Bureaucracy, Puppets, and Play

When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years.

 Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine.

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