David Graeber, "the radical anthropologist, provocative critic of economic and social inequality and self-proclaimed anarchist who was a coiner of 'We Are the 99 Percent,' the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement," died on September 2, the New York Times reported. He was 59 and was a professor at the London School of Economics.
Graeber was a prolific author and "captivated a cult following that grew globally over the past decade with each book he published," the Times wrote. Those books included Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), in which he discussed "the changing definitions of borrowing and who owed what to whom," and in which he supported widespread loan forgiveness.
In The Utopia of Rules (2015), Graeber "ridiculed the bureaucracy that is typically associated with government, but that also permeates the corporate world and everyday business transactions."
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), he criticized how advances in technology had not led to shorter work weeks and more meaningful work. "In technological terms, we are quite capable of this," he wrote. "And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."
He also wrote The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013), and in fall 2021, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow.