February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020
From Crimethinc.com – Today, we mourn the passing of our friend and comrade, David Graeber, a tireless, insightful, and wide-ranging thinker.
David’s unexpected passing takes us by surprise. Only days ago, we were corresponding with him about Facebook’s decision to ban anarchist pages to placate the Trump administration. David was among the first to respond with a support statement, charging that “Nothing could conceivably be more violent than to tell us—and particularly our young people—we are forbidden to even dream of a peaceful, caring, world.”
This was in character for David. He was not just an intellectual—he was always eager to take a stand, putting himself in the thick of things. He participated in the Direct Action Network in New York City leading up to the massive demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Quebec City in April 2001 at the high point of the so-called “anti-globalization” movement. He was an instrumental participant in the founding of Occupy Wall Street and engaged in the debates about “violence” that followed, confronting the same self-righteous pundits that other anarchists did. He was one of the first to direct international attention to the revolutionary experiment in Rojava when it was threatened by the Islamic State, and joined us a year ago in calling for solidarity when Turkey invaded.
He put his body on the line along with his reputation, braving tear gas as well as academic retaliation. After Yale forced him out for his political beliefs, David was compelled to move overseas to find a university position commensurate with his abilities. He got a corporate publishing deal, yes, but he got it by refusing to compromise, not by watering down his politics.
David wrote—and thought, and said, and did—more than we could possibly summarize here. We hope that others will compose a proper eulogy to him, recounting all of his activities and contributions across a wide range of fields. Even when we disagreed—our analysis of democracy is in part a response to David’s account of democracy in essays such as “There Never Was a West“—we always learned from him. He was a stalwart friend and a worthy adversary.
In Graeber’s most transcendent work, such as the essay “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, he grapples with the basic ontological questions about freedom and the cosmos. This is how we remember him, weaving together different threads to present a vision of self-determination that extends from subatomic particles to entire societies and ecosystems:
“Is it meaningful to say an electron ‘chooses’ to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.”
He passed away at the young age of 59. Our hearts go out to everyone who survives him. We mourn his passing and grieve for all the things that David had yet to share with us.