Biography
David Graeber was an anthropologist and author. He wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and he was in the room when Occupy Wall Street’s first general assembly was formed.
Bowling Green, 2 August 2011
Graeber published his own account two and a half months after the fact, describing in detail how the assembly started.
He went to a 7 p.m. meeting at Bowling Green on 2 August 2011, told about it by an acquaintance, to plan “some kind of action on Wall Street in mid-September”. Adbusters had floated the “Occupy Wall Street” call online a month earlier with, in his words, “some very compelling graphics, to see if it would take hold”. A local anti-budget-cut coalition had advertised the Bowling Green event as a “General Assembly”.
It was not one. He found roughly eighty people being addressed through megaphones by a veteran protest group, with a march past the Stock Exchange planned to follow. What he noticed instead was who was standing there: people he characterized as “horizontals”, sympathetic to non-hierarchical organization and direct action, rather than people who would march under someone else’s direction.
His summary of what happened next: “They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.” A group broke off, formed a circle, and held one.
According to Graeber’s account, this splinter group’s assembly, not the advertised rally, became the model for Occupy’s general assembly process.
Position and Work
At the time of writing, Graeber was Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and had previously been an associate professor of anthropology at Yale. Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in 2011, Bullshit Jobs in 2018.
A Correction on “We Are the 99%”
The slogan is often attributed to Graeber. The editorial note attached to his own essay, on the site that published it, credits David DeGraw of Amped Status as “widely credited as the originator” of it. This page does not attribute it to Graeber.
Digital Political Impact
- Wrote the first-person account that is the closest thing to a primary record of how Occupy’s general assembly form came into being
- His account documents the actual role of an online call — Adbusters posting an idea with graphics “to see if it would take hold” — as a prompt rather than as an organizing mechanism; the organizing happened in a park
- His books gave the movement much of its vocabulary about debt and work; the essay itself does not claim more than described above
What Is Not Established Here
Removed in the citation audit: his birth year; a Twitter follower count; his affiliation with the London School of Economics, which post-dates the essay cited here and is not sourced; the claim that he “played a direct role in the early planning” of Occupy in a stronger sense than his own account supports; and the attribution to him of the movement’s framing and slogans.
Sources
- 01.
Graeber, D. (2011). On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet. Graeber's own first-person account, published 19 October 2011 and read through an Internet Archive capture because nakedcapitalism.com returns 403 to automated clients. Source for: his position at the time as Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and previously associate professor of anthropology at Yale; his authorship of Debt: The First 5,000 Years; his attendance at a 7 p.m. meeting at Bowling Green on 2 August 2011 called to plan an action on Wall Street in mid-September; his account that Adbusters had put out the call to 'Occupy Wall Street' a month earlier by floating the idea online with graphics; that a local anti-budget-cut coalition had called the Bowling Green event a 'General Assembly' but ran it as a rally; and his account of gathering a circle of participants to hold an actual assembly instead. The publisher's own editorial note on the same page credits David DeGraw of Amped Status, not Graeber, as widely regarded as the originator of 'We are the 99%'.
- 02.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Catalogue record confirming author and first publication year, 2011.
- 03.
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Catalogue record confirming author and first publication year, 2018.