The 17th-century Huron chief Kondiaronk can still teach us valuable lessons

Ten years ago, David Graeber was a leading figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He and his fellow protesters camped out in Zucotti Park, storing $800,000 of donations in trash bags because they didn’t believe in banks.

The American anthropologist and anarchist activist called this an experiment in ‘post-bureaucratic living’. But such politics made Graeber persona non grata at US universities, so he moved to Britain where, in 2013, he became a full professor at the LSE. There, until his death last year aged 59, he imagined anarchist utopias and indicted what he took to be an oxymoron: western civilisation.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years he called for a biblical-style ‘jubilee’ — wiping out sovereign and consumer debts — which made him popular with his students. In Bullshit Jobs he complained that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less.