#david graeber

British people, I've observed, are quite proud that they are not especially skilled at bureaucracy; Americans, in contrast, seem embarrassed by the fact that on the whole, they're really quite good at it. It doesn't fit the American self-image. We're supposed to be self-reliant individualists. (This is precisely why the right-wing populist demonization of bureaucrats is so effective.) Yet the fact remains the United States is—and for a well over a century has been—a profoundly bureaucratic society. The reason it is so easy to overlook is because most American bureaucratic habits and sensibilities—from the clothing to the language to the design of forms and offices—emerged from the private sector. When novelists and sociologists described the "Organization Man," or "the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," the soullessly conformist U.S. equivalent to the Soviet apparatchik, they were not talking about functionaries in the Department of Landmarks and Preservation or the Social Security Administration—they were describing corporate middle management. True, by that time, corporate bureaucrats were not actually being called bureaucrats. But they were still setting the standard for what administrative functionaries were supposed to be like.

David Graeber, Mark Fisher, Michael Brooks, and Matt Christman

David Graeber, Mark Fisher, Michael Brooks, and Matt Christman. Each, in his distinct idiom, attempted to make the abstract concrete—to name the nameless malaise that infects the social body, and in so doing, each was marked, and three were taken, by the very forces they sought to exorcise. Their stories do not merely illustrate a theoretical point; they constitute a living, dying, dialectical image of the left’s struggle against capitalist realism. To think them together is to trace the lineaments of a collective nervous breakdown and to glimpse, in their shared failure, the preconditions for a more successful failure.

I. The Anthropologist of Possibility: David Graeber (1961–2020)

David Graeber entered the public imagination not through the academy’s gilded gates, but through the tear-gas haze of Zuccotti Park. An anarchist anthropologist who had long toiled in relative obscurity—his fieldwork on value in Madagascar, his monumental Debt: The First 5,000 Years—he became the intellectual nerve centre of Occupy Wall Street. His genius lay in taking the apparently immutable edifices of capitalist common sense and revealing them as the sedimented outcomes of political struggles, often violent and always contingent. Debt was not merely a history of an economic instrument; it was a genealogy of morality itself, a demonstration that our most intimate senses of guilt and obligation are woven from the fabric of money. Later, Bullshit Jobs gave phenomenological voice to a generation drowning in pointlessness, transforming a private, shameful suspicion into a collective grievance.

Graeber’s Marxism was heterodox to the point of heresy, yet deeply consonant with the young Marx’s vision of species-being. He insisted that communism was not a utopia to be imposed from above but a latent potentiality in every act of mutual aid, in every refusal to reduce human relations to exchange. His practice of “prefigurative politics”—the commitment to embody the desired society in the means of struggle—was a direct challenge to the Leninist deferral of freedom. The assembly, the consensus process, the occupation of space: these were not tactics but the very substance of the new world in the shell of the old.

And yet, the vessel shattered. In September 2020, Graeber died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis while on holiday in Venice with his wife Nika. He was 59, at the height of his influence. The necrotic pancreas, an organ devouring itself, seemed a biological metaphor for a system that cannibalizes its critics. His death ripped a hole in the intellectual firmament, a raw demonstration that even the most incandescent mind is housed in a vulnerable body that the logic of capital neglects, exhausts, and ultimately discards.

II. The Haunted Cultural Critic: Mark Fisher (1968–2017)

If Graeber excavated the historical contingency of our economic prisons, Mark Fisher mapped their psychic walls. Capitalist Realism (2009) gave a name to the pervasive sense that not only is there no alternative, but that it has become impossible even to imagine one. Drawing on Jameson’s “cultural logic” and Žižek’s Lacanian Marxism, Fisher diagnosed a condition in which the end of history had been internalized as a structure of feeling. Our culture was stuck in a loop, recycling dead styles (the “slow cancellation of the future”), while mental distress—depression, anxiety, anhedonia—was privatized and pharmacologically managed, severed from its social determinants.

Fisher’s life became a painful enactment of his own concepts. His battles with depression were chronicled with unflinching honesty in his blog k-punk and later in Ghosts of My Life. He sought to politicize despair, to show that “the mental health plague” was a rational response to a society that had commodified every aspect of existence, including our attention, our solidarity, and our capacity to desire. His turn to “Acid Communism” represented a desperate reach for a lost 1960s–70s moment when class consciousness, psychedelic experimentation, and popular culture briefly fused, hinting at a post-capitalist libidinal economy. But the “vampire castle” of call-out culture, as he termed it, combined with the relentless precarity of academic life, tightened the noose. On 13 January 2017, Fisher took his own life.

Fisher’s suicide was a structural fatality. It was not merely a personal tragedy but a symptom of what he called “the privatization of stress.” The university, once a refuge for critical thought, had become an apparatus of bureaucratic cruelty, measuring its inmates with metrics while starving them of hope. His death posed an unbearable question to the left he had nourished: what does it mean when the diagnostician dies of the disease? It forces us to confront the possibility that demystifying capitalist realism is not, in itself, a sufficient antidote—that the affective infrastructure for living otherwise must be built, not just theorized.

III. The Comedian as Organic Intellectual: Michael Brooks (1983–2020)

Michael Brooks was not an academic. He was a comedian, a broadcaster, a voice crackling through YouTube, a laugh that could cut through the densest fog of liberal piety. As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and a co-host of The Majority Report, he practiced a form of political pedagogy that merged rigorous internationalist analysis with withering impersonations and a profound sense of the absurd. His 2020 book, Against the Web, skewered the “Intellectual Dark Web” (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, et al.) with surgical precision, exposing their reactionary mysticism beneath a veneer of free inquiry. But Brooks’s true originality lay in his insistence that the left must reclaim humour as a weapon. Sincere, joyful mockery was, for him, the death of the fatherly authority that the right projects. When he impersonated a billionaire’s crocodile tears or a pundit’s bad faith, he was performing a Gramscian war of position within the affective economy.

Brooks’s internationalism was visceral. He brought to American audiences the struggles of the Global South—from Brazil’s PT to Palestine to South Africa’s EFF—not as exotic curiosities but as integral fronts in the same battle against empire. He embodied the rejection of the colonial division of attention, insisting that the fate of a favela resident and a rust-belt worker were dialectically intertwined. His show, built on the precarious infrastructure of independent media, was a prefigurative space: listener-supported, fiercely independent, a living rebuttal to the ad-surveillance model of late-capitalist communication.

On 20 July 2020, just months before Graeber’s death, Michael Brooks died suddenly from a blood clot at the age of 36. The shock was disorienting—a young man, seemingly vibrant, felled without warning. The body, again, betrayed the project. His death exposed the brutal material conditions of the “content creator” under platform capitalism: the relentless pressure to produce, the absence of healthcare security, the impossibility of switching off when the battle for minds is perpetual. Brooks’s laughter was extinguished, leaving an eerie silence, a hauntological reminder that the voice of a whole generation can be silenced in an instant.

IV. The Lay Theologian of History: Matt Christman (b. 1985)

Matt Christman is, as of this writing, alive. But he has already passed through a kind of death, a stroke in October 2023 that left him partially paralyzed and aphasic, and from which he has been slowly, heroically, reconstructing himself. Christman is the beating heart of Chapo Trap House, the co-host whose CushVlog—a series of solo, rambling, deeply historical rants delivered from his couch—became a genre unto itself. His project is an attempt to think from inside the totalizing catastrophe of American history. For Christman, Marxism is not a science but an existential encounter with the dialectic, a method for wrestling with the traumas that have deformed the collective subject. His "Hell of Presidents" series reframed US history as a relentless process of primitive accumulation, liberal self-delusion, and the slow-motion car crash of empire, narrated with a mix of scholarly rigour, gallows humour, and shamanic intensity.

Christman’s performance of thought—for it is a performance, a lived art of dialectical negativity—resists easy classification. He is less a theorist than a lay theologian, secular but haunted by a deep sense of sin, doom, and the possibility of grace. His body, often slumped, his voice a gravelly rumble, became a medium for the accumulating weight of history. The stroke was not simply a medical event; it was, in Christman’s own immediate and horrified recognition, the materialization of all that he had been theorizing. The system that grinds down bodies, that privatizes health and alienates care, had reached into his brain. The lesion was a memento mori for a left that too often treats the intellect as disembodied.

Christman’s return to the microphone, his halting, fragile speech, is a testament to something that exceeds theoretical critique: sheer stubborn persistence, the will to continue thinking and communicating as a mode of survival. He is the living negation of the “end of history,” a body that has been broken by history’s continuation and yet refuses to stop speaking it.

V. The Dialectics of Despair and the Labour of Hope

Weave these four lives together and a pattern emerges, a dialectic of defeat that is also, paradoxically, a pedagogy. Graeber reveals the possibility of other worlds, only to perish from the exhaustion of fighting this one. Fisher names the prison, and the naming offers no escape, only a sharper, more unbearable awareness of the bars. Brooks transforms that awareness into joyous, militant solidarity, but his instrument is cut short by the very material conditions it sought to transcend. Christman endures, a Lazarus-figure, bearing witness to the damage and modelling the excruciating labour of piecing a mind back together in public view.

What unites them is their refusal of the dominant affective mode of neoliberal subjectivity: cynical detachment. Each, in his way, embraced a form of sincere radicalism—Graeber’s anarchist earnestness, Fisher’s depressive lucidity, Brooks’s comedic ferocity, Christman’s historical immersion. Against the ironic cool of a culture that has commodified critique, they risked vulnerability, commitment, and even tragedy. Their stories are not invitations to despair but to a deeper realism. As Gramsci taught, we need pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. But these lives suggest that the intellect itself has a material, emotional substrate that must be collectively sustained. The next left cannot just be a community of ideas; it must be a community of care—a prefigurative infrastructure of mutual aid that guards its people against the necropolitical logic that claimed Fisher, Graeber, and Brooks, and that nearly claimed Christman.

faced with a rapidly moving column of several hundred anarchists appearing out of nowhere, small groups of police would often abandon their cars, which the anarchists would then proceed to trash and spray-paint. A couple dozen police cars, one stretch limo, and numerous official buildings were hit in the course of the next hour or so. Eventually, reinforcements, in the form of police bicycle squads, began to appear and before long there was a rough balance of forces. What followed at this point could only be described as an episode of some kind of nonviolent warfare. A few Black Bloc kids would try to shut down a bus by playing with valves in the back; a squad of bike cops would swoop in and grab a few, cuffing them and locking their bikes together to create tiny fortresses in which to hold them. Once, a large mass of protesters appeared from another direction and the cops ended up besieged in their little bike fort, with Black Blockers surrounding them, screaming insults, throwing paint bombs above their heads, doing everything but actually attacking them. On that occasion the Bloc wasn’t quite able to snatch back their arrested comrades before police vans with reinforcements appeared to take them away; elsewhere, there were rumors of successful ‘unarrests’. The police even suffered a casualty in that particular confrontation: one overweight cop, overwhelmed by the tension and stifling heat, collapsed and had to be carried off or revived with smelling salts.

It was obvious that both sides had carefully worked out rules of engagement. Activists tended to work out their principles carefully in advance, and while there were certainly differences, say, between those who adopted classic non-violent civil disobedience rules (who had, for example, undergone nonviolence trainings) and the more militant anarchists I was with, all agree at least on the need to avoid directly causing harm to other human beings, or to damage personal property or owner-operated “mom and pop” stores. The police of course could attack protesters more or less at will, but at this point at least, they seemed to feel they had to do so in such a way as to be fairly sure that none would be killed or more than a handful required hospitalization—which, in the absence of very specific trainings and technologies, required a fair amount of constraint.

These basic rules applied throughout; however, over the course of the day, the tenor of events was constantly shifting. The Black Bloc confrontations were tense and angry; other areas were placid or somber ritual, drum circles or pagan spiral dances; others, full of music or ridiculous carnival. The Black Bloc column I was accompanying, for example, eventually converged with a series of others until there were almost a thousand anarchists rampaging through the center of the city. The District Attorney’s office was thoroughly paint-bombed.

More police cars were destroyed. However it was all done quickly on the move and larger and larger bike squads started followed our columns, splitting the Bloc and threatening to isolate smaller groups that could, then, be arrested. We were running faster and faster, dodging through alleys and parking lots.

Finally, the largest group descended on a plaza where a permitted rally was being held; this was assumed to be a safe space. In fact, it wasn’t quite. Riot police soon began surrounding the plaza and cutting off routes of escape; it seemed like they were preparing for a mass arrest.

Such matters usually simply come down to numbers: it takes something like two officers in the field for every protester to carry off a mass arrest, probably three if the victims are trying to resist, and have some idea of how to go about it (i.e., know enough to link arms and try to keep a continuous line.) In this situation the Black Bloc kids could be expected to know exactly what to do; the others, who thought they were attending a safe, permitted event, were mostly entirely unprepared but could nonetheless be assumed to follow their lead; on the other hand, they were trapped, they had no way to receive reinforcements, and the police were getting a constant flow of them. The mood was extremely tense. Activists who had earlier been conducting a teach-in and small rally against the prison industrial complex milled about uncomfortably around a giant poster-board as the Bloc, now reduced to a couple hundred black figures in bandanas and gas masks, formed a mini-spokescouncil, then faced off against the police lines at two different points where it seemed there might be a break in their lines (there usually is, when the police first begin to deploy); but to no avail.

I lingered on the plaza, chatting with a friend, Brad, who was complaining that he had lost his backpack and most of his worldly goods in the police raid on the puppet space that morning. We munched on apples—none of us had eaten all day—and watched as four performance artists on bicycles with papier-mâché goat heads, carrying a little sign saying “Goats With A Vote”, began wading into the police lines to perform an acapella rap song. “You see what you can do with puppets?” laughed Brad. “No one else would ever be able to get away with that.”

The Goats, as it turned out, were just the first wave. They were followed, ten minutes later, by a kind of “puppet intervention”. Not with real puppets—the puppets had all been destroyed, and the musicians all arrested, at the warehouse earlier that morning. Instead, the Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc appeared; led by two figures on high bicycles, blowing horns and kazoos, spreading streamers and confetti everywhere; alongside a large contingent of 'Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)’, dressed in high camp tuxedos and evening gowns. There were probably not more than thirty or forty of them in all but between them they immediately managed to change the tenor of the whole event, and to throw everything into confusion. The Billionaires started handing fake money to the police (“to thank them for suppressing dissent.”) the clowns attacked the Billionaires with squeaky mallets. Unicycles appeared, and fire jugglers. In the ensuing confusion, cracks did appear in the police lines and just about everyone on the Plaza took advantage to form a wedge and burst out and to safety, with the Black Bloc leading the way.

There is every reason to believe that our own money started the same way—even the English word "to pay" is originally derived from a word for "to pacify, appease"—as in, to give someone something precious, for instance, to express just how badly you feel about having just killed his brother in a drunken brawl and how much you would really like to avoid this becoming the basis for an ongoing blood-feud.

Indigenous art by Gawirrin Gumana

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“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

“Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

… The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. 

It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”

― David Graeber,

no title, just experimenting Giovanni Tilotta, 2020

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“if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.”