For the New Year, why not quit your job and go live in the forest?
“The book is not intended to be of merely academic interest, but is a political manifesto”
The left’s present-day obsession with social and economic inequalities was invented in 2011 by David Graeber, an anthropologist and anarchist activist who died towards the end of last year. In the wake of the credit crunch and financial crisis, a small advertisement appeared in the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters, as Daniel Immerwahr relates in The Nation. “What is our one demand?” it asked. The question wasn’t answered. Readers were only told “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent”. The result was – as surely no one expected, not even the organisers – a global movement that briefly shook the world. The movement “held Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan for two months, made headlines, and set off more than 200 occupations globally”, says Immerwahr. The question in the original advertisement was in fact never answered, but the movement did settle on a slogan, one that has since entered the vocabulary: “We are the 99%”. The insight was based on the latest economic research, which showed a growing gap between the top 1% and everyone else. The slogan that grabbed the popular imagination was Graeber’s.
That story, like all origin stories, is something of a simplification and a myth, of course. Social and economic inequalities in a broad sense have been a concern of the left for centuries. Graeber didn’t invent the slogan, but contributed ideas to the committee that did. Nevertheless, stories like that do something to capture the spirit of the moment and reveal basic
