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The battle cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which took over Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in the autumn of 2011, was “we are the 99 per cent” — as opposed to the one per cent of the American population who, protesters argued, own a disproportionate chunk of the US’s wealth and assets. Some attributed the coinage to David Graeber, an anthropology professor who had been instrumental in organising the New York City General Assembly, which first convened in August of that year and from which Occupy was born. Graeber, who has died at the age of 59, insisted that others were responsible for turning the phrase into a slogan that would echo around the world in the months that followed. But he was always happy to acknowledge his role in what he once described as an “experiment in a post-bureaucratic society”. The New York Times would later call him the movement’s “house theorist”. His political engagement was at least as important to him as his scholarly work. Marshall Sahlins supervised Graeber’s PhD at the University of Chicago in the 1980s and recalled him as “the most creative student I ever had . . . David’s activism and his anthropology were of a piece, inseparable”. David Graeber was born in New York in 1961, to working-class Jewish parents, and grew up in a housing co-operative in Chelsea, on Manhattan’s West Side. His father, Kenneth, was a plate stripper who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Ruth, his mother, was a garment worker. In the late 1930s, she performed in Pins and Needles, a Broadway musical produced by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Having been raised in the bosom of the American labour movement, by the age of 16 Graeber was calling himself an anarchist. He took an undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Purchase and then went to graduate school in Chicago. A Fulbright scholarship allowed him to travel to Madagascar to do the field work on which he would base his PhD thesis in 1987. By his own account, his decision to pursue an academic career in anthropology was a political one. “I was drawn to the discipline”, he wrote, “because it opens windows on other possible forms of human social existence.” He approached activism in much the same way — as a rehearsal for alternative ways of organising political and social life. The general assemblies at Occupy, for example, he saw as exercises in participatory or “direct” democracy. Graeber started teaching in the anthropology department at Yale University in 1998. Around the same time, he became active in the anti-globalisation movement. According to Beka Economopoulos, like Graeber a member of the New York Direct Action Network, this “freaked Yale University out”. In 2005, by when he had become an associate professor, Yale decided not to renew his contract. Graeber believed the decision was political. Released from the purgatory of the American academic tenure system, which he said was “harrowing and psychologically destructive”, he eventually found sanctuary, and a professional berth, in the UK at Goldsmiths, University of London. It was here that he began work on the book that would make his name, in and outside the academy. Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in 2011, shortly before the encampments in Zuccotti Park took root. This was a disquisition on western political economies after the financial crisis in the guise of a sweeping historical account of the debtor-creditor relationship. The book was also a call to arms. Not long after it was published, Graeber helped to establish a group called Strike Debt, which launched a “rolling jubilee”, buying up hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of medical debt and then abolishing it. Several books followed, including an insider’s account of Occupy Wall Street, a treatise on the scourge of bureaucracy and, most recently, Bullshit Jobs, an analysis of the meaningless work that proliferates in modern economies. Although Graeber remained a self-described anarchist to the end, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leftwing leadership of the UK Labour party. He discerned a connection between Corbyn’s attempt to “democratise” Labour and his own work in “movements aimed at creating new forms of bottom-up democracy”. One of the last pieces of journalism Graeber ever published was a postmortem on Labour’s catastrophic 2019 general election defeat, in which he insisted that “proclamations of the death of British socialism . . . seem decidedly premature”.