s well worth the wait.

He debated Peter Thiel, the billionaire, out in San Francisco last year. He’s just a fascinating guy with so many intelligent lessons about why we innovate as humans. He doesn’t believe we do it for money; he says we do it for other reasons, and he might be onto something. The other thing that’s interesting is he says debt was the first instrument used to trade goods. It actually wasn’t money.

David has a lot of fascinating things to say and I really think you’re going to enjoy it. I love getting back to our roots with the Occupy movement and activists, because I think they have a lot to tell us, in addition to the entrepreneurs and crazy people like Dan Peña. So I hope you enjoy.

2:40 [London Real promo removed]

6:10 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is David Graeber, who is an anthropologist and anarchist activist currently teaching at the London School of Economics, previously at Yale. You’ve been involved in anti-authoritarian social movements such as the global justice movement and Occupy Wall Street, where you were credited with creating the term “We are the 99%”. You’ve written a dozen books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years and The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. You have debated the billionaire Peter Thiel on capitalism and studied everything from magic in Madagascar to manners in early modern Europe. David, welcome to London Real.

David Graeber: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Rose: I’m glad we finally did this. I was watching your debate with Peter Thiel last night, and before we get to the rest of the good stuff, I just want to know: what’s it like debating a multi-billionaire? The guy that created PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, a very eccentric dude. How did that happen and what was it like?

David Graeber: He actually contacted me. He’d read something I’d written and liked it a lot, and then he discovered that I’d just written something about technology, and it turned out we had one of the same pet peeves. We were both people who grew up, you know, I was seven years old when the moon landing happened, of that generation that was taught that all this science fiction stuff was actually going to happen. Everybody said so. You went to the observatory, or to science class, or read National Geographic, and they talked about all the space stations we’d have by the 90s and the Mars shots we’d have in 2000. We all expected that we’d be doing all this stuff that we now just have in movies.

People of my generation have this common sense of bitter disappointment. We didn’t expect we were going to get everything, teleportation, anti-gravity shoes, all that kind of stuff, but it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t get any of it, and none of it happened. So even though politically we’re on opposite poles in a lot of ways, there’s one thing we’re both really angry about, and we totally see eye to eye. Not only are we angry about it, but we’re actually interested in trying to think about what it would take to turn things around, so we actually do get there.

Brian Rose: In his book Zero to One, it’s funny, because the guy that’s known for PayPal and Facebook is the one that’s so disappointed in what the tech industry has brought us, and he knows better than anybody. He said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I think that’s his joke, and he was probably an investor in Twitter. So he was disappointed: where are the real technological advancements?

David Graeber: Yes. I remember going to see one of the Star Wars prequels. It was a terrible movie, but the special effects were really good, and I’m looking at it saying, wow, remember those cheesy science fiction movies from the 50s, dragging tin cans on strings and stuff like that? If those guys could see this, they’d be really impressed. And then I realised, no, they wouldn’t. They thought we’d actually be doing this stuff by now. All we’ve done is come up with an amazing way to simulate it.

I thought, oh right: the simulacrum, the end of history, ironic repetition, the hyperreal, all this postmodern stuff. It’s ultimately the cry of pain of people who expected to be on Mars by now, and all they got is these amazing computer simulations. They can’t talk about that, because nowadays if you say “But I expected we were going to be on Mars,” they say, “Sucker, you’re a chump for believing this.” So we can’t actually complain about what we’re really complaining about, and they come up with a fancy language to express what otherwise can’t be expressed.

10:15 Brian Rose: And you and Peter think it has to do with our incentive structure. It’s funny, for a guy that made a bunch of money in tech, you would think he would be a quote-unquote capitalist, but he doesn’t believe in the market.

David Graeber: He knows better than anybody.

Brian Rose: And he doesn’t really believe in fierce competition in the market. He believes in creating a monopoly and being able to run that as a business.

David Graeber: Yes, that’s very interesting in a way, because he does recognise that this sort of frenetic competition doesn’t bring out people’s creativity. When you put out questions for people to send in, one of the ones I got was: do you think having a free society where everybody’s equal is going to have terrible effects on innovation, because people need monetary incentives to create things? I think history shows exactly the opposite.

Brian Rose: They were saying an anarchist society wouldn’t give people the monetary incentive to invent. That was their question.

David Graeber: And I’d say, no, it would give people the means and the time to invent. Have you ever met a rich inventor? I guess there are one or two that actually made it. But the vast majority of inventors know perfectly well they’re going to get ripped off, and they do it anyway. We have a system that incentivises creative people terribly. They almost always get crushed, destroyed, ripped off or exploited, but they still do it. If anything proves that people don’t just do this for the money, this is it. I can’t imagine a society that could incentivise people less to be really creative and inventive. People are creative and inventive because they’re creative and inventive. The question is how to get them the means.

The conclusion I came to in that piece I wrote about flying cars, and why there’s so little scientific and technological creativity now, was this: it isn’t rocket science, except in so far as it is. If you want to maximise creativity, get a bunch of creative people and just let them be. Give them whatever resources they need, give them a comfortable place to stay, maybe let them hang out with each other. A lot of them will come up with nothing, but a few of them will probably come up with something that even they wouldn’t have imagined.

If you want to minimise the possibility of creative breakthroughs, it’s also pretty easy to see how to do that. You get those same people and tell them, “We’re not going to give you any resources at all unless you spend most of your time competing with one another to prove to me that you already know what you’re going to invent.” Well, that’s the system we’ve got now, and it’s hardly surprising we don’t have any of these new technologies.

Brian Rose: And that first scenario you’re talking about sounds like a university.

David Graeber: That was the old idea.

Brian Rose: Where you could just think. These days, especially in a place like Silicon Valley, you have to find the funds, prove the capital, compete, compete, compete to the very top, and then there’ll be a winner.

David Graeber: And it’s absurd, because people end up spending all their time writing grants, reading grants, trying to cut down other people’s grants, reviewing things. People have said Einstein would have been destroyed. His stuff wouldn’t have been published; he never would have got to the point where he could publish it. And look at the people who are actually responsible for creative breakthroughs, not just the scientists but the social thinkers. You don’t even have to talk about real weirdos like Nietzsche. What about anybody from Max Weber to Foucault or Deleuze? All these guys are the heroes of the academy nowadays, and none of them would have got tenure in a university. They would have been kicked out as weirdos almost immediately.

13:50 Brian Rose: We’ll talk about your tenure situation in America, but just to finish up on Peter: you said that while you agreed on a few things, there were some big blind spots he had. Is that because of his wealth?

David Graeber: I think the most telling thing in that debate was when he was saying, why are you all worried about inequality? All you need to do is create a free environment where people can pursue their visions and be rewarded for it, and things will flow by themselves. And I said, well, the problem we have is that 98% of the people who could be coming up with new, innovative ideas are working 12 hours a day in a Nike factory in Indonesia, because their father got kicked off the land by some neoliberal reform and this is the only way they can feed their family. Who knows what those people could be inventing if they actually had the time?

I did a TED talk once, and I kind of did the anti-TED talk. I don’t know if anybody ever noticed. It was a TEDx, and I talked about political pleasure, but the point I made is that it’s not as if we’re lacking good ideas. There’s probably not a single person in the world who couldn’t come up with one creative idea, or some creative solution to a problem, that none of us would have anticipated. Everybody’s got something like that in them. The problem is that the vast majority of people on earth are told to shut up every day. Nobody cares what they think. If we created a system that opened that up, we’d have an endless deluge of potential solutions to problems. That’s what people like Peter Thiel don’t recognise: there are structures of violence telling people to shut up, because it didn’t happen to them.

Brian Rose: Structures of violence?

David Graeber: Yes. If you’re in a situation where the only way you can support your family is to work in a factory or become a prostitute, or whatever you have to do as a poor person in Indonesia, that is a structure of violence. If you don’t do that, you can’t have food. If you try to take the food, they’ll hit you, they’ll lock you up.

Brian Rose: An economic prison.

David Graeber: Yes. These things can only be enforced, ultimately, by violence. I call it structural violence: a set of rules that couldn’t exist without ultimately appealing to someone with a stick or a gun to beat you up if you break the rules.

16:15 As an anarchist, people ask me all the time: you’re for the NHS, right? You’re for public resources. Isn’t that government? How can you be an anarchist and be for that? I always say I make a distinction between institutions that could exist without violence and ones that couldn’t. Any institution that could exist without ultimately being able to call up somebody with a stick or a gun to say, “I don’t care what you think, shut up and do what you’re told,” if you can still run the organisation without recourse to that, that’s fine.

Brian Rose: And that includes the NHS. What other organisations?

David Graeber: It’s a test. We don’t really know until we try. But any sort of collective management of some resource could be organised without violence.

Brian Rose: So is that the more systematic definition of an anarchist? I think most people don’t know what an anarchist is. They have this extreme image in their mind, someone in history throwing a bomb.

David Graeber: Well, that’s one of the ironies. Everybody’s got in their minds the idea of a bomb-throwing anarchist. If you look at the last 50 years, anarchism is probably the only political movement whose exponents never bombed anybody. When’s the last time an anarchist blew somebody up? Conservatives, liberals, social democrats, they blow people up all the time. We never blow anybody up. Why are we the bomb throwers?

Brian Rose: But you have a PR problem. Anarchy needs a little bit of PR.

David Graeber: There’s nothing that makes the people running things more upset. If you say, “You’re evil, I want to kill you,” they don’t like that, but in a way they do, because it makes them important. If you say, “You’re completely pointless and unnecessary, we’re going to carry on without you,” that really annoys people. So anarchism annoys the people in power a lot more than people who simply hate them.

Brian Rose: So you ignore the government. Is that how you become empowered as an anarchist?

David Graeber: That’s the idea of direct action. I once said that direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if you’re already free. That’s the difference between protest, or civil disobedience, and direct action. With civil disobedience you say, “I think this is terrible, I’m going to block the streets, I’m going to surround your office,” but you’re ultimately trying to make the people in power change their minds. In direct action, you’re ignoring them.

Gandhi was actually a famous direct actionist in that sense. The salt march: instead of saying “We won’t pay our taxes” or “We’re going to sit down and block city hall until you get rid of the monopoly on salt,” he said salt should be a human right, we’re going to march down and make salt, and you try to stop us.

Brian Rose: Was the Occupy movement direct action?

David Graeber: It was, in that sense, because the idea of the Occupy movement was exactly that. Everybody’s got creative ideas, nobody’s listening to us, to hell with politicians. We’re going to set up structures that could exist in a free society, where people organise themselves, and show that representative democracy isn’t necessary. We can collectively make decisions by ourselves using a non-hierarchical, directly democratic approach. So running the camp was a model for how you could run anything.

Brian Rose: That was at Zuccotti Park.

David Graeber: Zuccotti Park, yes, and probably millions of people across the world did similar things in different squares. It really started in Tunisia and Egypt, Tahrir, then went on to Greece and Spain, the Syntagma and the Puerta del Sol. A lot of those people actually helped us. I think there was one guy from Egypt there, and definitely people from Greece and Spain in Zuccotti Park. And from Zuccotti Park it spread all over the world.

19:40 Brian Rose: How were you involved in those first few days of Occupy? It’s funny, I have my pre-interview form here, which a lot of people hate, including you, but you said you’d been doing things all your life. You had thoughts about the 9/11 attacks, probably about the financial crisis, all these pieces, but it was always the wrong timing, Yale tenure, the wrong timing. With Occupy, what you’d been saying your whole life seemed to synchronise with other people at the same time.

David Graeber: I had really bad timing, in the sense that I came out as an anthropological theorist at just the point where anthropology decided it didn’t like theory any more. I came out as a proponent of direct action, and then 9/11 happened two weeks later. That didn’t look too good. It was a kind of direct action, but not really the kind I was talking about. This kept happening to me over and over again. I had the worst timing in the world.

And then one day it all came together. In 2011 I had the best timing inconceivable. I came out with this book about debt just at the moment it became the central issue of all politics. I walked into the middle of this Occupy stuff and it was perfect serendipity. As it happened I had a year off from school, a sabbatical, and I went back to New York to help publicise the book that summer. My actual plan was to go to Madagascar for some of that year.

But there I was in New York doing book promotion, and I figured, let’s see what activist projects are going on. I went to a meeting at a place called 16 Beaver Street, an art activist centre. They were talking about anti-austerity movements around the world, and I met an old friend of mine from Greece named Georgia Sagri. She said, “Have you heard about this Occupy Wall Street thing?” It had been advertised in a magazine called Adbusters. Adbusters is a sort of neo-situationist Canadian magazine by people who work in the advertising industry but hate it, and they do subversive advertising, anti-ads. They had thrown out this idea of doing an occupation of Wall Street.

She said, “I don’t know about that, but they’ve called for a general assembly, and I’ve just got back from Greece, where we have these big general assemblies. It’s direct democracy, it’s really exciting.” A general assembly is when people show up for a giant meeting and go through a democratic process to make collective decisions together. For example, in Argentina, after the big economic crash there in 2001, people essentially rejected the government and created their own neighbourhood assemblies to manage things.

Brian Rose: And that was anarchist?

David Graeber: It was very explicitly anarchist, and it was part of the globalisation movement. It was a very important moment. This is basically what ended the Third World debt crisis. They essentially said politicians are irrelevant, we will run things ourselves, it’s up to you to prove that you are in any way relevant to our lives. In Argentina it got to the point where politicians couldn’t even go to restaurants any more. They’d have to wear phony moustaches, because if people saw them they would throw food and chase them out. So the politicians had to do something to re-legitimate themselves, and what they did was default on the national debt, which created a cascade of events that ended the Third World debt crisis.

We wanted to create something like that: autonomous institutions that would make politicians prove to us that they could do anything for us. That was the idea.

That’s why we didn’t make demands. So we had this idea of a general assembly, and we showed up. It was at Bowling Green. I remember it well, because I walked through Wall Street just to see what it was like, and I’d never seen so much security in my life. There were squads of police, horse cops, helicopters, all these shady-looking undercovers lurking around.

Brian Rose: Can you spot the undercover cops?

David Graeber: Oh yes, it’s pretty obvious. A lot of them wear bracelets. If they’re people of colour, they have little coloured bracelets so other cops won’t beat them up.

Brian Rose: Wow. That’s a whole other discussion.

David Graeber: There’s all sorts of stuff you learn doing direct action. Anyway, I was walking through all this and I show up, and there’s this meeting with a couple of hundred people, and I thought, wait, this isn’t a general assembly, it’s a rally. There are people with microphones and cameras on an improvised stage, revving up the crowd and making speeches, and I thought, this is boring, this is like any other stupid thing. I went to see Georgia and she said, “Oh God.” I thought, should we just leave? Then I looked around and realised everybody in the audience was thinking the same thing.

24:30 So I thought, what would happen if we just talk to people and say, “If we had a real meeting, would you come and leave this thing?” And they were like, “Yeah, fuck yeah, this is boring.” So we started whispering and gathering people, and then we defected and tried to create a real meeting. It turned out the rally was run by some Leninist, or Stalinist, political party.

Brian Rose: Do you think people protest that way because they’ve seen it in the movies, and when they go down they try to do that?

David Graeber: There are people who really like that sort of thing, because they’re in control. We call it verticals versus horizontals. Verticals are people who essentially have a vanguard party that comes up with an analysis, and then they try to lead people. It’s all about non-participatory forms. You’re participating, but only under their control. There’s some guy leading the chant, there’s somebody coming up with printed signs and you just hold them. The horizontals are all about creating a democratic process where people collectively decide what to do. Even the chants are different: anybody can start one and it goes back and forth.

But I looked around and thought, this isn’t a vertical crowd, this is a horizontal crowd.

Brian Rose: And you can feel it, because you’ve been doing this. You’re a pro.

David Graeber: You look at people and you can tell. Someone’s got a Zapatista sticker on, or an IWW badge.

Brian Rose: What’s the IWW?

David Graeber: Those are the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. It’s basically an anarcho-syndicalist union. It’s been around for 100 years. It was really big around 1910, it faded, and now it’s coming back again.

Brian Rose: So when you see that, you think, horizontal person.

David Graeber: Yes. So we said, do you want to go and have a real meeting? And we did. Then of course the Trotskyists came over and said, “No, no, we talked to the organisers, we’re going to have a real meeting, come back,” and of course it wasn’t true. Then Georgia got on stage and made a speech about how this was nonsense, and was practically threatened. All this stuff happened, but by the end of it we’d defected and everybody came over to our meeting instead of theirs.

26:30 We formed a circle and said, “OK, what are we going to do?” Then we realised we had a problem. The magazine had something like 40,000 people subscribed to a mailing list where they’d advertised the date. I think it was the 17th of September, and this was the end of August, so we had about five weeks. Their idea was to bring 40,000 people to sit on Wall Street until they met our demands. Wait a minute, that’s absurd. There’s no way we can get 40,000 people down to Wall Street in five weeks. They had done nothing in terms of preparing infrastructure, because these guys think you just put something out on the internet and it happens. That’s not the way it works. You’d have to set up buses, create local chapters. It would be a whole process.

So we said, what can we actually do? We could try to bring people to shut down Wall Street, but the day they’d announced was a Saturday, so Wall Street’s already shut down. The only way it would even matter that we were there is if we were still there on Monday, so it had to be an occupation of some kind. We’d have to grab a park near there and camp.

But of course if we advertised which park we were going to be in, that park would be shut down. So we advertised the wrong one, and that park was immediately surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire, and for the next three years nobody got to use it.

Brian Rose: So you were being watched.

David Graeber: We know we’re being surveilled in everything we do. So we had five different parks on a map, with numbers, and we handed them out to everybody at the event. We weren’t sure who was going to show up, but as the day went on more and more people seemed to come out of the woodwork, and we gave them the little map. When the moment came we said, “It’s number three,” which was Zuccotti Park.

Brian Rose: Why did you choose that?

David Graeber: It was nearby, it was big enough to fit people, and it was within sight of a lot of important places, like the Federal Reserve. Not Wall Street itself, but it was far enough away that they wouldn’t immediately expel us.

Then we had a giant democratic meeting to decide what we were going to do: march to Wall Street now, or stay here. That’s when we came up with the people’s microphone. We’d used it before, but normally the people’s microphone was used for getting information out in a hurry. Say you’re on the street and you want to say the cops are coming from the north, there seem to be a lot of them, we want to get out of here. You don’t usually have a megaphone; megaphones are often illegal. So you have people repeat what you say, and other people repeat what they said, and it passes down the line. But we’d never used it in a meeting before.

We made a little mistake. We formed a circle, because we figured it’d be more democratic, but we had a lot more people than we expected, three, four, five thousand people.

Brian Rose: This is still the first day?

David Graeber: The first day, 17 September.

Brian Rose: And you’ve got four thousand people. That’s a lot.

David Graeber: We actually had microphones, because the cops hadn’t told us not to yet, but when you have a circle you have to have them pointing in different directions, and it didn’t work. Some of the Spaniards said, “You idiot, you’re supposed to form a crescent with columns so people can walk up.” It was too late. So we thought, all right, we can use the people’s microphone. Everybody will say a sentence and everybody repeats it.

Brian Rose: And it propagates out.

David Graeber: It was a small enough crowd that it could work, if everybody who could hear it repeated it. And it had a really interesting effect, which is one reason we kept using it: it stopped people from speechifying. You’re not going to say anything you don’t have to say if you know a thousand people are going to have to repeat it. So instead of going on and on, people kept to the point.

Brian Rose: So it’s actually a democratic tool. It keeps it very horizontal.

30:30 Looking back on it all, when was the day you thought, whoa, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be, this is bigger?

David Graeber: The very first day was way bigger than we thought. My friend Marisa Holmes, who’s probably the single most important organiser, is also a filmmaker, and she went out with a video camera that night and talked to all the people she didn’t recognise, which was most of them. It wasn’t the usual suspects. She asked, who are you, why are you here, what motivated you to do this? The overwhelming majority were debt refugees.

They all said, “I never thought of myself as an activist, but this is ridiculous. I’m one of the good kids. I worked hard, I went to school.” A lot of them were from relatively modest backgrounds, but they studied hard and got scholarships, and they still had to go way into debt, even with a scholarship. They said, “I did what I was told. I’m $40,000 in debt. I got a degree, I got good grades, and then suddenly the economy crashes because these bankers totally broke all the rules. They didn’t play by the rules at all, yet they got bailed out. I didn’t get bailed out, and now I’m going to be treated like a deadbeat for the rest of my life because I can’t get a job, because they crashed the economy, and I owe money to them. This is completely unfair.” We heard that over and over again, and that was unusual. We were used to a different crowd showing up to these meetings. It wasn’t usually so immediately personal.

31:50 Brian Rose: When did you come up with the term “We are the 99%”? What’s the story behind it?

David Graeber: It’s fairly simple. The phrase “the one percent” was being bounced around at that time. I think Krugman wrote a column about it, and people were talking about it. It was just a matter of reversing it. This was before Zuccotti Park. After that initial meeting we came up with a democratic process. We started having regular weekly meetings and formed working groups: a media working group, a process working group, organisation and logistics, and so forth. I was part of the outreach working group. What are we going to tell people? Come join us. Who are we?

Brian Rose: So, PR.

David Graeber: Basically PR. There was one group for the web, and then we were the ones actually leafleting and going out to talk to people. The first question we had was, who are we? Adbusters had said we should have one key demand, and their idea was that the meeting should decide on it. We decided no, we’re not going to do that, because if you make a demand you’re essentially saying you want politicians to intervene and solve your problems. We thought that sent the wrong message. Again, we were thinking of Argentina. It’s much better to say, “Prove to us that you are in any way relevant. You’re just talking about stupid things that have nothing to do with our real problems. We’re going to talk about our real problems ourselves and see if we can’t solve them.”

Brian Rose: And a demand isn’t direct action.

David Graeber: It’s exactly the opposite. Direct action means trying to solve your own problems rather than trying to get other people to intervene. Even if you’re using radical means to make them intervene, it’s indirect.

So the next question was, who are we, who do we represent? What’s interesting about the one percent is that it’s not just about social class, it’s about class power. The one percent were not only the people who got basically all of the advantages of economic growth. Since 2008 there had started to be a recovery, but all the money was going to 1% of the population; everybody else was as poor or poorer than before. They were also the people who made all the campaign contributions. Look at the way the American political system works: something ridiculous like 98% of the money that goes to politicians comes from 1% of the population.

Brian Rose: And this is pre-super PAC?

David Graeber: I think it was even before they changed a lot of the rules around.

Brian Rose: Citizens United, that was it.

David Graeber: I think it was before Citizens United, but it didn’t matter. The thing about the American political system is that it’s a system of institutionalised bribery. When they publish indexes of political corruption around the world, the US usually comes out well, and I was always surprised by that. Then I realised Nigeria or Russia often come out on top because in Nigeria and Russia it’s still illegal to give politicians money to influence their vote. In America it’s not illegal, so of course we don’t look corrupt.

Brian Rose: Should it be number one?

David Graeber: If you look at it morally, I think it would be the most corrupt.

We identified that the one percent are the people who not only control the political process, but because of that control arrange things in such a way that they get all the profits. It’s hardly even capitalism any more. If you look at the way the American economy works, and this is true of the UK and most of what they call advanced capitalist countries, a little less so of places like Germany, manufacturing and commerce are a relatively minor share of where the profits come from. For the City, for Wall Street, most of it is finance.

People say finance is speculative, it’s taking bets on things, they’re just making up money. That’s kind of true, but there is a connection between finance and the real economy. Finance is a word for other people’s debts. What it really means is that you bribe politicians, you set up legislation that guarantees people are in debt, and then you use government to regulate and manage that debt. The class of rentiers who are actually collecting this money and the government almost overlap. There’s a single bureaucratic web and you can’t even tell what’s public and what’s private, but it’s all designed to guarantee profits for certain people who have political power.

Brian Rose: And that’s what you’re talking about with the one percent. And the average citizen has all of these debts just to be alive.

David Graeber: And those debt refugees were exactly the people who showed up at Zuccotti Park. So I threw out, “We have to figure out who we are. Why don’t we call ourselves the 99%? Everybody’s talking about the one percent.” Then we had to put out a leaflet. I think Georgia, the Greek anarchist friend of mine, and two Spanish Indignados in the outreach working group came up with a little flyer saying “We the 99%”. Then a Korean Food Not Bombs organiser put up a Tumblr page called “We are the 99 percent”. So in a way the slogan was created by committee, but it came out well.

Brian Rose: And it became huge.

David Graeber: People put out these little signs. That was what the Tumblr page was. If you can’t actually come to the protest because you’re too busy working your three jobs or whatever it is, the idea was to put up a picture of yourself holding a sign describing your life and why you feel you are the 99%. They’d all end, “I am the 99%.” We got thousands and thousands of them. It was really interesting, because about 80% of them were women, and even the guys were all in the caring professions, the kinds of professions where you want to do good in the world. They were in health, or education, or social work.

They were all saying the same thing. There was a very broad similarity in the complaint. Essentially it came down to: “I want to pursue a career where I can be proud of what I do, or at least not embarrassed by it, where I help other people. But if I want to do a job where I care for other people in some way, they’ll pay me so little and put me so far into debt that I can’t take care of my own family. This is ridiculous.”

Brian Rose: And that’s why they rallied behind you.

38:45 In retrospect, looking back at Occupy Wall Street, what did you accomplish and what did you fail to accomplish?

David Graeber: I think we managed to get the government really scared. That’s why they suppressed us. I think we accomplished a lot. Think about it this way: nobody in America even talked about social class. It was the great taboo since the 1930s, really, and we broke that. Suddenly inequality was all anybody could talk about. You could say our greatest victory came when Obama gave a speech about inequality, which nobody cared about before we were there, and the Republicans responded. Both Republican responses did not say inequality was unimportant, which they certainly would have said before we came along. They all said, “Yes, you’re right, inequality is a big problem, but you have the solution wrong.” Once you’ve changed the terms of debate so that both sides have to at least pretend they agree with you, there’s been a major change in the way people think about their problems. That was our biggest success. We changed what people thought political issues actually were.

I think our biggest strategic miscalculation was that we trusted the mainstream left to be more strategically sensible. The mainstream right wing in America is very strategically smart. The average Republican politician thinks an anti-abortion activist or a militia guy is nuts. They don’t actually take those people seriously, but they think it’s really important that those people exist, because that makes them seem moderate.

We figured a liberal Democrat would see us and say, “Great, we’ll support these guys, and then we’ll come to the table and say, those guys might be kind of crazy, but we’re reasonable, let’s talk about these issues,” and it would totally play to their advantage. The way I always put it is that if the Democratic Party was as absolutist about First Amendment rights as the Republican Party is about Second Amendment gun rights, we’d still be there. Unfortunately those guys really don’t think that way.

Brian Rose: They didn’t support you when the time came, when the cops came in.

David Graeber: We expected they would raise a huge fuss about the violence and the repression. The First Amendment is pretty clear. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Everybody says you have the right to freedom of assembly, you just have to ask the cops first. No. If you have to ask the cops before you speak, that’s called not having freedom of speech. If you have to ask the cops before you print something, that’s called not having freedom of the press. Why is it different with assembly? But they basically said, “Oh well, First Amendment, whatever.”

Brian Rose: That’s the media, the politicians and anyone on the left. You thought they would sound off a little bit.

David Graeber: We thought they would know it was in their interest that we continue to exist. You can’t sell out your radicals on policy issues if you’ve already sold them out on existential issues. The Republicans understand that; the Democrats don’t. At first they thought it would be like the Tea Party, they’d incorporate us.

And this always annoys me. You still meet these moderate left people who say, “You Occupy people should have run political candidates, you should have supported campaigns, you shouldn’t have stayed aloof from politics. It’s all your fault.” Excuse me, we don’t tell you what to do. We became big because we rejected the political process, because everybody thinks it’s illegitimate. Nobody’s stopping you from going out and running your political candidates and campaigning for them. It didn’t work, did it? And we did something that did work. So you want us to stop because you can’t do what you want to do?

Brian Rose: But people expect a next step that they’ve seen before. They want a predictable next step.

David Graeber: Which is of course what they’d been telling us to do for 30 years. People kept trying to do it and it always failed. Then somebody tries something else, it’s spectacularly successful, and they say, “Yes, that’s fine, but now switch to doing what we told you all along.”

43:40 Brian Rose: Talk to me about violence, because that was picked up on the news. I was here in London, so I saw some of the video, but I never know what it’s really like on the ground. And tell me why it was about the most non-violent movement I ever heard of.

David Graeber: There were something like 5,000 occupations and about three broken windows. The average mildly rowdy hockey game in Canada has more broken windows in one night than we did during the entire movement. It was absolutely not violent.

Brian Rose: But there was police violence. First of all, what’s it like being down there day after day? This is what you do, but most people maybe go for a few hours. What’s it like? Do you just get used to it?

David Graeber: You get used to it, but you’re always aware that you can get really seriously hurt at any time. And cops do stuff like this. I have a friend, I can’t mention names. One of the things the police were doing at a certain point, and it was clearly a tactic because they started doing it in Egypt first, was systematically groping women, sexual assault. They grabbed their breasts, they exposed them. Part of it was to traumatise women, because these women were key organisers, but part of it was also to try to provoke the men. The idea is, if they offend your womenfolk, the men will do something they could call violent, and then they can put them in prison.

So the police started doing this. There was one woman they grabbed and she yelled at them, “You fucking pervert.” This was in New York.

Brian Rose: Undercover cops?

David Graeber: No, actually uniformed cops. There are lots of pictures. One woman appeared on television the next day with giant handprints on her breasts. They arrested her later for something else, just to punish her.

So they were doing the systematic sexual assault, and one woman screamed at a cop, “What are you, some kind of fucking pervert?” If somebody ordered you to sexually assault someone, that’s disgusting. And the cops took her behind the lines and broke her wrist. They do stuff like that. Breaking thumbs. I know a guy who’s one of the key organisers, a concert pianist, and they broke his fingers.

Brian Rose: Wow. Did it feel scary down there? Were there moments where you just didn’t know what was going to happen?

David Graeber: It’s an adrenaline thing. On the one hand there’s this incredible feeling of freedom, because you realise you’ve never been in a crowd that was self-organised. Every moment of your life you’re actually operating under the threat of violence. If I walk this way, if I do this, if I do that, someone could attack me. But you never think about it. I used to live in Madagascar, in a small town, and where I was there basically were no police, and in so far as there were police, they didn’t concern themselves with open container laws, who can stand here, who can play music there, who can drink this, eat this, sell that.

Everything we do is regulated, but we don’t think about it, and those regulations are enforced by violence. Sell untaxed cigarettes and they could kill you. Obviously in America they can do that fairly easily if you’re black. It’s harder if you’re white, but theoretically they can; the possibility exists. So we’re always under threat, some people more than others, but everybody, and you just internalise that. You never think about the fact that you’re constantly being threatened with violence every moment of the day.

But then suddenly, when you’re in a group of people who are self-organised, you can go down the street any way you want, you can do whatever, and suddenly you’re free. It’s this incredible feeling: we’re facing a risk here, but we’re not sheep. We’ve actually taken control. We’ve created this free space where we decide what we’re going to do, and almost no one ever has that feeling. It’s a rush, it’s really exciting.

And suddenly your horizons open up, because you experience things you never imagined were possible. We’re trained every day to think this. They talk about democracy: we live in a democracy, democracy is what makes us great, we’re going to kill people to defend democracy. But we don’t actually believe in democracy. Every day we’re told in all these subtle ways that real democracy would be mob rule. People are crazy, people are irresponsible, people are selfish, people could never just sit down together and collectively make a reasonable decision.

But then you do it. You come to a meeting, there are a thousand people, they all sit around, everybody’s constructive, and you solve a problem without any leadership. And it’s like, wow, I thought all my life that was impossible. I never really thought about it, I just assumed it, because in all these subtle ways you’re taught that people are basically unreasonable and selfish and nobody would actually behave that way. Then you see them behave that way and think, oh my God, something I thought was completely impossible is not impossible. What other things that I think are impossible might also be possible? Suddenly your horizons completely change.

In a self-organised group like that you have this amazing feeling of freedom, and yes, freedom always comes at a price. The price of freedom is that you could get your thumbs broken, somebody could come and smack you on the head just for being free. But it’s worth it.

Brian Rose: So in the UK and in the US we use the word democracy, but not only do we have no concept of what it is, a lot of us are actually fearful of what a real democracy would be. And there are so many institutions around us that exist with this low-level threat of violence.

David Graeber: Absolutely.

Brian Rose: And that brings anxiety in us over time, and we don’t realise where it comes from.

David Graeber: Ultimately it is anything. Ask a feminist: even gender roles carry a threat. If you violate them you can get attacked. People point out that violence against women tends to go up in periods when there’s an advance in women’s rights. Men fight back in subtle ways, and they don’t even realise that’s what they’re doing, but if you look at it cumulatively, the violence does enforce the rules. Any systematic inequality has to be ultimately underpinned by a threat of violence.

Brian Rose: I’ve just thought of South Africa. I remember reading Nelson Mandela’s book, and he said that when they started passing laws against the coloured and black people, they were these little tiny laws. They’d pass one, then pass another one: you can’t marry that person, you can’t be out after this time. It was all these little pieces.

David Graeber: Death by a thousand cuts.

Brian Rose: That would shut down your options until all of a sudden you’re backed into a corner with this huge set of violence. And we have 100, 200, 300 years of that, to the point where everything we do is regulated and we don’t even realise it could be any other way.

50:45 OK. What’s a bullshit job?

David Graeber: Bullshit jobs.

Brian Rose: Do I have a bullshit job here?

David Graeber: No, this is the opposite of a bullshit job. People watch the show. This is fun.

One of the things I told myself when the debt book was successful was that I was going to use it to widen my opportunities of expression rather than narrow them. I was saying this earlier, before the interview: there’s this weird thing where if you say something people decide is interesting and creative and unusual, and people actually pay attention to it, the world will somehow conspire to ensure that you never do it again. They’ll try to make you say the same damn thing over and over, because you don’t get that much money for the book, but you do get money for talks or articles where you say the same thing in a slightly different format, again and again, until you become a robot repeating things. I thought, I’m not going to do that. It’s one reason I can’t afford a house, but I think it’s worth it.

Brian Rose: So they wanted you to keep talking about the same thing.

David Graeber: And I could have made a lot of money, because rich people are interested in money. If I’d got myself a personal assistant and arranged deals, I could probably give talks all over the place. But instead I thought I’d see if I could do the opposite: turn this into an opportunity to take all those crazy rants and obsessions and interesting things I’d been thinking about that no one would ever print, and figure out a way to get them out there. That’s how I came up with the thing about flying cars and technology, or my analysis of neckties, all sorts of things like that.

Some people formed a new radical magazine called Strike! and said, “Have you got anything oddball lying around that nobody else will print? This is your big opportunity. We’ll print anything.” So I said, OK. I’d noticed over the years that you keep meeting people who are embarrassed by what they do. You meet them at a party, especially if you’re someone like me. I’m an anthropologist, and most people think that’s kind of interesting. So they’ll say, “You’re an anthropologist? What is that? You go to foreign countries, you live in villages, what’s that like?” They start asking all these questions, and you ask, “What do you do?” and they say, “You don’t really want to know.” Then they get a little drunk and you press them, and they say, “To tell you the truth, I’ve got this job as senior East Coast division manager for this company, and I don’t really do anything. I just file reports nobody really reads, and we create these committees and pass things back and forth, and it’s just bullshit.”

So I started asking people, do you actually do anything at your job? How many hours a day do you really work? A lot of people said, “To be honest, I could probably do what I do in three hours a week, but I stretch it out. Don’t tell my boss.” Or, “A computer could do this whole thing.” I thought about it and realised this is really interesting, because it’s exactly what capitalism isn’t supposed to do. Back in the Soviet Union they did stuff like that. They made up all these jobs because they had a full employment programme. Everybody had to have a job, whether or not you actually needed them to be doing anything. To buy a piece of beef in the store, you’d have to go to one person to get the beef, then you got a ticket, then you had to take the ticket to another line. They just made up employment.

We’re doing something like that, except it’s being done by the private sector. Most of these people weren’t working for the government; they were working for private, competitive firms. So how on earth do you have a situation where private firms are making up jobs and paying people not to do anything? That’s the last thing you’d think a competitive firm would do.

Brian Rose: The opposite of capitalism.

David Graeber: Except they’re capitalist firms. So what’s going on? I thought about it, and in fact these jobs constitute a pretty big sector of our economy. I didn’t know how much at the time. I was guessing 20 or 25%. It turns out it’s more. Think about all these industries where, if they disappeared, it wouldn’t make any difference. Telemarketing: if all telemarketers vanished, most people would not complain. They’d be pretty happy, actually. Corporate lawyers: there are one or two big shots who think what they do is important, but the vast majority will say, “It’s completely unnecessary. If I didn’t have this job, the world would not change in any way.”

Some of these are jobs where nobody would need to do it if nobody did it. One guy only needs a corporate lawyer because somebody else has a corporate lawyer. It’s like armies: no country needs an army unless other countries have armies. Corporate lawyers are a bit like armies, and telemarketers are like that. But there are other things that aren’t even like that: all the middle management guys who just organise meetings, or fill out forms, or supervise the way other people fill out forms, or create meaningless paperwork and reports.

And I suddenly thought, this is why people aren’t working 15-hour weeks. Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay, I think it was called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, where he basically said that in a hundred years we shouldn’t be working more than 15 hours a week. Technology would have improved to the point where we could have a society mainly based on leisure, and work would be a relatively unimportant part of our lives.

The interesting thing is that if you look at the jobs that existed in the 1930s, we could have done that if we’d kept the same type of job profile. Back then there were a lot of people working in industry, a lot of people working in agriculture, a lot of domestic servants. All that’s gone. A lot of domestic servants have been replaced by service jobs in Starbucks or wherever. And there aren’t as many people employed in industry, even if you count the ones in China and other places where the factories have gone. People think the jobs have gone to the service sector, but what they’ve gone to is the administrative, clerical and supervisory sector. If you count service and that together, it’s gone from, I think, a quarter of all jobs to 75% now.

So you have all these people administering other people. What on earth is happening? They’re not really doing anything, they’re just pretending. And think about all the people around them. You have some company where all they do is take German forms and translate them into French forms. It’s a completely meaningless job. But then there are all the people cleaning their bathrooms, doing the reception, the security for that building. Those jobs are unnecessary too. How does this happen? Huge swathes of our economy are completely unnecessary.

58:20 I tried to think about it, and it’s not consumerism, which is the usual explanation, because most of these jobs have nothing to do with giving us more sushi and more iPhones. It seems to be this idea that work is a value in itself. Back in the 19th century, people really got hold of the labour theory of value. Social movements managed to get it out there and it became common sense: value comes from labour, we collectively make our world, we manufacture things.

Brian Rose: And the Protestant work ethic.

David Graeber: There’s a Protestant work ethic that jibed with that. If you listen to speeches politicians made in the 1860s and 1870s, they all sound like Marxists. Abraham Lincoln says capital comes from labour. They had that idea. But the idea of labour they had was industrial labour, and I think this is part of the problem. The paradigm for all work was hammering something, casting steel, manufacturing automobiles: hard physical work that makes something. They focused on production as if it were the paradigm of all labour, even though most people, even then, were not factory workers. Even among working-class people, more of them were cabbies, nurses, gardeners, caretakers. I always say you produce a cup once, but you wash it a thousand times. Most labour is actually maintaining things.

Because they focused on production rather than the work of taking care of things, it became possible for the capitalists to push back. There was a major ideological drive. People like Andrew Carnegie founded all these schools and societies to spread what he called the gospel of wealth, which was essentially proto-consumerism. They said, stop thinking of labour as the way you express your life or realise yourself. It’s what you go home and buy and consume. And anyway, production doesn’t come from people making stuff. They’re just sitting on production lines acting like robots. Production comes from the minds of entrepreneurs like me, creative geniuses, Peter Thiel types, who have a vision, and you’re just little robots who go around realising our vision. People got convinced of that and everybody started repeating it. It made a certain amount of sense at a time when a lot of factory work was mindless automaton stuff.

But then the question became, why work at all? How do you convince people that work is a value? Rather than saying work is valuable because you’re producing the world, you say work is valuable because it’s morally good to work. Work is a value in itself. The corollary is that if you’re lazing around you’re a bad person, a parasite, you don’t deserve anything. If you’re not working at something you don’t like very much, more than you’d really like to be, you’re not a very good person. Work is discipline, it’s character, and that’s also very Puritan and Protestant.

Once you get the idea that work isn’t valuable because of what it does but because of its effect on you, because of the moral status of the worker, a weird perversion creeps in, and I really think this is part of the key. People start thinking that anything that makes your work more pleasant and fun and interesting actually makes it less morally valuable. It’s got to the point where even the pleasure of knowing you’re doing something good in the world, or something necessary, undercuts the moral value of the work. If you’re sitting there doing something really stupid, that’s real work, because you don’t even get the gratification of knowing you’re helping anybody.

Brian Rose: So we’re living with this anachronistic idea that we need to be working a certain amount of time every day and it needs to be hard work, and that’s why we force ourselves to work these hours when it’s really not necessary. We’re fooling ourselves.

David Graeber: Even the labour movement falls into that. We want jobs. Nobody says, we want jobs that actually do something. Just give us more jobs. There’s less and less need for work, but people just keep making it up.

Think of Alan Greenspan at the Fed, or the equivalent at the Bank of England. I was actually in a meeting once with somebody from the European Central Bank, a vice president of the New York Fed and all these rich bankers, and finally you get to see what they say to each other. This guy was making a speech. He’d been at the Bank of England for many years and also at the Treasury, and he said, “We have to talk about what we’ve managed to achieve in the last 20 years. It’s true that the standard of living hasn’t really advanced as much as we’d like, and that’s a problem, but we’ve really done well with the labour market. We’ve improved it enormously. The unemployment rate we would normally expect at this point in the economic cycle would be much higher than it is now.” As he was talking I suddenly realised what he was actually saying. If you decode it, he was saying, we’ve got more people working more hours for less money and getting less out of it.

1:03:10 Brian Rose: So how do we snap ourselves out of this?

David Graeber: I think we need to start thinking about what’s actually going on. I’ve coined a phrase that I’m going to use now, and I’ll say it here first: 21st-century economics. What we need is 21st-century economics. Something I’ve noticed is that everybody says people like Corbyn are people from the 80s, but everybody else is from the 90s, but everybody’s using the same economic models, and they really come out of the 19th century. It’s all about markets and competitiveness, but it’s all based on a false idea of what the basic problem is. We’re still trying to solve these very old-fashioned, essentially 19th-century problems: how do we increase productivity in a competitive environment, and solve problems of the optimal distribution of limited resources and goods?

Certain things are not as limited as they used to be, other things are more limited than they used to be, and the basic dynamics of economic problems are changing because the need for labour is just going down. Instead of making up imaginary jobs, which is what our system does, we should embrace robotisation. I have some friends who coined a phrase, fully automated luxury communism. This is what we need to be moving towards: a system where robots do all the work, we live in luxury and everybody’s the same. Why not? We could probably actually do that if we unleashed technology in that direction.

Instead you have people saying, “Oh no, what are we going to do when the robots take all our jobs? It’ll be a terrible economic crisis.” If there’s ever a sign that we have a completely irrational economic system, it’s that automation and less demand for work is seen as a problem. This should be the best thing that ever happened. We could have Star Trek, and instead it’s, oh no, everyone will be unemployed. We need to snap out of that mindset.

So 21st-century economics needs to look at a new set of problems. Number one, how to create a reasonable way of distribution in an environment where there’s less and less demand for labour. There are different ways to solve that: basic income, reduction of working hours, lots of different ideas, degrowth. And how to manage productivity in a way that doesn’t destroy the earth. How to manage technological growth in a direction that’s ecologically sustainable and doesn’t create massive inequality. Those are the real problems economists should be looking at, but economics as it’s currently configured looks at anything but that. They’re still trying to solve the problems of the time of Marx and Ricardo, and those aren’t our problems any more.

1:06:00 Brian Rose: You were in Syria this year, is that right? What did you learn from Syria?

David Graeber: I was only there briefly, a little over a week, but I was part of a delegation visiting Rojava. Rojava is the three autonomous cantons controlled by the PYD, which is a Kurdish party. It’s part of the broad Kurdish movement and affiliated with the PKK in a broad way, ideologically, not organisationally. They are engaged in a revolutionary experiment with direct democracy. It’s an interesting story. One of the reasons I was there is that they wanted to bring in a bunch of academics to observe what they were doing.

What’s fascinating to me is that nobody knows quite what to say about this. First of all, the PKK are on the terrorist list, because Turkey was fighting a war with them for some time. If you’re a non-state actor engaged in a war, you’re automatically a terrorist. Turkey managed to get them on the terrorist list, and once you’re on it it’s basically impossible to get off; Turkey would have to agree, which they’re never going to do. Now, the PKK used to be a fairly standard-issue Marxist-Leninist guerrilla force, but they went through a process of self-examination and decided they needed to radically transform what they were about. Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, is actually in prison now.

The Turks nabbed him after a crazy chase around the world. I think they ended up getting him somewhere in Africa, and he’s in a little island prison in the Sea of Marmara that they built just for him. But he’s had a lot of time to read, and he got into anarchist theory. He discovered Murray Bookchin, a theorist of democratic confederalism: the idea of taking directly democratic organisations and having them confederate at larger and larger levels, so you can have a bottom-up democratic system. He became fascinated by this. He also became really interested in feminism, which was already happening in the Kurdish movement at the time. Traditional Kurdish society is quite patriarchal; it’s a Middle Eastern society. It’s always had a bit more space for women than a lot of its neighbours, and there’s a certain tradition of women even as fighters, but that exists even in some Arab countries.

Brian Rose: What did you see them doing right or wrong? Did you give them any thoughts?

David Graeber: It was amazing, because I’d never been in a real, classic, old-fashioned revolution. The area had been under Syrian control, and they managed to convince the Syrian government essentially to leave. The government decided the place wasn’t worth holding in a civil war. The Kurds were going to have an uprising, and they basically said, “Look, if you leave your guns and get out of here, we’ll give you safe passage.” So the Syrian forces, except for one little airport they still control and a piece of one city, Qamishli, said, OK, we’re out of here. And they took everything, even the computers and the wall decorations. Everything in the government buildings was stripped out.

But then they said, OK, we’ll start from scratch and create a democratic society. All these people who’d been thinking for 20 years about how you would actually organise a society democratically suddenly had about two million people saying, let’s try. So every neighbourhood, every hundred houses or so, has a democratic assembly. Every assembly has to have at least 40% women participating, and it has an all-women’s group that can veto any decision. They have different working groups which work the same way, and they confederate at the neighbourhood level and the municipal level, so decisions are made collectively.

They also have something that looks like a government, a parliament with ministers and so forth, but that’s essentially for dealing with outsiders. In revolutionary theory we call this a dual power situation, where you have two different structures both claiming to be the government at the same time, with a balance of power between them. But this is the only time I’ve ever seen a dual power situation where the same people created both sides. They knew they had to have something that looks like a government to deal with foreigners, because somebody’s got to sign the treaty. Even if you’re going to get aid from the UN to help refugees, you need somebody official to talk to. But at the same time, anybody with a gun is not answerable to that government. The people with the guns are answerable to the democratic assemblies, and they have plans to completely decentralise all forms of power. They’ve only got so far, because they’re being attacked by ISIS. They’re in a war, so there’s only so much they can do.

I went to an academy, one of the first places I went, for the Asayish, the security forces, kind of like the police. Under the Syrian government the security forces were the scariest people in the world, the guys who arrest you and torture you for being a dissident, and most of the people organising things there had been tortured by the security forces at one point or another.

Brian Rose: Was it scary being there?

David Graeber: No, not when I was there, because everybody was your friend. It was great. We had a driver who drove us around, and on the first day they gave us some guys with AK-47s in the truck in front of us, riding shotgun, just to make us feel secure. But we realised it was fine. There were roadblocks everywhere, but the people at the roadblocks were really nice. It was so funny to see our driver every time we passed a roadblock, which was every ten minutes, saying, “Good afternoon, security forces!” That’s the last thing you’d ever say in Syria, especially in Kurdish, a language you were forbidden to speak. Everybody’s your buddy.

1:11:55 Brian Rose: Your father fought in the Spanish Civil War, didn’t he?

David Graeber: Yes, he did.

Brian Rose: Does part of you have that longing to go over there and really get your hands dirty?

David Graeber: I’m a little old now. Sure, there’s that romantic desire to be on the barricades. I’ve been on barricades, but not where they’re actually shooting. Or rather, we’re not shooting anyway; the other guys might be. It would be nice to shoot back for once, I guess. That’s a fantasy. We’re always the ones getting hit. I got hit on the head by a plastic bullet once. I still have it.

Brian Rose: Wow.

David Graeber: When I was in Quebec City we were behind these barricades, and they were firing pepper bombs. I was wearing a gas mask, but the pepper goes right through your gas mask, so when you get up for a breath of air they try to shoot you with plastic bullets. They’re big, like mallets. I was keeping my head as low as I could and one grazed off the top. A friend of mine came up to me and said, “I think this is the one that hit you. You might want to keep it as a memento, since it’s your first.”

Brian Rose: People make necklaces out of them?

David Graeber: It’s like a big cylinder, it looks like a little mallet. And it’s funny, because the guy who gave it to me, Brad Will, was later killed at the barricades in Oaxaca. He was shot by anti-APPO Mexican government people.

Brian Rose: So there’s danger out there. But you didn’t feel it in Syria. Would you go back?

David Graeber: I would. Part of the problem is that at the moment Turkey has gone crazy and is bombing like mad, so you can’t get in any more. It’s a long story, but some of it’s worth telling. The Iraqi Kurdish government had been tacitly allied with Turkey, and of course Turkey hates these people because they’re tied to the PKK. The PKK has a base in northern Iraq, a place called Qandil Mountain, where they’ve been holed up for 15 years, because they declared a unilateral ceasefire and tried negotiations. They were inspired by the Zapatista rebels in Mexico and adopted a similar strategy: let’s have peace talks. They knew perfectly well the Turkish government was not negotiating in good faith, but it gave them an opportunity to try to create directly democratic institutions and economic co-operatives on the ground in Turkey. The main force pulled back to Qandil Mountain, and you’ve got thousands of guerrillas with nothing to do, so they’ve been doing a lot of translation, seminars, talking theory, writing poetry. Some of them apparently read my book, and that was one reason I was contacted.

Brian Rose: Gotcha. What are your thoughts on the Zeitgeist Movement? It just came to mind because I’ve spoken to Peter Joseph here before, and some people see them in a similar vein to Occupy.

David Graeber: I don’t know that much about it. They kept trying to join, but we were a bit creeped out by them. They seemed a little cult-like. They seemed to have this guru, and it wasn’t clear whether they were the kind of group that says one thing to outsiders and another to insiders. They gave off that kind of vibe. I don’t know if that’s true, but we were a little suspicious.

Brian Rose: You’re more on the direct, consensus side, and anything other than that is alarming to you, because that’s the reason you’re doing it.

David Graeber: We like people who tell you exactly what they think. Direct democracy is about creating an environment where people don’t have to act like politicians, where they don’t have to say one thing and do another, or say one thing and then take you into the other room. I remember this very well, with NGO guys back around the time of Seattle, when there was window breaking and black blocs. There was a guy from an NGO group who came to us and said, “Look, privately, what happened in Seattle was perfect. You did just the right amount of violence, but not too much. It got people’s attention, but you didn’t really hurt anybody. We liked that.” Then he went out, made a speech and condemned violence in all its forms. He thought this would impress us, but of course it just made us think: politician.

The whole idea of not forming links with political parties, not taking money, not having a funding base, is that you’ll never be in a position where you say one thing in public and another thing at home. We’re trying to create an environment where people can actually say what they think, even in a political context, and tell the truth.

1:16:50 Brian Rose: Let me ask you about your time at Yale. Before we get into the politics, you said something about Yale students. You expected an Ivy League university where everyone would be highly talented, but you noticed that about a third of the students weren’t, and you had this realisation: oh, I get it, some day the smart ones are going to work for the dumb ones.

David Graeber: Yes.

Brian Rose: Maybe that’s a comment on the Ivy League, but a lot of people would say it’s a comment on our society in general. You were close to getting tenure there and it didn’t happen.

David Graeber: Actually they fired me before I could even come up for tenure. That’s a common misconception; they went out and suggested to everybody that it was about tenure, because nobody gets tenure at Yale. They have these junior professors, and I don’t know, maybe 10% of them get tenure, or even less, depending on how you count it.

Brian Rose: So is the whole concept of tenure a racket anyway?

David Graeber: Yale is a huge pyramid scheme. But Yale is very unusual, because traditionally they deny people tenure and then hire people back later. So I said, OK, I’m not going to get tenure. That’s fine. That means I don’t have to lie about what I actually think. I could go and do direct action, say I’m an anarchist, why not? I figured I’d do that in New York, and in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is, I wasn’t going to step on anybody’s toes. There was a labour organising drive among the graduate students, and I wouldn’t get involved in that, I wouldn’t get involved in local political issues. If I don’t threaten their personal power, why would they care what I do in New York? And anyway, if they did, what were they going to do? They weren’t going to give me tenure anyway.

Brian Rose: But some people got very upset that you were being so active in public.

David Graeber: I thought they wouldn’t care. Honestly, I was naive.

Brian Rose: You were probably the most active member of staff at Yale at that time, maybe at any Ivy League university.

David Graeber: In terms of taking part in all those direct actions, that’s true. I guess I had a little too much fun with it. I remember going to my classes and saying, “All right, see you again on Tuesday, unless I’m in jail, in which case there’ll be a movie.” That was before an action or something like that.

Brian Rose: And how did they respond?

David Graeber: What they did was fire me in a very irregular fashion before I could even come up for tenure. I think it was to send a message to other junior faculty: don’t try this, don’t think that just because you’re not going to get tenure anyway you can have fun and not be afraid of us.

But in a way they tested my loyalties, and this is an interesting story. There were really just three or four crazy ones who had it in for me; most of them didn’t care. This is what happens in academic departments. There are three or four people who aren’t really doing much research or writing, but they care about total domination of their environment, becoming king of the hill within this relatively small hill. Since they spend all their time on office politics, the people who are actually doing real research say, “They’re crazy, but either I stop doing research myself and fight them, or I let them run the department and do my own thing.” So nobody else was going to spend their entire life fighting them, and getting rid of me would make the problem go away.

Another problem they have at Yale is that the graduate students were really pretty good. Some of the senior faculty were OK, but they’d reached the top of their field by getting tenure at Yale, that was the biggest thing they’d ever achieved, and they felt very insecure because of the students. They only let in four or five a year and they were fully funded, so these were really smart kids. In a way they wanted to tamp them down and keep them under control, and when the students started labour organising they felt very threatened. They were convinced I was on the side of the union. The irony was that I wasn’t involved at all. I was trying to be neutral. The students were actually very divided about the union. Some were very against it because they thought it was a crazy union; others were very gung-ho. I tried to stay out of it.

But one of my students was a union organiser, and right before a big strike they tried to kick her out of the programme on an obviously trumped-up charge. Somebody wrote her a bad letter of recommendation, she figured that out and didn’t use it, and they accused her of not returning something. They just made up an excuse. Partly it was to scare the students, but partly it was also to test my loyalty. She was my student, and a very good one, and the idea was: would I defend her? Of course I did, because she was a good student. And then they said, “We knew it, he’s really on the side of the union people.” After that they were just out to get me. It was quite explicit.

They’d already been suspicious. I remember this quite well. I went off on sabbatical, did a lot of direct action stuff and appeared in the media as a spokesperson for activist groups. When I came back, they’re not warm, effusive people, so I wasn’t expecting anybody to say welcome back, but I thought “hello” would not be inappropriate. All these senior professors would just walk by as if I wasn’t there, and I thought, OK, they really have it in for me.

Brian Rose: And for some of these people this is their crowning achievement. It’s the only thing they’ve got in their lives. But you must still have been disappointed.

David Graeber: I’m sure. I thought I was bringing something to the department. I was having fun with this, and they should have been having fun with it too. Why do we create these sadomasochistic games where everybody’s living off other people’s fear and anxiety? What kind of way to live is that? I don’t think it made them happy.

Brian Rose: They could have embraced you for your uniqueness and for bringing a different point of view, something more interesting and entertaining.

So you picked up and came to London.

David Graeber: What happened was interesting. They basically had to change the rules in order to fire me. They got special permission from the dean to review me without any external input, and when they decided to kick me out they didn’t give a reason, because they couldn’t actually come up with one. The last time they’d done external reviews and student reviews, they came out very well. So they just didn’t say anything, just said bye. And that was an insinuation: if he’s this well known and he got fired, and they won’t tell us the reason, he must have done something. It was a way of insinuating just by not saying anything.

Then the students protested, and this is an irony. As I said, the students were very divided about the union, and there were huge political tensions, but the only thing all the students could agree on was that what happened to me was really unfair. They felt I was too nice to students; that was part of the reason the faculty didn’t like me. I’d defended the student they were trying to kick out, and I was generally seen as being on the side of the students rather than the senior faculty. So the students said, “Please let us protest, because it’s bringing us all together. Every working group has one pro-union and one anti-union student on it, and suddenly we have something we can all agree on.” I said, well, I can’t have anything to do with the protest, but go ahead. So they put up a petition and did protests with signs. I wasn’t even on campus at the time.

In retrospect, I think that was what really sank my boat in American academia. For five or six years I applied for probably 30 jobs, and not a single time was I even considered. Usually there’s a long list of maybe 20 people, they cut it down to three or four, they interview, and they choose one. Not a single time did I even make the long list. I was always dropped at the first cut, every single time, which had never happened to me before. I’d applied for lots of jobs and always at least made the long list. Meanwhile, everywhere else in the world, all the way to China, I was getting feelers saying, “Hey, apply for jobs here, we’ll give you a job.” Except in America, where no one would look at me. So something really weird was going on.

Brian Rose: It was damaged in their minds.

David Graeber: Who knows. If there was a blacklist, we’re only going to know 20 years later. I know there were other people, not just me, who had similar experiences around that time, so it’s possible something was going on. But who’s to say?

1:25:30 Brian Rose: And now you’re here at the London School of Economics.

David Graeber: I’m happy here at LSE. It’s very nice. I can’t complain.

Brian Rose: People value and respect your opinion on a lot of different issues. Do you like being in London? Is this your spot?

David Graeber: I didn’t like it at first. At first you’re an expat and you mostly hang out with other expats, and people were all saying it takes about ten years before you’re fully accepted here. I thought, I don’t want to be that old before I have any friends. But it wasn’t true. It took about two or three. I think it was the student movement in 2010. I actually helped occupy something.

Brian Rose: Did you occupy here? Were you here for Occupy London?

David Graeber: No, I was in New York, and actually in Texas for part of that year. But the 2010 student movement, I was involved in that. There were only maybe three or four actual lecturers who were willing to show up and take part, and we made friends for life with the people we were there with. That really became the base of my social network.

Brian Rose: What’s next for you? If you look forward five years, what will David be doing? What will you have done?

David Graeber: The government will have fallen? Capitalism? I don’t know. I was thinking about this because I’m writing a book with Marshall Sahlins, a combination of essays by him and me. He was my adviser in anthropology. He’s a big name, though outside anthropology perhaps people haven’t heard of him. When I met him it was like meeting Brad Pitt or some other superstar, and here I am co-writing with him. So I thought, well, I’ve achieved my intellectual ambitions. Now all I have to think about is my political ambitions, and my political ambitions are a little more ambitious.

Brian Rose: What are they?

David Graeber: Get rid of capitalism and the state.

Brian Rose: Capitalism, yes.

David Graeber: It might take a little longer, but we’re doing the groundwork here. There’s a lot going on, and the one thing I’ve learned about history, having taken part in it a little bit, is that you really don’t know when things are going to hit. You just have to be prepared.

Brian Rose: So be ready, keep doing the direct action, and then all of a sudden something aligns, like with Occupy, and you take a huge leap forward.

David Graeber: After the global justice movement, after 9/11, there was huge repression, and we kept doing the stuff. Every year I thought, maybe this year it’s going to take off again. For a while I think we were just going through the motions. We were telling ourselves this, but none of us really believed it. You have to tell yourself this could turn into a huge thing, and then it never does. I talked to someone from Egypt who said exactly the same thing. She’d been organising for years, and she said you get into this thing where you organise a rally or a march and only 50 people show up and you’re depressed. Then 300 people show up and you think, not bad, and you’re happy. Then one day 300,000 people show up, and she said, “What did I do right? I just did the same thing.” So when history hits you, you’re never really prepared.

Brian Rose: So keep grinding every day, keep doing what you’re doing, to lay the groundwork.

David Graeber: When people ask me about capitalism, to be perfectly honest, and say, “How are you ever going to get rid of capitalism?”, it seems to be going down the tubes pretty quickly of its own accord. I’m not so much worried that capitalism will still be here in 50 years. What I’m more worried about is that the next thing is going to be even worse. Considering it’s going down the tubes, this is the worst time imaginable to stop thinking about what something better might be, because if we don’t get something better, we are going to get something worse.

Brian Rose: One of the questions asked for you on our YouTube video was from a man who identified himself as an anarchist. He said, “I’ve really got to start my web development business to make some money. What if I do it in a way where I control my environment and keep it with the right people with the right ideals? How do I keep myself from being viewed as a sellout by my anarchist buddies?”

David Graeber: Some people are going to think of you as a sellout no matter what you do, and I think that plays into the hands of people who think any utopian politics is bad. I can’t tell you how many times reporters have said, “Well, you’ve got a TV, haven’t you? You’ve got a computer.” I always think, yes, I could live in a tree, but what good would that do anybody? To some degree you live in society now. So what is a reasonable compromise and what isn’t? Most people would say that becoming Richard Branson and then saying you’re still an anarchist is a bit hypocritical. I think we’d all agree with that. Most people would say working for the government and then saying you’re an anarchist is a bit hypocritical. Beyond that, it’s your call.

Do you think you can make more of a difference inside or outside? How many compromises do you have to make, and which compromises are you comfortable making? Somebody will disapprove of you no matter what you do. I think it’s a matter of you and your conscience.

1:31:10 Brian Rose: Can I ask you about some of your success secrets, how you’ve been able to write so many books and be a professor? I don’t even know, I think you’re up to 10 or 12 now?

David Graeber: You said it was somewhere around a dozen.

Brian Rose: Is there something in your morning routine or daily practice, whether it comes to your writing or anything else, that you’ve picked up over the years, where you think, when I do this I get all this output, and when I don’t, I don’t get where I want to go?

[London Real promo removed]

Why Madagascar? What were you doing down there, and if you had to give me the one-minute explanation, what is Madagascar like?

David Graeber: Madagascar, it’s a great place. My adviser suggested it. I’d been thinking of going somewhere else, and he said, “You’ve got to think about Madagascar. It’s an Austronesian society. I think that would be a good idea, your mind works like that.” I still have no idea what he meant. I looked it up and thought, that’s interesting: it’s like half African, half Asian, a complete mix of cultures, and the language spoken there is related to Indonesian. It was relatively recently settled, and it seems to have been settled largely by escaped slaves, both African and Indonesian, who created what in South America they’d call an almost quilombo-type society.

I started reading Malagasy myths, and they were great. There are all these stories about people who claim they weren’t created by God and challenge God to a contest to prove it, and win. They’re totally subversive. Their myths were hilarious, and they would all end with the same tagline: “It is not I who lie; these lies come from ancient times.” They seemed to have this great attitude and they were really funny, so I thought, these are people I could get along with.

When I went there, I never had more fun. This was in a community called Betafo, and when people asked me what I liked about it, I said, imagine a place which has the best gossip in the entire world. Here we have a community where not only is everybody polyamorous, so they’re all having multiple affairs, but everybody knows magic and they’re all enchanting each other in all sorts of complex ways, because they’re all having these complex love affairs, punishing this person, enchanting that person. And the ancestors are showing up, there’s this huge history, they’re all doing battle secretly and magically, and people are getting possessed by spirits all over the place. They’re all very poor, but God knows they find ways to entertain themselves.

Brian Rose: And you’re doing research, watching the way they behave?

David Graeber: You learn the language, you move into the community, and you get a sense of the flow of everyday life, including the flow of debt and money and that sort of thing. That was important; people were involved in commerce.

What was interesting about this place: Betafo is a cluster of little hamlets. I keep wanting to call it a town, because the word for town can be used for any settlement there, but there are only a few houses. It’s surrounded by ancient moats, giant rings, which is how you know it’s a really ancient place. There’s no water in them any more, so they’re giant ditches. Only a noble place can be surrounded by ditches and moats like that. In the very centre is the tomb of the noble ancestor. The community is divided between descendants of nobles and descendants of their former slaves, and if a person descended from a slave so much as touches the tomb of the noble ancestor, guns go off inside. They’re not supposed to come near that spot.

However, the people who used to be slaves have their own ancestor, on a little hill to the north-east overlooking the place, which is the sacred, superior direction. They claim their ancestor wasn’t really a slave. They tried to enslave him, but there was a huge magical battle and he won, and that’s why they control the weather now. They have a charm to control the hail. When they open the tomb to bury somebody they have to hang a cloth over it, because if their ancestor sees the village he gets so angry that whirlwinds strike the town.

When I was there, everybody told me about something that had happened. Government had basically vanished in rural Madagascar. There were no police, nobody was paying taxes, everybody was basically managing their own affairs. These are generally very non-violent people, but there was a problem with theft, especially in places where some people are much richer than others. Somebody had made off with a whole storage pit full of some elder’s rice, and the elder said, “This is enough. I’m really tired of all this thieving. We’re going to have a collective ordeal.”

The way you have an ordeal is that you get some water, you put in some dust from the ancestral tomb and a piece of gold, usually a gold ring, and everybody takes a little of the water and says, “I swear by the ancestors, if I am the one who did this, may the ancestors strike me dead.” Then the next person who dies was guilty. So they did that, and then they said, “Wait a minute, which ancestor are we going to use?” Because the ancestors hate each other. You’ve got the noble ancestor, and you’ve got the slave ancestor up on the hill. The astrologer, the old man who was the ritual master of the community, said, “It’s OK, we’ll mix them together. We’ll take a little from each.”

So they had the ceremony, and according to everybody it went well. But it was the rainy season, so every evening there was a storm, and that evening there was a freak hailstorm that destroyed only the rice of the people who had organised the ceremony. Basically the ancestors were both so angry about being mixed together that they pulverised their fields.

Brian Rose: Do you pick up some of this sorcery and magic when you come back? Are you superstitious? Or did you ever want to shake them and say, this is all nonsense?

David Graeber: Half the people there said it was nonsense. That’s the fun thing. When you’re in a place like this, it’s not as if people are living in a mire of superstition. Everybody’s like, “Well, you always wonder whether some of this is true. Some of these guys are definitely frauds, but I think some of them are for real.” You think of these people as living in a primitive, superstitious way, but they’re really just like us.

My favourite story: one of my favourite informants had a whole bunch of kids. There are different taboos for pregnancy. If you put an egg in your pocket, your child will be bald. If you put a piece of ginger in your pocket, your child will have knobbly fingers, or too many fingers. She went through all these things, and said that if you laugh at a cripple, your child will have that deformity. She said, “Of course I’d been hearing this all my life, so I had to know whether it was really true. So every time I became pregnant I broke one of the taboos. I put an egg in my pocket for this one. She’s not bald, so that’s nonsense. I put ginger in my pocket for that one. See, she does have a problem with her fingers, so that’s true.”

Brian Rose: Everybody is a radical empiricist.

1:38:50 David, I always finish these by asking a few questions at the end. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old David Graeber and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Where was he? It’s kind of interesting: you were walking around barefoot.

David Graeber: I went barefoot the entire time I was in college. Well, as soon as it was warm. I’d forgotten that. Whenever it was warm I would go barefoot, and everybody said, “That’s stupid, you’re going to walk on broken glass, you’ll hurt your feet.” I would always say, “If you don’t believe it will happen, then it won’t.” And oddly enough I never once stepped on glass during the entire three years I was at SUNY Purchase. Maybe it was luck, or maybe I just had calluses.

What would I want to tell my 20-year-old self? That’s a good one. I’ve made so many mistakes in life. I would say, don’t trust people so much, and don’t be so naive. In a lot of ways, almost everything that has gone wrong in my life has been based on being naive in some way. In the Occupy movement we were naive because we thought the moderate left would be sensible and stand up for us rather than leave us to the cops. When I got kicked out of Yale, it never occurred to me that everybody else in America, when nobody respected those guys, everybody else in American academia who claimed to be these great radicals, would put a boycott on me and not hire me. So, don’t be so trusting.

Brian Rose: The best advice you’ve ever received, in business, personal life, academia or even direct action? You must have learned early from some of the veterans out there doing it.

David Graeber: I’ve learned a lot. For direct action stuff, if you’re dealing with cops, the most important thing to know is never disagree with them. If you have to deal with a cop, agree with everything they say and do the opposite. I’ve avoided arrest on many occasions. When a cop says, “Stand against that wall,” I say, “OK, officer,” and walk the other way. He says, “Against the wall!” “Oh, that wall? OK, you want me to go over there,” and walk away.

Brian Rose: So agree, and don’t give them a reason.

David Graeber: They’re looking for pushback. A person who argues with them but does what they say will probably get beaten up anyway. Someone who doesn’t argue with them and doesn’t do what they say will, the moment he has a chance, get away.

Brian Rose: That’s a very good tip.

Last question. To the people listening, especially the 20-year-olds who see these movements happening and don’t know what to do or where to go. They hear you talk about what you’ve talked about today, but they don’t know how to act, or how not to become part of the system. What advice do you give them?

David Graeber: I really think you’ve got to follow your own heart on that one, because there is no answer. The most important thing is to understand that for some things there is no right answer. One of the things I’ve realised from studying anthropology is that there are certain quandaries that nobody’s figured out and nobody ever will. In a way, when we study people in Madagascar and magic, it’s just their way of dealing with the same sort of thing that we can’t figure out. Statistical probability is just as mystical. We’re trying to quantify the exact degree to which we don’t know what’s going to happen, which is like some magical mana idea they have in Polynesia. Nobody’s got the answers on some of these things, so to some degree you just have to follow your gut, and don’t be so judgemental about people who come to other decisions.

1:43:00 Brian Rose: Good advice. David, it’s been fascinating talking to you. I come from what some people would call the other side of the street. I was in banking for ten years, I was a credit derivatives trader. We didn’t really get into your book.

David Graeber: Well, come back again.

Brian Rose: Because it’s fascinating. It’s called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I was reading through it, and it’s a fascinating assertion, the idea that debt came first, and that even barter and money were for relationships where people didn’t trust each other. And it sounds like in these places in Madagascar there are all sorts of debt arrangements.

David Graeber: There are always credit and trust arrangements between people. We have the question wrong. Everybody thinks people start out with a spot trade: I’ll give you two of those, you give me three of these. Then the story is that this becomes inefficient, because maybe I don’t have anything you want right now and we can’t make a trade. That’s so silly, because people are your neighbours. You want people in your debt. The question is how this sense of “I owe you a favour” becomes quantified into “I owe you 17 of these, which is equal to 54 of those.” That’s a very different question from the one people usually ask.

Brian Rose: And the idea is that when you start putting a monetary value on things, things can get ugly.

David Graeber: They have the potential to. They don’t have to, but they can. I always say a debt is a perversion of a promise. If I promise to meet you at five, and then my mother dies, you’re not going to expect me to show up, because it’s a personal thing. You understand that everything is qualified within reason. But if I promise to give you money, and then my mother dies, so what, unless we’re friends. Debt makes it possible to make these things totally impersonal. If I promise to meet you at five, normally you can’t give that promise to someone else, but with a debt you can, because it becomes impersonal, it becomes transferable, and it becomes enforceable in this impersonal fashion. Then of course violence comes in. You can say, “If you don’t do this, I can have you arrested.”

Brian Rose: Or break your knees, or whatever the equivalent is. And then there are all these micro-payments going on too: can I borrow this, can I have that. When you quantify those, that turns into something else.

David Graeber: In human relations, I actually made the argument that we have a tendency to think of everything as exchange, but not everything is exchange. If you have relations between people who aren’t equal at all, and I do you a favour, you’ll just expect me to do it again. It establishes the kind of relationship you have with each other. If I give money to a beggar, he’s not going to give me something back, but he might expect me to give him more next time he sees me. The same is true when a boss does you a favour. It establishes the relationship, so if you need it you’ll come to them again, and they’ll expect other things from you. So in really hierarchical relations you don’t have exchange.

But also among really good friends. I always say communism exists right now. It exists between friends, it exists within families, and to some degree it exists between everybody who isn’t an enemy. They say communism means from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. We all act like that with everybody, at least a little, if the need is great enough or the cost is small enough. If the need is great enough, if I’m drowning, you’re going to throw me a life preserver; it doesn’t matter who I am. Or if the cost is small enough: can you give me directions? It takes a situation of real mutual suspicion and hostility for a person not to give you directions. It’s just assumed that anyone will do something like that for you. So there’s a kind of ground of communism as the basis of all sociability, and to some degree we extend it to anybody we care about a lot.

The problem is that communism can slip into hierarchy, into a relation where somebody’s needs or somebody’s means are so much greater than somebody else’s that it becomes a relationship where one person is clearly dominant. That’s why egalitarian societies have to create safeguards to make sure that doesn’t happen. If we’re all hunter-gatherers and somebody’s a really good hunter, we make fun of him, or we set up some randomising device so it doesn’t matter who killed the animal, it’s whose arrow it was, or something like that. So there are mechanisms to make sure communistic relations don’t slip into hierarchy.

They can slip into hierarchy, but they can’t slip into exchange. Some slip into each other and some don’t. Say you’re friends and you listen to each other’s problems, and one person always wants you to hear them complain about their problems and is always asking you for favours, and you never get much from them; they never have time for you. You’re not going to say, “I think we should be more equal about this. You need to listen to my problems at least once for every three times I listen to yours.” You can’t turn it into exchange. If someone’s abusing it, you just cut them off; you stop talking to them. What I was trying to understand is the basic moral micro-dynamics of how we relate to each other. It’s not a business deal. It’s a much more complex mix of hierarchy, exchange and communism.

Brian Rose: That’s the best explanation of communism I’ve ever heard. When I started reading about your theory, I thought, I guess we’re all like that in a certain way. If you’re in a crisis situation, everyone looks to whoever is most capable. You know how to cook, cook. You know how to fight, fight. You know how to build a house or light a fire, everyone does it.

David Graeber: When there’s a natural disaster, everybody reverts to communism, ironically, because it’s the only thing that works.

Brian Rose: I never thought I’d be agreeing to that. I come from the banking side, and we have a lot of people on here who talk about entrepreneurship, but I think this conversation is just as important, because we all have to look around and question why the hell we’re doing what we’re doing. And you go even further in saying that a lot of the time we don’t even know what we’re doing. The invisible hand, and economists, assume humans will always make the rational value decision, but we know that’s not true. So it’s interesting to see your perspective on why we do some of these things, including maybe working full-time when we really have no business to.

David Graeber: There are these strange moral hangovers from previous ages, and the people in political power realise these things play into their hands. I’ve been accused of being a conspiracy theorist for saying this, but I do think it’s true that people in power don’t really want a population with a lot of free time on its hands. Most of these guys went to college in the 60s, and there was a kind of collective freak-out in the ruling class at the time. I know people who were part of think tanks back then asking, “What are we going to do about the problem of too much leisure time?” They talked about this all the time. They said, “If we think hippies are bad now, what’s going to happen when robots replace all the factories and the entire proletariat turns into a bunch of hippies? It’s going to be a disaster. They’re all going to be sitting around smoking drugs and having crazy ideas. It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

And there was a change in technological investment away from that kind of robotisation, towards information technology and medical technology, the right kind of drugs, Ritalin, Prozac, things like that. So I think there really was a sense among the people running things: keep them all working a lot, it gets them off the streets.

Brian Rose: You look at all the stone walls in England. You go up to the Lake District and see all these walls and think, what the hell? But it was the wealthy people keeping everyone busy, to stop any kind of revolt from happening.

David Graeber: Absolutely. I think they do think like that. As I was saying, I went to this meeting and they were saying, “We’ve fixed the labour market, everybody’s working.” Of course they’re getting less money, working more hours and not happy, but that’s OK. We’ve got them working. That’s what was important.

1:51:05 Brian Rose: I look forward to your new book. Is it about social classes?

David Graeber: The new one is a bureaucracy book that just came out. We didn’t get to talk about that. But I have a new one I’m going to do about the origins of social inequality, with David Wengrow, an archaeologist at UCL.

Brian Rose: Excellent, that’s coming up. And you’re teaching at LSE.

David Graeber: I might do a book on bullshit jobs, I’m not sure.

Brian Rose: So you’re going to keep publishing.

David Graeber: A bunch of projects.

Brian Rose: I’m glad we finally made this happen. It’s nice to get to know you a bit. I’ve seen you on the Keiser Report, which is always great, and speaking at a few meetings, but it’s usually very on the point, so it’s nice to hear more.

David Graeber: It was fun to be able to talk about that a little.

Brian Rose: And thanks for telling us about the creation of Occupy. I’d never heard it from that perspective.

David Graeber: It just took off. Again, it was one of those moments: what did we do right? It worked. Oh my God, now what are we going to do?

Brian Rose: It’ll probably happen again some time.

David Graeber: Oh yes, it’s a matter of time.

Brian Rose: Thanks for opening up our minds, I appreciate it. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you all on yours.

David Graeber: Thanks.

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