Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism―as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or “bullshit jobs” as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile from the American academy. In short, Anarchy―In a Manner of Speaking presents a series of interviews with a first-rate intellectual, a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk.

Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman asked Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discussed the meaning of anarchist ethics―not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) “anarchist morality” today.

Foreword: A dialogue that doesn’t cover up its traces
Introduction to anarchy—all the things it is
Reins on the imagination—the illusion of impossibility
Revolutions in common sense
Feminist ethics in anarchy—working with incommensurable perspectives
The three characteristics of statehood and their independence (two for us, one for the cosmos)
America 1—not a democracy, never meant to be
America 2—the indigenous critique & freedom works fine but it’s a terrible idea & Lewis Henry Morgan invents anthropology because he’s nostalgic & Americans are legal fanatics because of their broken relationship to the land, which they stole
With great responsibility comes precarious tongue-tied intellectuals
Anthropology as art
Anthropology and economics
Freedom 1— which finite resources?
Freedom 2—property and Kant’s chiasmic structure of freedom
Freedom 3—friendship, play and quantification
Freedom 4—critical realism, emergent levels of freedom
Freedom 5—negotiating the rules of the game
Play fascism
Leave, disobey, reshuffle
Great man theory and historical necessity
Theories of desire
Graeber reads MBK and proposes a three-way dialectic that ends in care
Art and atrocity
Vampires, cults, hippies
Utopia
Rules of engagement
Dual sovereignty
Against the politics of opinion
The world upside down (and the mind always upward)
God as transgression and anarchy as God