Since David’s death in 2020, much of my life has been entwined with his vast archive of published and unpublished texts, hundreds of notebooks, audio and video recordings, and correspondences. David once said that the real care for a “great man” begins after his death, and is almost always done by women. Now I know what he meant.

When David talked about care, he always added that it has real significance only if it enables freedom. Prisons take care of their inmates, feeding and housing them—but hardly any of us would want to experience that sort of care. Parents take care of their kids so children can play and be free. I ask myself: What kind of care might David need after death, and what posthumous freedom would it enable?

Our Western conception of freedom traces back to the legal authority of Roman patriarchs over their family and slaves. It is based on the idea of private property—understood not as a relation between people, but rather as a relation between a person and a thing, or between two people, one of whom is also a thing (this is how slaves were defined in Roman law: they were persons who were also res, things). Slavery meant social death; a slave was a person deprived of the right to create his or her own social bonds. In turn, the Latin word for “body”—corpus—also means a body of writings or a body of laws, and it is linked to the idea of private property and a free man who has autonomy over his body and can own property. In a slight modification it means “corpse,” a dead body. A body of work set for eternity, immutable, floating above mere mortals: it would be hard to find a description of writing more alien to David.

David’s understanding of freedom was antithetical to Western notions derived from ancient Rome. In his lectures he frequently observed that perhaps we are the only civilization that has been built almost exclusively on the bizarre link between private property and freedom. Virtually all of David’s work advanced his theory that true freedom is an underlying principle of the universe, manifested in play and social relationships; freedom, to David, does not derive from laws and it is not based on individual property rights. (In an essay for the popular magazine The Baffler, which concludes this collection, David discusses the crucial themes of freedom and play, which he discussed with the philosophers Roy Bhaskar and Mehdi Belhaj Kasem.)

Writing was an exercise of freedom for David. It was a rebellious project, often created with others to collectively change the social order, literally revising an existing social code. His understanding of change diverged from that of many revolutionaries, especially Vladimir Lenin. David believed that revolution was not about taking over the Louvre or bringing new politicians to power—although sometimes that might help to make the world a better place. Rather, David believed that “revolution happens when there is a transformation of common sense.”

David lived with the deep understanding that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world”—the code that drives the invisible social mechanisms of our society that make us kill one another in wars or build free housing, work for years in bullshit jobs or take on caretaking jobs, even if they pay very little—“ is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”

Borges famously said: “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” With this sentiment I agree. Though, for it to truly embody David’s spirit, his book would have to be open source. In open-source projects, participation remains open to everyone, the methodology and results are transparent, and if the “lead programmers” disappear, the project nevertheless continues to evolve without them.

David was what the French call an “homme de lettres.” He lived to share his ideas, expressing them in as many ways as he could. Much like Noam Chomsky, another noted anarchist-scholar, he made himself available to those outside the academy and would speak almost everywhere he was invited.

David understood anarchism not as an identity but as a practice, existing in social relationships with others, and it could be said that David’s main intellectual project outside of publishing was the democratization of the writing process itself.

David used to say that when writing in his mind he was talking to his mother, and if he felt that she understood him, he believed that others would, too. His texts were written to be open to discussion and further development by other people. This was by design; he wanted to change our collective common sense, and this task can only be accomplished collectively.

It seems to me that his social project has been remarkably successful. From book to book, and essay to essay, David was able to challenge assumptions that we hold dear, the way we think—the very essence of our collective social code. David proudly noted that after Occupy Wall Street, the word inequality appeared in the speeches of even the most conservative American politicians, and most Americans under the age of thirty-five preferred socialism to capitalism. The Occupy Wall Street movement, to which he later devoted several books, spread around the world. Though often credited to him, the slogan “We are the 99%” was a collective enterprise, born in the struggle, and continues to resonate and have a global impact long after he is gone.

I selected eighteen essays for this collection, in collaboration with David’s students and colleagues from both the David Graeber Institute and the Museum of Care, with the aim of mapping his key life projects—or at least those that are already known to us; his archive is vast, and yet to be fully explored. The essays in this collection are a history of his social relationships—an exploration of his friendships, his adversaries, and his conversational partners. They center around the dialogical nature of human consciousness, cooperation as political freedom, and, ultimately, the origins of “common sense.”

In the preface to Pirate Enlightenment, David describes the book as part of a larger intellectual project, which he first laid out in the 2007 essay “There Never Was a West (Part One),” and continued with The Dawn of Everything (coauthored with David Wengrow). He called this project “decolonizing the Enlightenment.”

He writes: “There can be no doubt that many of the ideas we now see as products of the eighteenth-century European Lumieres were, indeed, used to justify extraordinary cruelty, exploitation and destruction, not just on the working classes at home, but on those who lived on other continents. But the blanket condemnation of Enlightenment thought is in its own way rather odd.”

David’s lifelong project was to reveal the non-Western origins of the Enlightenment and its strikingly different view of human nature
and democracy—thus offering us another Enlightenment we have yet to discover. In Pirate Enlightenment, he tells the story of white European settlers in Madagascar who generally avoided committing most of the crimes against humanity that we today call colonialism. It is an example of an alternative colonization, during which the Old World met the New World, mixing with the local population and creating a new culture and even a whole new nation, the Zala Malata, who still live in Madagascar—all while upholding the ideas of equality, freedom, and democracy we hold dear in the West today.

David articulated many of the central ideas of this project in the 2013 journal article “Dead Zones of the Imagination.” But he had begun thinking about this larger project as early as graduate school, when he traveled to Madagascar on the advice of his anthropology professor and intellectual mentor at the University of Chicago, Marshall Sahlins.

David’s work builds upon Sahlins’s critique of Western economic and cultural models, in large part by incorporating insights gleaned
from Russian thinkers—primarily Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also Dostoevsky and Bakhtin. It is noteworthy that he took only two books with him to Madagascar: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. One of the basic ideas to which David would return again and again in his scientific and political projects, as well as his anthropological studies, was that “man is not a final and defined quantity upon which firm calculations can be made; man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms which might be thrust upon him . . .” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics). Bakhtin and Dostoevsky described human nature as a potentiality that emerges through polyphonic, carnivalesque dialogue with other people.

David used to say, “All human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other.” This is how David understood himself and the purpose of his writing.

When choosing texts for the section on economics and care, I remembered how David, at one of his book launches, answered a question
from a woman who introduced herself as a nanny in a nursing home. She asked: “Why don’t people like me have access to decision-making?” David replied, “Our society is organized in such a way that access to power is conditioned on access to violence. People who are busy taking care of other people have minimal access to make decisions, but army chiefs, CEOs of big corporations, and so on are the ones who decide how we all live our lives.” In turn, he asked the woman: “Do we really want to live in a society organized according to the ideals of such people?”

I was in the Berlin auditorium at that moment, and I was personally struck by David’s answer, because usually people who have written
books of five hundred pages rarely bother to connect their complex constructs, especially economic ones, with the daily reality of ordinary people. It is even more difficult to make your fundamental discoveries—new paradigms of knowledge, history, and power—understandable to people without any specialized education.

But this is exactly what is needed to change public perceptions of common sense.

In the “Against Economics” section, I chose essays I saw as key to David’s thinking about power and justice. In the interview “Finance Is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts,” David listed some of the people he was in dialogue with, but I would especially like to highlight Michael Hudson, an economist straddling academia and Wall Street, whom David credits for turning him on to creditor-debtor
relations, or debt, as a critical turning point in human history. (David also was enchanted by Hudson’s incredible biography. As we were heading out to lunch with him one day, David whispered to me, “The most amazing thing is that everything Michael will tell you about himself is really true!” Hudson was the godson of Lev Trotsky, who was murdered with the ice pick belonging to Michael’s aunt. Such stories interested David far more than any academic achievement.) Another text included in the “Against Economics” section, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” was born as a follow-up to casual conversations with people who defined their jobs as meaningless or even harmful to society, despite earning good money and enjoying high status. What was remarkable in his approach was his empathy for the very victims of the “spiritualist violence” inflicted upon those holding bullshit jobs. After all, it was these people, occupying the most privileged positions in society, whom the left traditionally scorned for their complicity and blame for the suffering of the oppressed, and not unfairly so. But David draws attention specifically to their misery, showing how it forms “a scar across our collective soul.”

The question of how the power structure of our society works, and, more important, how it might work, was always front and center for David. When he coined the phrase “care and freedom,” care wasn’t a buzzword yet. Today, care is invoked in texts frequently and ubiquitously, from academia to the art world to journalism. There is an entire section in this collection, “The Revolt of the Caring Classes,” describing David’s proposal to integrate Marxist and feminist approaches, creating a new form of the labor theory of value.

In concluding this introduction, I want to refer again to the title of the collection. I hope after reading this book it will become obvious that “the ultimate truth of the world,” does not exist somewhere behind the closed doors of museums; it is not kept in archives filled with dusty books by great authors of the past, nor is it to be found in the palaces of kings or in the manifestos and speeches of political party leaders. This truth belongs to all of us, and it is this: we are free to change it as we see fit.

Without magic tricks or a Leninist “bridge and telegraph takeover,” David was releasing forces that were already within us—our common human yearning for freedom and care.

With this in mind, I see David’s texts—his archive—not as an unchangeable corpus of work, but as a very generous structure that can provide a space for making these horizontal connections, replete with open questions, doubts, and unexpected references to different ways of thinking, with entry points for reader-commentators almost anywhere.

In our essay “Another Art World,” we fumbled for a description of what this other world might look like, returning to the Romantics’
original idea of culture and to Alexander Bogdanov’s Proletkult, an experimental cultural federation in the first years of the Russian Revolution, which created a gigantic network of popular amateur artistic collectives, independent of state and party control.

As I think about the kind of care that might suit David, keeping in mind his ability to make direct emotional and intellectual connections
with people—both personally and through his texts—I ponder how to make his legacy a living and ever-evolving project in which all of us, his readers and fellow writers, can participate.

This is the kind of care that David himself not only endorsed but practiced. In this evolving collective space, we can continue to collaborate with David even if he is no longer with us in a corporeal sense.

I hope that these eighteen essays will be the beginning of a series of publications that will include David’s unpublished writings, his diaries,
his sixty-two lectures, and the complete collection of his archive. But most important, I hope that there will be more and more people who, freely and caringly, in a collective dialogue, will be able to build Another World, exactly as they imagine it to be.