JMC  🌹 🏴

History will say that David was: an anthropologist whose research reconfigured our understanding of the origins of money and the state; an anarchist militant deeply involved in all the great social movements of the past thirty years; an essayist of the highest caliber.

But as David would've noted, the victors who write history are no more insightful for the opportunity. His work was dedicated to uncovering hidden histories -- not just the ones they don't want you to see, but those they're blind to, because power is stupid & lacks imagination.

In that spirit, I want to talk not so much about his impact on intellectual and political history, which has been and no doubt will continue to be enormous and earth-shattering. Instead I want to talk about his impact on me and my friends. For me, it was all in his voice.

I believe the style of a writer is inseparable from their actual subject-matter, because each creates the other. They're really part of the same thing. If so, then it becomes clear that David's voice -- in writing & in speech -- was the embodiment of his revolutionary values.

His critics called him chatty, breezy, glib. They said his books were collections of anecdotes. Well, I suppose it's okay to be wrong in one's taste. What's criminal is to make a correct observation superficially. Imagine thinking the avoidable error in Picasso is the cubes.

David's entire style was a conscious democratization of high intellectualism. He was modeling a way of thinking about the biggest ideas -- and even inventing new ones -- through a process of conversation between equals. Let's dream together, he said, and in dreaming, create.

Why all the anecdotes? The gossipy tone, like he's letting you in on a secret? Sure, it keeps the attention of the "common reader," like sugar to help the medicine go down. But more to the point, it transparently reveals the text you're reading to be an ongoing collaboration.

When David would explain to you, giggling & chattering like a friend over coffee, how Marxisms are named after people & anarchisms for tactics; or how the first modern arguments for democracy were Haudenosaunee; or how the economists fear anthropology, it wasn't just fun & games.

The Graeberian anecdote was a formal device, carefully chosen for its efficiency in a number of literary and intellectual games the critics didn't even realize he was playing.

It levels the playing field between author and reader by quickly & memorably explaining "expert" knowledge most specialist texts would assume as part of their gatekeeping. It serves as a bridge connecting one subject with another, teaching you that all ideas are interconnected.

It ties an abstract idea back ruthlessly to the real world, to people who produced it, within particular institutions, from a certain vantage point shaped by class or gender or race, or as part of very specific political struggles which have since been conveniently forgotten.

It reveals, by doing so in a playful rather than hectoring tone, how very silly are our motives, how arbitrary our customs, how often and hilariously wrong our sacred ideas -- yet at the same time, how we can for the very same reason always reinvent these things and ourselves.

It's giving credit in a thicker way than mere citation. Because by constantly referencing what's said by his friends -- anarchist friends, feminist friends, friends in bureaucracies & factories & occupations -- he maps a process of thinking & learning together by acting together.

It treats the experience of different cultures & time periods as part of a common human experience & thus a shared heritage. Not by reducing the past or other cultures to an extension of the modern present, but precisely by showing how weird it *all* is, these ties that bind us.

David's voice expressed a vision of life as a human comedy, full of colorful types, delightful reversals, & universal folly. A world which of necessity contains many worlds, where the point is not for one to rule the rest but to find a way for them to all go on living together.

And more than that -- by talking in this way, even when the world around us seems so authoritarian, so full of sclerotic dogmas and senile tyrants, David *created* a place, in his writing itself, where readers could experience what it would be like to think freely with friends.

Words fail me when I try to convey to you how important it was to me to hear such a voice -- to know such a voice was possible. Art & ideas saved my life, even before I "met" David. But his voice taught me how to write & to live as if, already, art & ideas belonged to everyone.

If assembly democracy is the political form of libertarian socialism, then its intellectual culture would look like the world sketched out, at least in outline, by David's voice.

A world of free & equal conversations between publics across borders & languages. A world where all cultures & histories are seen as contributing to our common knowledge. A world where we produce ideas the way we produce everything else, & neither is very different from play.

The practical effect of all this on a reader -- particularly a young reader, scared of how the world is going, badgered into compliance with the prevailing orthodoxies of a small-minded age -- are, to say the least, dramatic. Suddenly, the world is larger and more wonderful.