David Graeber, Rest in Peace

Creston Davis, PhD

On Wednesday, the second of September Prof. David Graeber died in Venice. Graeber and I exchanged a few emails about education and GCAS. He was fond of GCAS and organized a meeting with a colleague of his in London about forming the early stages of an international alliance against neoliberal education. In one email he wrote, “”[W]e want it to become a broader assault on the very idea of the neoliberal university, and as it gets bigger, there will surely be international alliances.”

Graeber’s importance went well beyond his important anthropological work that circled around on the concept of debt distilled most decisively in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. He was also an activist who fought for fair labor standards. When he and I were at Yale (he as a professor and I a graduate student) we worked together for the Graduate Student Union.

His activism came honestly as he grew up in a Jewish New York, working-class family. Both his father and mother were, like him, activists. His mother was a garment worker and the female lead in the Broadway musical, “Pins and Needles.” His father, joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, to fight Franco’s fascist regime.

David died too early and the work he produced was increasingly important especially for the intense time in which we find ourselves.

The GCAS academic community will continue the work that Graeber began and has inspired.

Rest in Peace, David Graeber.