What is your first memory of political awareness?
I remember a 1960s peace march in Central Park. And another on a beach on Fire Island, of all places. I was carrying a sign that said ‘We want peace’ and some older guy, noticing I was seven years old, asked me if I understood what it meant. I seem to remember telling him that the meaning was self-evident.

In the matter of Tory rule in England, David Graeber has been writing since before the Brexit vote about an “efflorescence of resistance” and a lifting of England’s culture of despair. In this interview, Graeber talks to Christopher Lydon about the recent UK elections and potential change to come.

In this wide-ranging interview for ROAR’s third issue, he speaks about the unexpected history of inequality, the role of debt in contemporary capitalism, the nature of money as a social relation, the violent and self-destructive logic of financialization, the class power of the 1 percent, and the challenges of building a radical-democratic movement against the rule of finance.

Odd things happened in fall 2011 as Occupy Wall Street began to inhabit down- town Manhattan. People rode the subway carrying signs that touted the merits of the Glass-Steagall Act; they started sidewalk conversations about corporate person-hood and about the social purpose of derivatives.