When Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world. The obituaries all agreed on the breadth and eclecticism of his accomplishments: the graduate work he had done on the culture of Madagascar; his ultra-rapid attainment, then loss, of an associate professorship at Yale; the rumors that he had masterminded Occupy Wall Street; his uncanny knack for writing bestsellers on what, at first glance, seemed like some of the most mind-numbing subjects known to man.

Soon, however, a new, backhanded consensus took over in the academy. Yes, Graeber was “inventive” and “original”, but in the cold light of retrospection he was also ill-disciplined and unsystematic. Even worse, his footnotes were a mess. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to hear academics scoffing that for all his childlike imagination and rumpled charisma, David Graeber was not so much a thinker as a gadfly, a provocateur.

Perhaps the best illustration of Graeber’s PR problem is to be found in his most popular (and misunderstood) book: Bullshit Jobs. Bullshit Jobs was a full-length treatment of a viral article Graeber had written in 2013 to answer a simple question: why, given the advances in labor-saving technologies through the 20th century, have we not seen a comparable expansion of leisure time? Why do we not have robots to do our chores, computers to organize our lives, automated production lines to furnish us with every consumer good we could ever need? Graeber’s answer was that for various bureaucratic and political reasons, the gap has been plugged with millions of new, pointless jobs — compliance officers, telemarketers, middle managers, corporate lawyers, administrators of all types. Society was simply not geared towards being productive any more. We were all pencil pushers now.

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Within weeks of publication, the establishment had settled on an orthodox line of rebuttal. Graeber’s problem, argued The Economist, was that he had confused people not understanding their jobs with those jobs being pointless. He was just another social theorist with his own pet theory of alienation. And Left-wing academics with pet theories of alienation are not exactly rare. In other words, Graeber’s critics reacted to him in the way they had been taught to react to Marxists in the academy: by insisting that drudgery was an inevitable feature of a rational economy, and that the swarms of miserable worker bees he described would ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production.

But David Graeber was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist — something far rarer in academic life — and by the time Bullshit Jobs was released in 2018 had amassed a vast and subtle theoretical back-catalog that covered everything from Indian Ocean pirates and the German post office to West African fetishes, mid-century dreams of flying cars, and the entire history of Western metaphysics. All this Graeber could bring in to undergird his arguments: one 2015 book on the history of European bureaucratic institutions spent half a chapter offering a novel reading of Batman: The Dark Knight.

Behind Bullshit Jobs, in fact, lurked another book, in which most of the criticisms leveled at the later essay had already been answered: a little-known 2001 academic monograph called Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. Among other things, this was a kind of anarchist rejoinder to Marxism, with its tendency to justify social organization with reference to “production” and “surplus value”. In politics, Graeber instead argued, there was a vast number of things you could call valuable, not just key performance indicators and productivity statistics, but unquantifiable things, like happiness, fulfillment, care. “Production” was a recent fetish, popularized by bureaucrats; when you asked people what was really valuable in life, you would invariably get an answer that sounded something like “helping other people”.

With hindsight, though, what is perhaps most striking about Graeber’s thesis is how conservative it looks. These days, the one political constituency that reliably talks about “values” as distinct from “value” is the Right; if there is one group that can be relied upon to antagonize bureaucratic and managerial types, and hold people like government employees and contractors to account for their bullshit, it is the partisans of Milei or Trump. We live, now, in a topsy-turvy world, where the New Right style themselves as the champions of the common man, while progressives and liberals tend to couch their prescriptions for society in the language of enlightened paternalism.

So does this mean that Graeber was really a Tory in anarchist clothing? Not quite: Graeber was still deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation. What it does show, though, is that since his death, the political Left has managed to forget many of his most fascinating and resonant ideas. Take, for instance, the critique of bureaucracy. These days, the “b” word is hardly ever uttered by progressives; we are supposed, as Left-leaning people, to react to the shuttering of NGOs and government agencies with howls of uncritical lamentation. Here, too, Graeber offers an important corrective.

In The Utopia of Rules, published in 2015, Graeber gleefully acknowledged the horrors of modern bureaucracy stressed by the Right: the endless ID-verifying and form-filling that the modern citizen must engage in if they want to keep a job, move house, or check into a hospital. Crucially, though, he then added another radical step. Bureaucracy, he argued, wasn’t just the preserve of the government. Now, there were private bureaucracies, too. Inescapable call centers. Murky “public-private partnerships”. Vast corporate compliance offices operated by people with annoying vocal tics. One can only imagine the rhetorical potency this kind of critique would have had in the age of Trump — whose main constituency, it seems, is Americans fed up with lanyard-wearing functionaries telling them they haven’t got the right forms, or credentials, or grievances.

This old anarchist insight — the inarguable point that any vanguardist administration becomes its own kind of elite class, every bit as entrenched and corrupt as the ancien régime — seeped into the very foundations of Graeber’s thought. Towards the end of his life, he even seemed to be questioning the usefulness of the idea of “equality” as a Left-wing ambition altogether, and for precisely these reasons:

“[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.”

This, needless to say, is a remarkable statement for the rumored mastermind of Occupy Wall Street, not to mention the coiner of the slogan “We are the 99%”. In it, we glimpse a man who had realized that transforming the world would mean more than tinkering with numbers and arguing about Gini coefficients. At the deepest level, people don’t want to be thrown a few scraps by an administrator and told to shut up. They want to be free.

There is one Graeber video I have found myself coming back to again and again since his death. It is a debate he conducted in 2014 with Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir billionaire who has since become famous as the éminence grise of the New Right. Thiel is clearly fascinated by Graeber; he agrees with his points about bureaucratic stultification, and seems to find it rather novel to have a Left-wing interlocutor echoing his paeans to untrammeled human creativity.

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Watching the video, indeed, you get the sense that in many ways, Graeber’s anarchism is the result of Thiel’s impulses being carried to their most logical, most humane conclusion. Thiel wants coercive bureaucracies to stop meddling in the likes of SpaceX and PayPal; Graeber, meanwhile, wants them to leave everyone alone, from professors in London to peasants in Bihar, so that they all have enough time and space to figure out something worthwhile, and do it.

It is tempting to treat Graeberism (a term its originator would have hated) as a kind of “road not taken” for the political Left. Graeber’s most important books — Possibilities, Direct Action, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, The Utopia of Rules, The Dawn of Everything — are among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time. Certainly, they’re the only ones that manage to carry the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists. They manage this, moreover, without ever once canvassing coercion, intimidation, or brutality. But to lament roads not taken would be a mistake. Because if there was one thing Graeber stood for, it was the idea that, as he put it, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. You are always slightly freer than the world claims you are. There is no road, and there are no turnings. You can change direction any time you like.

Between 2018 and 2020, I spent three years living in Rojava, the region governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). There, I heard a different take on the revolution’s successes almost every day. US military commanders saw the region as a useful ally against Isis and a counter to Iranian influence. Kurds, women, and Christian and Yazidi villagers were pragmatically grateful to AANES for guaranteeing Syria’s highest standards of human rights and humanitarian provision in the face of ethnic cleansing by Turkey and Isis.

Yet some anarchist volunteers left despondent, their idealised view of the “Rojava revolution” foundering on the reality of mass poverty, limited political engagement and an increasingly prominent security apparatus. Many more remained, accepting ideological “contradictions” as part of the revolutionary process. Certainly, since 2013, it has become apparent that the revolution could never have survived without fulfilling a number of seemingly contradictory roles.

Rojava achieved autonomy after the 2011-12 Syrian uprising saw regime forces withdraw from the country’s Kurdish north. This enabled Kurdish fighters loyal to Abdullah Öcalan, their long-imprisoned leader, to descend to northern Syria from the mountain eyries where they had long been engaged in a bitter guerrilla war against Turkey. There, a committed cadre lived a necessarily communal and frugal life. Kurds who have spent time “in the mountains” speak nostalgically of the comradeship and holistic relation to nature they found there. But these political organisers now found themselves tasked not only with fending off Isis, Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Turkish Armed Forces, but also with establishing a society capable of sustaining millions.

These lifelong partisans of the Kurdish cause have experienced an almost rapturous vindication of their struggle. One middle-aged woman told me, with shining eyes, that 38 of 40 Kurds in her initial training group had lost their lives fighting Turkey, only for a liberated Kurdish homeland to suddenly emerge across the Syrian border. Privately, though, Kurdish militants will often admit frustration with a restive local population uninterested in their leader’s lofty ideals and rhetoric.

Ideas such as Öcalan’s have never before been implemented on such a mass scale. Following his 1999 capture by Turkey’s intelligence organisation (MIT), Öcalan — whose Kurdistan Workers’ Party had been fighting for an independent, socialist Kurdish state — encountered the work of US anarchist Murray Bookchin. Building from Bookchin’s “social ecology”, he developed a critique of state socialism also informed by feminist thought. The Kurdish leader came to advocate a “federation of federations” — a decentralised network of local communes feeding consensus decisions via city-level municipalities into a democratic polity, all based on a re-evaluated relationship with the natural world and a cooperative economy.

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There is a certain mysticism to Öcalan’s writings. His works were transmitted to the outside world from the prison island Imrali in lieu of defence submissions at court, and the subsequent lack of references makes its arguments hard to parse. His works are peppered with gnomic historical speculations, often prefaced with the disclaimer “Could it be…?” Rather, the jailed leader’s brilliance lies in distilling Bookchin’s complex analyses into maxims accessible to the Kurdish public. He deploys a Bookchinite account of history as the steady expansion of “hierarchy” from the patriarchal-gerontocratic tribe through the city-state to capitalist modernity. This teleology is then tied to the fate of the long-dispossessed Kurdish people in their Mesopotamian homeland, with Öcalan marshalling his people as the inheritors of the Fertile Crescent’s idyllic “natural society”.

The idea was for a network of self-governing communes to grow up alongside and ultimately supplant the authoritarian states which today occupy the Kurdish homelands. But, as Rosa Luxemburg observed after October 1917, revolutions do not grow up little by little: they are ejected into the world fully-grown and shrieking. In Rojava, Öcalan is respected as a symbol of Kurdish and women’s liberation, but little-read by civilians; Bookchin is known only to the Kurdish nomenklatura, and that indirectly. Reality, in the form of inter-ethnic warfare, bread shortages and depleted energy resources, immediately intruded on Öcalan’s somewhat utopian vision.

Most obviously, without its black-market petrol revenues, the impoverished Rojava administration could never have kept millions from starvation. Ambitions to build a greener economy by transitioning to more localised, cooperative agriculture and renewable energy sources have been frustrated by a number of factors: Turkish damming of the Euphrates and control of key water infrastructure; the diversion of power to areas controlled by Assad and Turkish-backed jihadist militias; war damage to dams and oil refineries; and an embargo preventing industrial imports. Hence the unlikely spectacle of a “green revolution” underwritten by oil wealth. (Could it be…?)

Economically, too, the AANES has been forced to proceed cautiously, expropriating Syrian regime holdings, but largely leaving private property and capital untouched. Oil revenues subsidise cheap diesel and bread, with these efforts reaching far more people than the scattering of co-ops. Sporadic attempts to develop agricultural autarky are limited in their effectiveness by the economic embargo and subsequent forced, continued reliance on smugglers who bring in the weapons the Kurds need to fend off Turkey, but also flood the markets with cheap Turkish chicken stock, flip-flops and cigarettes.

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Similarly, economic pressure, priorities of national defence and the challenges of managing conservative and sometimes openly pro-Isis local populations have hampered AANES’s efforts to promote genuine grassroots political participation. AANES has made truly impressive steps in challenging deeply-entrenched patriarchal norms by introducing women-led governance, restorative justice and social education programmes, even in former Isis heartlands — but the devolution of decision-making authority is partial and inconsistent. I’ve attended commune meetings in the Kurdish Jazira. Here, locals complain about road repairs, bread and price-gouging, but absent calls for greater investment in infrastructure, the Kurds broadly align behind the AANES. Directing an economy or a war requires centralised policy, and most locals are content to leave these issues to their leaders, visiting the commune only to collect the chits for their subsidised bread and oil.

Paradoxically, it is in those conservative Arab regions only recently liberated from Isis that the AANES has been repeatedly forced — through admirably open-minded public consultations, pressure from conservative tribal federations, and street protest — to rethink, revise or defend its positions on issues such as women’s education, conscription, the detention of Isis-linked individuals, and relations with Assad. Neither Öcalan nor Bookchin envisaged the scene I witnessed in Raqqa, in which tribal sheikhs quarrelled with Kurdish women’s activists over the primary-school curriculum. But these thorny controversies are the lifeblood of a unique democracy. These Arab-Kurdish tensions are the primary internal crisis facing Rojava today. But they also produce its most genuinely democratic and revolutionary moments. With typical far-sightedness, Bookchin recognised that “any self-managed community that tries to live in isolation and develop self-sufficiency risks the danger of becoming parochial, even racist”. Rather than Arab chauvinism merely being an obstacle for “the Kurds” to overcome, their fractious relation with these neighbouring communities creates genuine, if imperfect, federalism.

Thus the most interesting contributions to a new essay collection, Social Ecology and the Rojava Revolution, are not the sketches of Bookchin and Öcalan’s ideals, but the recent analyses from on the ground in Rojava. As Bookchin writes in his anthologised essay “What Is Social Ecology?” (1993), “new ecological attitudes will remain vaporous if they are not given substance through real and objective institutions”. The Trotskyist-turned-anarchist-turned-iconoclast would certainly be open-minded enough to consider the “Rojava revolution” on its own, distinct terms.

Bookchin repeatedly turns Marx’s maxim “the social revolution…cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future” against both Marxists themselves and eco-capitalists. But while he warns against “the glorification of history” and a desire to return to prelapsarian “primitive communism” and modes of social organisation, in practice Bookchin himself risks valorising an unobtainable historical ideal. As the Rojava experiment demonstrates, the approximated restoration of “natural society” through village communes and local co-operatives is noble in theory, but impractical and insufficient at scale. Bookchin’s self-described “utopianism” becomes reality not when applied in asocial, isolated Leftist enclaves kept pure by those he damned as “lifestyle anarchists”, and still less via the “mystified primitivism” of Trad-Right doomerism, but when material conditions make them a necessity for ordinary people.

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So, where one contributor to the essay collection cites the remarkable autonomous women’s village Jinwar as an example of Rojava’s social ecology in action, a more representative model of the region’s unique political identity might be the refugee camp I visited south of Tel Abyad, a town seized and ethnically cleansed by Turkish forces in 2019. Here, Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds — some displaced three times by war — must live side-by-side, solving grievances via the local reconciliation committee. It is here, and not in comparatively well-off Jazira, that the large and growing agricultural cooperative constitutes a genuine lifeline to destitute families.

As most international volunteers in Rojava are clear-eyed enough to recognise, any immediate efforts to implement similar ideals in the West cannot succeed at scale. Absent a decade’s armed struggle on the basis of a violently repressed national identity and even the very war against Isis, which served as the basis for building a trans-ethnic political consensus, Rojava could never have succeeded in mobilising a mass movement, still less in uniting peoples so recently at war. Rather, it is more likely to be through climate catastrophe and a retreat from globalism that we see new Rojavas emerge in the terra nullia left behind by shrinking states. The dialectic of history will lead some of us to anarchism — along, no doubt, with more authoritarian alternatives.

For his part, Bookchin somewhat reluctantly addresses “how to go from here to there” only in the final two pages of his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, gesturing to a Marxist theory of historical crisis while admitting genuinely effective “libertarian forms of organisation” are yet to develop. Ten years on from the revolution, this is perhaps the most important lesson Rojava has to offer: it is only when the regional political consensus is fractured by extreme internal and external stresses that genuine opportunities to refashion it emerge.