David Graeber

David Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist known both for his academic scholarship and for his prominent role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where he is widely credited with helping to coin the slogan we are the 99 percent. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) he challenged the conventional economic account that money arose to replace an earlier system of barter, arguing instead that debt and credit relations are historically prior to and more fundamental than barter, with implications for how societies have organized obligation, morality, and violence. His later books included Bullshit Jobs (2018), a study of meaningless employment in modern economies, and The Dawn of Everything (2021), co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, which challenged standard narratives of human social evolution from small egalitarian bands to large hierarchical states.