This Isn't About David Graeber
April 2, 2026 Reading time: 24 minutes
I think the best place to start this piece is with a simple declaration: I never knew David Graeber while he was alive. Like most people, I knew of him and, also like many people, had been introduced to a lot of his work around the time that the media kept dragging him in to say something during the Occupy movement.
I can only really credit him with helping me, a person from a rural community who'd never really heard anyone talk about anarchists (other than to insist that any form of unruly behaviour was "anarchy"), understand that there was even a word for people who held views like my own. He didn't do this on a personal level; it just kind of happened since everyone kept referring to him as the Anarchist Anthropologist, and it gave me a starting point to investigate what 'anarchist' even meant.
Somewhat amusingly (at least to myself), I knew of him before Occupy happened. I'm not saying this as a way to show that I was ahead of the trend (that'd be a weird flex), but I do want to say it largely because it's just true, and it came about because I also studied anthropology. As a student, I had come across bits and pieces of his work where it was available, and his name was originally recognisable to me because he had been the doctoral student of another anthropologist who I had taken an interest in because of his work and whispers of his activism: Marshall Sahlins. (Marshall Sahlins was someone I learned of because he, too, really hated Napoleon Chagnon. And with good reason because everyone should've.)
But anyway, this isn't about Graeber. At least, it's not meant to be about him as a person or an individual. It's about how weird it feels to see the way people use him and his work, particularly seeing how easily co-opted his name and work have been by liberals or minimally progressive leftists. It's about how even anarchists seem to use his name and his work as the final destination for their thoughts rather than expanding beyond it and seeing what more exists, either in the history of varying movements or in future possibilities.
Because it's really weird how people use him now that he can't say anything.
The most cohesive beginning of these thoughts started when I kept noticing a similar reply to things I had written. Every single I time I made any kind of post about the tedium in my work as a teacher and how it played into and supported the systems we're living under, there would inevitably be a handful of people making very similar comments. It was always some mixture of asking if I'd read Bullshit Jobs, linking me to the essay that appeared in Strike! Magazine, and then hitting me with one of the quotes from the GoodReads page for the book.
And I do mean every single time. It had become such a common occurrence that a good friend of mine created a Clippy meme for it.
I could not make any comment on any aspect of my job without someone insisting that I read it, as if it were the peak of labour activism and as if I hadn't been espousing the same ideas with or without ever having engaged with the book. It even got to the point where I started finding myself irritated even seeing someone mention David Graeber to me, and that started extending in general to when I saw people bringing him up... everywhere. This wasn't because he was a terrible person (I never knew him) or felt his work was worthless (though it was in large need of a whole range of critiques, some of it is still useful and interesting).
It was because other people were using him almost like a cudgel, as if his singular book (and not even the most interesting one) could save us all. It was like they viewed him as the anarchist messiah, and I found it... disgusting.
Though the essay was published in 2013 and resonated with many people (enough people that even Simon & Schuster thought it best to offer him a deal), the book was published in 2018. Ever since then, it has continued to resonate with people in rapidly de-industrialising countries that have practically shoved all their labour force into more 'white collar' work, whether the job needs to exist or not (this is largely an oversimplification of Graeber's point).
This makes sense, since that was largely what "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" was even about. If the talk he gave at RSA in 2018 is to be believed, it seems that the original article stemmed from observing interactions of people being apologetic for what they do for a living ("not just because they thought it was evil—some of them do—but just because they don't actually do anything"). Noticing a pattern in people's responses to such an anodyne question ("What do you do?"), he wanted to explore it further. This was done through what is effectively a discussion on a bunch of collated anecdotes from people who sent them to him in response to the original essay.
The essay and the book are... fine. It's taken me a long time to get to the point where I can see them for what they are and not the silencer they've become for a lot of people. Clearly they aren't my favourite things, and I doubt they ever will be. For me, part of what I don't like about Bullshit Jobs is that the focus is too narrow, asking the audience to consider if anyone would miss their job and letting that be the starting point for what is considered 'bullshit'. It doesn't really feel like it prompts people to start questioning the way the world works, including jobs they perceive as "necessary." If anything, the essay and the book both feel like very useful pieces of propaganda that support modern unions while still making concessions for the status quo to continue in some way (this is also how a lot of labour organising works, too).
However, I can also see them as having interesting cultural connections and as being a good starting point for people to build upon other ideas or to start seeing their own immediate work environment for what it truly is; it makes it much easier to recognise that, even if you perceive your job as partially meaningful, there is a lot of bullshit inherently involved in it. If you hadn't previously connected the dots between your own personal hell of tedium and what Graeber had pointed out out, it might spark some interesting ideas when read by someone who is better positioned to find something useful in it.
If only that was how most people were to use the book and essay.
To some extent, it feels like Bullshit Jobs isn't working that way, at least not anymore. When they're casually dropped in every thread about a vaguely work-related complaint, it feels more like a method of silencing or sidelining people and their burgeoning ideas, even when it feels like tacit agreement with their complaints. It's as if people are being repeatedly told that their own ideas, frustrations, and opinions don't even matter: "That has already been said! Look, David Graeber commented on it!"
This always annoys me. I find myself constantly staring at these kinds of responses, sarcastically thinking about how I'm so glad that David Graeber said it because now it means I can finally stop thinking about it and pull out random quotes until the end of time. Why bother engaging with my own thoughts? Why bother trying to converse about frustrations? I can just read his book and be done with it, and the world... will go on as normal.
Based on what little I've seen of Graeber and the few pieces that I've read about him, it really makes me wonder. How would he even feel about this? Would he want to be used like this? I can't know for sure, and I wouldn't even know who I should ask if I wanted to find out. But I can say that, as an anarchist myself, I find it difficult to believe that anyone who claimed to be an anarchist would want to be the thought-terminating cliché that many people seem to use Graeber as.
Though, if I'm being honest in my thoughts, it doesn't matter what he would've thought about this because anarchists should know better than to consistently place people upon pedestals. No gods, no masters, no idols... Y'know?
It should be clear by now that I have read Bullshit Jobs. This was something that I originally did while trying to be passively antagonistic toward an abusive school manager. For a whole week, throughout an excessively long professional "development" program where the hosts highlighted all the ways in which they'd never met a child in their adult lives, I sat reading this book and occasionally holding it in front of myself so that the cover would be blatantly obvious. The content was vaguely interesting enough to keep me occupied, and it at least amused my infuriated self that it annoyed the people it was supposed to bother.
My review at the time was that both the essay and the book were... acceptable. Neither text felt particularly revolutionary to me in the ways that many people seemed to find them, but I can appreciate the fact that a lot of people started shifting their perspectives on work after reading either of them. That is, at the very least, a positive influence.
Honestly, I think David Graeber found the ideas he presented fresh and new simply because other people hadn't put it to words in easily-accessible sources (or hadn't been allowed to do so), which I suspect is why other people found his 'new' take on work refreshing and novel. I can't fault either side of the equation for this because that simply was the reality. The mainstream media was full of narratives—both real and fictional—that extolled the virtues of hard work, and everything else was often difficult to find or only passed around in whispered conversations. It was rare to see someone talk about or write, in a very public form, that they believed that many people across Europe and North America believed their jobs (or even just parts of their jobs) to be entirely pointless.
But having spent a lot of my life looking at labour history and existing within spaces that were more often filled with marginalised voices that have traditionally been overlooked and neglected, this sentiment was never uncommon. I heard people talk about how they felt that their job was pointless with distressing regularity, and it often morphed into conversations about how they believed that they were pointless. I cannot count the times where I heard someone say that they simply couldn't figure out what meaning anything had anymore, and it was with excruciatingly regularity that people would relay these very messages along with the bigoted abuses they were enduring in their workplaces.
This isn't to say that even those people viewed their work as entirely pointless. Many people who saw value in their work struggled to not conflate what they were doing with the abuses they experienced, making it hard for them to disentangle the two. On top of that, you also had a number of people who recognised that their work should be wider reaching and more communal rather than being closed off to those who simply couldn't afford it. Many more kept pointing to all the tedious aspects of their work, trying to figure out how they could avoid them in order to do the actually useful parts.
And though Graeber's work did highlight that this pointlessness in our work was something that deeply scarred us psychologically and emotionally, those scars rarely felt like they were ever closely examined. He wasn't wrong, but I remember wishing he had delved deeper into what that meant and looked like beyond knowing that someone wasn't doing anything at all and that it hurt their sense of self. I wanted him to explore different understandings that were based in the many realities we all deal with, looking at these problems through any different lens at all. For example, how much more impactful would this idea have been if we explored it through gender, race, or migrant status?
That was one of the aspects that I found most lacking in those two pieces of Graeber's work: He really seemed to forget to look at things through varying lenses. Maybe this wasn't as obvious in that book because that wasn't the point of either it or the essay, but it always felt very much like there was a consistent failure to understand and recognise how work has often and always looked or felt different depending on geography or based on a person's identity. If anything, it felt like rectifying those omissions would actually have strengthened those ideas.
But then I kept noticing this same attitude elsewhere. In everything that I've read that he's written, those experiences are external and barely glanced at, even when it feels like it would've made his argument better.
For a long time, I thought it was just me who kept noticing that there were glaring holes in Graeber's argument that were, for example, distinctly feminist-shaped. This was especially because of how often his work would be recommended to me, and there was never any caveat about it or anyone expanding beyond it. But when I'd read other books or essays, it often felt like there were sections where he'd been called out by someone during the editing process for ignoring certain topics and then dumped a whole bunch of resources or evidence that probably supported his arguments into the footnotes or citations rather than actually weaving them into the story in which they belonged. His inclusion beyond the status quo, beyond what parts of the world he wanted to discuss, always felt rather... superficial, even if that wasn't his intent.
It was in reading one of my favourite obituaries[1], "The Elvis of Anthropology" by Erica Lagalisse (an ex-partner of his), that I realised it wasn't just me and was something very visible across all of his work:
In the beginning we poured over an early manuscript of An Ethnography of Direct Action (2009), which unfolds partly in my home town Montréal, while his little-known MA thesis soon became a key reference in my own dissertation on anarchist social movements – an antidote to his own. He read very few of the feminist texts I recommended, but often cited them where I told him to.
But what also resonated with me in knowing that I wasn't imagining that void of feminism was recognising how many other people were following in those footsteps, whether they knew it or not. I don't think this was done out of malicious intent (and the feeling that Lagalisse's essay gives me is that it wasn't), but I can't help notice how other people have failed to expand beyond the premise and have often used his ideas to constrain further discussion on what could be (and probably should be seen as) bullshit.
While Graeber's work can be interesting, especially for the time it was written and where it was located within the mainstream, why aren't people really expanding beyond it? Why does it always feel like someone is trying to make it the capstone when, if anything, it should've been part of the beginning? Something that could help highlight the cracks in the foundation of the status quo?
I have to wonder if it's because of how easily co-opted his work has been by liberal structures. Afterall, he said it himself—again in that RSA speech—when he said that it felt as if the world was conspiring against anyone who had done or said something that was interesting or unusual. He said that it was almost as if the world would conspire against them to never let them do that again, forcing them to do the same thing, give the same talk, write the same book... for the rest of their lives.
It's hard to say that he was wrong in this sentiment because it feels like even other people will assist in that project of ensuring that you're never allowed to be something other than what they will allow you to be, that they get to determine everything about you once you're dead, and that they will be the ones to decide how to use your name and being once you can no longer say anything. I can't count the number of times where people would openly call him the "founder of the Occupy movement" only to immediately highlight how he didn't want to be known as that. (And it also just ignores how it's not even true.)
People loved pigeon-holing him. They persisted in doing it while he was alive, regardless of how much he pushed back (if he did at all). But now that he's a corpse, it's even easier because he is someone who will forever be unable to stand up for himself.
I don't love that about how people use him, and it's because I don't love that about how people use anyone. If I look at the eponymous organisation, it's all about his legacy. Did he even want a legacy? Would he be happy to know that there are people who dwell upon his work as if it is the most important in the world, forcing everyone else's to circle it? Would he want people to barely push the boundaries of it? It doesn't matter if he did or didn't want that (though I can hope that he didn't) because that is what has happened, and it happens so frequently that it feels stifling.
I also have to wonder if he ever believed in the principles he professed in his earlier years or if those principles changed in his later years. Did the perpetual co-opting during his life soften him to holding more liberal values or was he always there in the first place?[2] And was that part of what made him so easily co-opted by the mainstream, especially after his death?
With regard to the latter, it wouldn't be the first time this happened to someone people viewed as being radical who entered or engaged with a very liberal institution, like a university or a political party. It's not even a question that fully discredits their work, and it doesn't mean that they were inherently wrong about everything. But it is a question that I think highly contextualises their work, our relationship to it, and what they continue doing in their life (or what others continue doing in their name after their death, even if that's obviously beyond their control).
It also contextualises what many of those people—people professing similar degrees of "radicalism"—do in the wider scheme of things. Many of the people who have casually slapped me with a response about reading Bullshit Jobs are supporters of unions, but that is really as far as most of them go in terms of support for supposedly liberatory politics. They don't see the world beyond the status quo and how unions (useful as they might be) support it rather than going beyond it. Why don't they see the union as the beginning with moving towards an anti-work culture as the goal? What if that perspective, rather than one that supports the continuation of capitalistic systems of constant production, were written into Bullshit Jobs?
Graeber barely wrote about changing things on a fundamental level in his most widely read works (and sometimes skimmed it in those that were less read).[3] It is partially because he neglected to write those things explicitly—if he believed them at all, that is—that his work has become so easily co-opted by more liberal people and under more liberal schema. Meanwhile, anarchists are far more likely to read this paradigm shift into Graeber's work, especially when he's marketed to us as the "Anarchist Anthropologist." Despite the fact that neither Bullshit Jobs nor the essay include any discussion on a fundamental shift in how the world works, it's already pre-packaged into a lot of our own internalised contexts when we read them.
Perhaps that's what Simon & Schuster recognised when they signed him to write this book. He was already writing for a 'general' audience who could infer their own values on something, so this book would be just edgy enough to sell (and make money for them) but general enough for people to imprint their own understanding of the world onto it with little effort.
After all, according to Erica Lagalisse, even he acknowledged Bullshit Jobs as his "sell-out" work. And maybe we should be doing more to recognise the ways in which other people utilise him and his work to maintain the status quo, driving people to change their perspectives as little as possible and silencing whatever desire they have to question the current structure of the world.
Would he want that to be his legacy? I don't know. I don't care, anyway. I just know that when someone merely invokes David Graeber or slaps someone with a quote of his and leaves it at that, it's nothing more than a tactic to stifle conversation and exploration.