Modern Era
David Graeber
1961–2020 · Anthropology of freedom
The world is something we make, and could make differently.
In their words
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
An anthropologist and a participant in the direct democracy of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber showed that debt is a moral claim rather than an economic fact, and that most of the social order we treat as inevitable was decided by somebody and can be decided otherwise. The phrase 'we are the 99 percent' came out of his work, and he was fired from Yale not long after.
Why it matters for freedom
He documented the anarchist practices people already use, from consensus to mutual aid, in ordinary social life.
Who they stood against
the debt system, the universities that fired him for the movement, and the bureaucracies that mistake themselves for democracy