The Debt to David Graeber

Richard Seymour and Thomas Jones

3 September 2025

When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years.

Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences