David Graeber and Militant Epistemologies: A Tribute

From a working class Jewish background in New York, Graeber was effectively blackballed for his politics out of a career in the American Ivy League, taking refuge in London academia at Goldsmiths and then the LSE towards the end of the 2000s.At the same time, deeply involved in and moved by a variety of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements of the early 21st century, he rose to prominence as the most visible thinker of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York in the autumn of 2011.He is credited with its most indelible slogan: 'We are the 99%'.In the last two decades of his life, he produced a series of essential books in social and economic anthropology: on the anarchist foundations of anthropology (Graeber 2004), on the praxis of activism based on an ethnography of the global justice movement (Graeber 2007(Graeber , 2009)), on the world history of debt (Graeber 2011a), and on the logic and curse of bureaucracy and meaningless employment in a neoliberal era (Graeber 2015a(Graeber , 2018)), each informed by his adherence to a mutualist, necessarily utopian, understanding of the fundaments of human society.In hindsight, Graeber may be read as the most iconic political theorist of his generation, and particularly of the dismal years of unrelenting crisis since the global financial meltdown of 2008/9.Although himself older, he spoke most to the millennial and post-millennial generation, young people in these years disabused of the illusions and pieties of globalist liberal democracy, and mobilised into action in the face of implacable neoliberal 'inevitabilism', and an ever more grim economic, political, demographic and climatic outlook for the world.Against the grain of so much left-leaning critique of this period, Graeber was an optimist, a tireless advocate of political hope, and of activism as 'a field of political possibility' to soundbite one of his constantly pithy formulations.He was a no bullshit writer, in word and deed, unlike so much of contemporary social and critical theory, analytically clear and unerringly direct in his diagnoses.And, as Myka Tucker-Abramson here so eloquently relates, he was famously able to read through the self-fulfilling gloom of so much contemporary textbook Marxist-Foucauldianism, to grasp the need for 1