Collective Conscious

A pro­file of David Grae­ber:

Meet the man who trans­formed a local protest into a world­wide movement:

Graeber’s par­ents were in their 40s when they had him and had come of age in the polit­i­cal left of the 1930s, self-​​taught working-​​class intel­lec­tu­als. Graeber’s mother had been a gar­ment worker and, briefly, a celebrity—the female lead in a musi­cal com­edy revue put on by the Inter­na­tional Ladies’ Gar­ment Work­ers’ Union that man­aged to become a Broad­way hit. His father worked as a plate strip­per on off­set print­ers. Orig­i­nally from Kansas, he had fought for the Repub­li­cans in the Span­ish Civil War. Anar­chists made up one part of the frag­ile Repub­li­can coali­tion, and for a brief period they con­trolled Barcelona.

“Most peo­ple don’t think anar­chism is a bad idea. They think it’s insane,” says Grae­ber. “Yeah, sure it would be great not to have pris­ons and police and hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures of author­ity, but every­body would just start killing each other. That wouldn’t work, right?” Graeber’s father, how­ever, had seen it work. “So it wasn’t insane. I was never brought up to think it was insane.”