Anarchist ‘anti-leader’ touched a nerve with academic study of ‘bulls..t jobs’

David Graeber, who has died aged 59, was a prominent anarchist and selfstyled ‘‘radical anthropologist’’, ‘‘anti-leader’’ of the (theoretically leaderless) Occupy Wall Street movement – and, latterly, a professor at the London School of Economics.

In 2013, he wrote an essay entitled ‘‘On the Phenomenon of Bulls..t Jobs: A Work Rant’’ in Strike!, a radical magazine published by a grassroots feminist collective. The essay, about the pointlessness of much work in postindustrial society, hit a nerve.

‘‘In the year 1930,’’ Graeber wrote, ‘‘John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like

Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.

‘‘In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

‘‘The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.’’

The article spread quickly, crashing the magazine’s website. It prompted a 2015 YouGov poll that seemed to underline the thesis, revealing that 37 per cent of British workers believed their jobs made ‘‘no meaningful contribution to the world’’.

In 2018 Graeber expanded his argument into a book in which he concluded that more than half the work done in our society – both in the public and private sectors – is pointless. Yet ‘‘bulls..t jobs’’, proliferated by administrative empire building and ‘‘managerial feudalism’’, tend to be comfortable, well-paid, and come with a certain social status.

Graeber’s speciality was ‘‘value theory’’ – how societies decide what is important. With a few exceptions, he argued, modern economies value jobs in almost inverse proportion to their social worth: compare the salaries of advertising execs and PR men with those of binmen, builders, nurses, teachers, and carers, and then ask how society would fare if one group or the other were to disappear.

The book spent four weeks in the Top 20 of the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and was awarded Book of the Year 2018 by the business-focused papers Financial Times and City AM, in which Graeber was no doubt surprised to find himself described as ‘‘an agony aunt for people from banking, finance and many other sectors’’.

David Rolfe Graber was born in New York into a politically active family. His father, a printing worker, had fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. David became an anarchist at 16.

He was studying for a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago when he won a scholarship to conduct field research in central Madagascar, in 1989. Because of spending cuts mandated by the IMF, he discovered, the central government had abandoned the area, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves.

Graeber found a society where, despite social division between the descendants of nobles and those of former slaves, people made decisions more or less by consensus. When necessary, criminal justice was carried out by a mob, but even then a lynching required permission from the accused’s parents. The experience confirmed his belief in zero government.

From 1998 Graeber was assistant professor, then associate professor, of anthropology at Yale, during which time he became increasingly politically active, taking part in protests at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. When, in 2005, Yale declined to renew his contract, he moved to London, eventually becoming professor of anthropology at the LSE.

Graeber made his name with Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), in which he observed that informal debts preceded money and in ancient times were frequently and routinely written off in order to prevent social unrest. The modern era, however, had ‘‘got it completely backwards. We created giant, overarching institutions to protect creditors against debtors; we’ve had nothing but debt crises ever since.’’

He was one of the most articulate proponents of the principles that underpin the ‘‘Occupy’’ movement, which he described optimistically as ‘‘the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire’’.

Graeber died in a Venice hospital five days after posting a video on YouTube saying that he had been ‘‘a little under the weather’’. The immediate cause of death has been reported as ‘‘internal bleeding’’.

He is survived by his wife, the artist Nika Dubrovsky.

‘‘Huge swaths of people ... spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.’’