by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson
Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, most assessments of his work have been strongly affirmative and hence often one-sided. What follows is a more critical engagement, offered in the spirit of generative dialogue. We honor Graeber’s writings as indispensable for denaturalizing money and obligation and for catalyzing new forms of organizing from Occupy Wall Street onward. However, we also argue that some of Graeber’s basic assumptions about money and public provisioning limit what the left can imagine and accomplish.
David Graeber has become a default point of reference for the contemporary left. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) is the book to cite when refuting the common myth that money originates in barter, demonstrating that money instead begins as credit, and insisting that obligations are made rather than found. It was central to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of finance and has echoed through subsequent experiments in populist coalition politics. For readers interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Graeber often appears as the deep anthropological backing for the claim that money is not a scarce resource but a boundless accounting construction.
These arguments have done a great deal to structure how critical monetary discourse has been conducted over the past decade and a half. At the same time, Graeber’s framework places real limits on what can be imagined about monetary institutions. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules (2015), and essays on what Graeber calls “creative refusal” do not simply de-naturalize money. They also embed money and bureaucracy in a broader picture in which social life is fundamentally organized as debt and guilt, and in which the highest political value is the capacity to say no—to refuse, to exit, to remain outside enclosing forms.
For Money on the Left’s Democratic Public Finance (DPF) paradigm—which seeks to understand money and accounting as instruments of coordination rather than exclusively as moral traps—this picture becomes a ceiling. If the whole system is a bureaucracy of made-up debts and accusations, then democratic action appears mainly as refusal and jubilee: organizing as debtors, confronting creditors, wiping the slate clean. What falls out of view is the possibility that public credit need not be organized primarily as repayable, quantified monetary debt at all—that obligations can be framed instead as ongoing, qualitative commitments and guarantees—and that democratic participation might mean designing public accounting and coordination on the front end, rather than periodically clearing it on the back.
The result is a tension at the heart of contemporary left monetary imagination: between a debt-centered horizon that privileges refusal and cancellation, and a credit-centered horizon that foregrounds the contested design of public obligations themselves. The present analysis of Graeber’s work points toward the second horizon, exploring what becomes possible once money is approached as public credit to be redesigned, rather than merely as debt to be discharged.
Baseline communism and the fall into form
Graeber’s early value theory is more open-ended than his mature work, but it already carries some of the limits that later come to the fore. In Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, for example, he suggests that cultures can be approached as “moral projects”: different ways of imagining what life ought to be like, and of organizing which actions count as important or worthwhile. He takes his subtitle from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s remark that society “pays itself in the counterfeit coin of its dreams,” using rituals, festivals, and collective action as examples of how people collectively stage and test what they value. The phrase “counterfeit coin” is meant to signal unreality. Yet what is being downgraded as “counterfeit” here is precisely the kind of shared credit and obligation that, according to DPF, organizes monetary life—what we have elsewhere called the “unofficial” life of public money. In any case, even in this more open-ended register, value still comes to look like a single, univocal horizon that individuals either inhabit or resist. It appears as a positive proposition that can be embraced or refused, rather than as a reversible, revisable space of co-design in which the terms themselves are continuously up for negotiation. The subtle, reflexive ways people name, test, and rework what counts—through shifting idioms, partial identifications, and experimental roles—slip into the background. Value appears as a common script more than as an enduring process of collective rewriting.
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber wields this language to construct a critical genealogy of money qua obligation. Communism, exchange, and hierarchy are cast as three recurrent moral principles exhibited by humankind. “Baseline communism” is his term for the raw material of social life: a taken-for-granted recognition of mutual dependence that undergirds social peace, where some things are simply shared and no one keeps accounts. “Everyday communism” names the dense mesh of practices that grow from that ground—sharing tools, feeding guests, helping friends move, relying on coworkers or kin without calculating exact returns. Exchange, by contrast, codifies equivalence. Worse, hierarchy organizes command and deference. Debt appears at the intersection of exchange and hierarchy, where quantified obligations are backed by force and moralized as guilt.
From these premises, money is described as emerging first as credit, with coinage arriving relatively late. From here, Graeber shows that many of the obligations that come to be called “debts” are in fact historical artifacts tied to conquest, punishment, and administration. Alongside this genealogy, Debt offers a minimalist reassurance: however bad institutions become, some version of the ethic “from each according to ability, to each according to need” will persist in the background as everyday communism.
With this, Graeber not only frames communism as a single, universal principle that precedes and underlies all of its concrete instances; he also curiously renders it exclusive, no matter how intermixed with exchange and hierarchy. On such a view, the main question becomes: Who is entitled to communistic treatment? And by extension: Who is to be consigned to exchange and hierarchy? What slips out of view are the differentiated codes, institutions, and expectations that make those situations non-equivalent in the first place—the ways “help,” “sharing,” or “support” are patterned and contested differently across workplaces, households, friendships, and states. The ideal of neighborly care in the mid-century American suburb, for instance—unlocked doors on Nantucket Island—has been extensively shown by feminist media history and queer theory to be modeled and franchised rather than given, through television, advertising, and domestic ideology (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV or Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public”). Approached from this angle, “everyday communism” looks less like a self-standing, homogeneous category that evades exchange and hierarchy than historically specific arrangements already organized by law, infrastructure, and forms of accounting.
Yet another exemplary scene that expresses everyday communism betrays the limits of everyday communism as a minimal ethic. One person is drowning, Graeber tells us, while another stands on shore with the ability to help them. The question is whether the person on the shore will answer such an obvious moral demand, given that the other’s need is grave and the cost to oneself is small. The scene is designed to appear self-evident, a quotidian moral dilemma that anyone might encounter. Its structure, however, conforms to an individualized cost–benefit calculation. What is left unexamined in this scene are the infrastructures and histories that make such an encounter possible at all: how people come to occupy these positions, who is equipped to help, whose needs are routinely visible, and whose costs are routinely deemed negligible. It functions, in this sense, as a benevolent version of the methodological individualism found in the classic trolley problem—a stylized scenario that in game theory isolates individuals from history and social structure. In appealing to such scenarios, Graeber reduces everyday ethics to one person weighing a grave need against a modest cost in the moment, while bracketing the intertemporal provisioning that produces both the danger and the capacity to respond. Baseline or everyday communism here comes across as a primordial, pre-coordinative ethic—an encounter between persons removed from institutional or public timetables—rather than as something that is itself shaped by perpetual arrangements of care, coercion, and provision.
This way of imagining a pre-coordinated baseline also shapes how ethics appears in Graeber’s project. On one side, ethics often appears as a ruse: a moral technology that fabricates guilty, indebted subjects and licenses punishment under the guise of obligation. Debt is not a malleable arrangement; it is a way of producing ethical subjects who internalize blame. On the other side, communism in this minimal sense functions as a kind of pre-political kernel of non-reciprocal kindness: the spontaneous decision to help when another’s need is pressing and one’s own cost is modest. Ethics, on this model, oscillates between an ideological trap and a minimal and tacitly private kindness that lives before or outside institutions.
From the perspective of DPF, Graeber casts ethics in an austere register with little room for scale. If moral claims that coordinate institutions are primarily techniques of capture, and if the only “good” ethical practice is a localized, pre-coordinative generosity, then large monetary and bureaucratic systems tend to appear mainly as fields of power to be refused or escaped, rather than as terrains where more accountable forms of obligation might be designed. Baseline communism, in other words, affirms that care is constitutive, but it does so in a way that leans toward institutional unaccountability: it holds the minimal ethic of help outside the very infrastructures through which help is necessarily organized and provisioned.
Bureaucracy, abstraction, and the utopia of refusal
The Utopia of Rules extends this pattern from money to bureaucracy as such. Graeber describes an “age of total bureaucratization” in which rule-bound procedures pervade public and private life. Bureaucracies, he argues, are sustained by fantasies of rationality and fairness that are never fully realized. They produce “dead zones of the imagination”: situations in which following rules replaces attempts to understand particular people or cases, and where the ultimate guarantor of compliance is the threat of violence.
Here, too, bureaucracy (and money) are conceived less as mundane infrastructures than as scenes of fall. Everyday cooperation and baseline communism form the lower, more concrete stratum of social life. Bureaucratic and monetary forms occupy a higher, more abstract level where creativity is frozen into stupid games. Rules no longer feel like collective instruments but like external impositions. The higher one climbs this implicit ladder of abstraction, the less room there appears to be for playfulness, experimentation or non-identity.
By later works, Graeber develops a politics that amounts to what we call a utopia of refusal. One finds this utopia in his late essays on “creative refusal.” It also structures the three “basic freedoms” articulated in The Dawn of Everything: to move away, to disobey, and to reconfigure social arrangements. Political creativity is anchored at the edges of institutions, in the capacity to say no or step aside. The relation to social form is either compliance or exit.
This fits comfortably with a broader post-structuralist inheritance. Much post-structuralist theory, drawing explicitly or implicitly on Nietzsche, embraces a fantasy of externality or exception, even when explicitly disavowing sovereign figures or variously insisting that power is immanent, diffuse, and ineluctable. Graeber’s own treatment of Nietzsche in Debt is sharply critical. He rejects Nietzsche’s claim that the invention of debt represents an originary cruelty that founds our humanity. Instead, he presents Nietzsche’s primordial debt story as an ahistorical fantasy that reveals how a world organized through exchange is justified, not as a serious account of human origins. Still, when it comes to theorizing social form, Graeber retains impulses inherent in Nietzsche’s framing. Once obligations are quantified and formalized, Graeber contends, they necessarily belong to the logic of Schuld—a self-exculpatory fiction that ties calculation to guilt. Thus the main political problem becomes how to negate or escape fictions of guilt, rather than how to rework the media of obligation as ongoing forms of coordination.
Our disagreement with Graeber is not meant to litigate whether communities should be able to refuse. Refusal is indispensable—full stop. Our concern, rather, pertains to the ground of that refusal and what political possibilities follow from it. In Graeber’s vision, durable interdependence is legitimate only insofar as it can be peeled back to a baseline of externality; once one has walked away, the moral scene is imagined to be free of social forms of obligation. For DPF, by contrast, politics is grounded in institutional interdependence and the cyclicality of its mediating forms. Social life is already coordinated through large-scale institutions that provision water, wages, care, housing, and time. Refusals matter, but they are gestures within a world coordinated long before any individual arrives. They generate new responsibilities rather than suspending responsibility altogether: someone has to take up work that has been refused, institutions have to be reconfigured, relations have to be repaired.
To insist on the priority of such questions is not to revert to an ethic of Schuld, as if refusal were itself a kind of violence that must be punished; it is to acknowledge that refusal, too, leaves people entangled, and therefore requires mediated care and empowerment both for those who refuse and for those who live with its aftermath. In a framework that regards coordination as suspect, any attempt to institutionalize those mediating responsibilities—a right to a job, or any other standing institution of guaranteed support—can only appear as make-work bureaucracy, an arrangement that keeps people busy inside an apparatus that ought, on some level, not to exist.
Graeber’s preference for grounding democratic practices in externalizing refusals becomes a problem for a politics that seeks to reclaim monetary and bureaucratic institutions as media of public coordination. If the domain in which obligations are formally recorded and enforced is structurally a “dead zone,” then public money and public accounting can only be trusted insofar as they are kept at arm’s length. These forms can be exposed as fictive or denounced as violent, but they are rarely seen as spaces where new, more capacious patterns of support and recognition might be staged.
Jubilee as redesign, coordination as fiction
The privileged role of debt jubilees in Graeber’s imagination makes the limitations of his program even clearer. If, for Graeber, money is always a fictitious debt based on fabricated charges of guilt and sin, then the paradigmatic emancipatory act becomes the jubilee: a sweeping cancellation that wipes the slate clean. Rolling Jubilee, debt strikes, and jubilees of various other kinds take center stage as a central horizon of contestation. Redesign is figured, if at all, as periodic amnesty. As a result, democratic control over social form culminates in the erasure of obligations, rather than the reconstruction of how they come into being.
That binary—between a world organized as debt and the moment when debts are forgiven—misses something crucial for monetary politics. It confronts public credit as if it has to take the form of quantified, enforceable monetary debt in the first place. Obligation is assumed to be inherently accusatory, so justice can only arrive belatedly, on the back end, as cancellation. Democratic participation in public accounting is confined to the role of the cleanser. Democracy arrives after the fact to denounce and erase. It never participates in initially designing the qualitative credits, guarantees, and obligations that shape life chances in the first place. Coordination is declared a fiction, and “nature”—or informal communism—is expected to heal once the ledgers are burned.
By contrast, DPF begins from credit as coordination. Public credit is how a polity authorizes projects, backs institutions, and recognizes work over time. This perspective agrees that debts are made, not found; that they can be cruel; and that cancellation can be necessary. But it refuses to let jubilee exhaust the imagination of change. The more basic question becomes how to build and revise public credit systems so that fewer life-sustaining activities show up as “debts” at all. The aim, in other words, is to transform more and more of activities of care into ongoing, unconditional supports and rights.
From this standpoint, the crucial distinction is not between debt and gift, any more than between spontaneous communism and carceral abstraction. Instead, it is between accepting money primarily as a moral technology of guilt and discharge, and politicizing money as a public instrument for organizing capacities over time. The former naturally lends itself to a politics of refusal and periodic cancellation: waiting until the system becomes intolerable, then wiping away its records. The latter demands a different set of questions. Which institutions get to issue and record claims? How inclusive and revisable are their categories? How can extant commitments be escalated, contested, or amended? And how do our infrastructures coordinate across scales—from city budgets and public banks to unions, schools, clinics, and political campaigns?
Graeber’s work has done a great deal to denaturalize money and debt, as well as to expose the brutality of creditor morality. But if the jubilee is taken as the last word, it cuts off the very terrain where a democratic politics of money has to operate.
The debt imaginary clips our collective wings
Reckoning with the limits of jubilee politics becomes unavoidable when left economic discourse turns from critique to governance. Recent commentary surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York offers a striking example. For perhaps the first time in decades, a broad left audience is being asked to think about how a self-identified socialist should govern a major city, not just how to win one. Yet even in this ostensibly new terrain, the debt-centered framing quietly structures what counts as fiscal “realism.”
Three widely circulated pieces exemplify the problems with this approach: (1) the Debt Collective’s Substack post in In the Red; (2) a Jacobin article by Nathan Gusdorf; and (3) a Dissent essay by J. W. Mason.
The Debt Collective piece, “Zohran Won Main Street—Now He Must Face Wall Street,” opens with genuine enthusiasm about Mamdani’s victory, then pivots quickly to a central lesson: the real challenge is not policy vision but debt. Because cities “cannot print their own dollars,” they are likened to households that must borrow for anything beyond current revenue. New York’s dependence on the municipal bond market is construed as a “structural veto” held by Wall Street: before tax revenue can fund rent control, free transit, or childcare, it must first service bondholders. The article calls this a form of racialized extraction and urges Mamdani to align with a powerful debtors’ movement that can negotiate and cancel unjust obligations. The horizon of democratic agency is clear: organize as debtors to confront Wall Street and push for cancellation.
Nathan Gusdorf’s “Mayor Mamdani’s Budget Can Add Up” in Jacobin combines cautious optimism with a similar constraint story. Mamdani faces “real fiscal constraints — but also real opportunities.” New York is said to have a strong tax base and room for modest reforms, but state and local budgets are described as arenas where a “limited amount of revenue has to be divided up,” in contrast to the federal government’s deficit capacity. Gusdorf emphasizes legal balanced-budget rules and the risk of “real fiscal crises” if revenues fall short. Bond markets and state law appear as hard parameters; the responsible socialist mayor is encouraged to raise taxes on the rich, find efficiencies, and work within these limits. The tone is constructive, but the assumptions are all-too familiar: at the municipal level, money is a scarce fund to be carefully allocated, with borrowing tightly bounded by what markets will accept.
J. W. Mason’s Dissent essay, “What Can Zohran Accomplish?,” proceeds from the explicit premise that MMT cannot help. At the federal level, he writes, leftists who follow MMT are right that tax revenue and bond markets “should not be seen as constraints”; spending is a political question. Unfortunately, Mason reveals, “This is not the case at the city level.” New York cannot raise most taxes without state approval, cannot normally borrow for operating expenses, and must treat the level of debt acceptable to bond markets as a “genuine concern.” “At the city level,” he concludes, “‘how are you going to pay for that?’ is a question that has to be answered.” Municipal government is cast as a “creature of the state,” poorly suited to expand the public sector. For this reason, all major ambitions must ultimately defer to Albany and the markets, where tolerance for big ticket items remains forever uncertain.
Taken individually, each piece reads as a sober reality check for an excited left public. None explicitly disavows Mamdani’s agenda. All three acknowledge real legal and political obstacles. Read together, however, they function less as a vibrant debate than a set of tropes: a chorus of left economic expertise offering the same basic lesson in slightly different keys. Cities are debtors. Bond markets and state law are unsurpassable obstacles. Money at the municipal level is a latticework of obligations that are owed outward, not a field of credit that can be restructured from within. Readers are not invited to see the city’s fiscal politics as fundamentally contestable. Instead, public finance is staged as the shared baseline from which any and all “serious” conversations must proceed.
What is easy to miss in this emerging genre is that its alleged baseline is itself an artifact of an economic imaginary that, like Graeber, reduces money to quantified debt. In this imaginary, ethics means either repaying external obligations, or refusing them outright through debtor movements and jubilees. Governance, in this picture, demands either managing austerity responsibly or helping to organize refusals. Any attempt to adopt municipal bonds, public banks, or complementary currencies as positive instruments of democratic coordination starts to look naive or even dangerous. This is because such pro-active monetary politics seem to blur a line that inheritors of Graeber’s program wish to maintain. Informal care and struggle count as “real” politics, whereas formal public accounting belongs to the fallen realm of Schuld.
Meanwhile, this chorus conceals the genuine challenge Mamdani’s win presents. For too long, the U.S. left has taken for granted that real politics happens in movements and oppositional parties, while governance is what the state does afterward. Budgets, bond ordinances, and credit ratings belong to a later, compromised stage, or to a distant future when the left finally takes power. The Mamdani moment unsettles this habit of thinking. It forces the question of how to govern while struggling. It requires using existing fiscal tools to build new forms of support and capacity, rather than accepting those tools as fixed constraints. The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read, in this sense, as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture.
What disappears in this chorus is precisely the terrain that DPF seeks to name. In the DPF paradigm, money is public credit in a strong sense: public institutions at every scale are already issuing and receiving promises that can be redesigned. The question is not simply how much New York can “prudently” borrow from Wall Street, but rather how the city’s own credit instruments can be reframed and rerouted as tools of democratic coordination.
From the standpoint of DPF, the immediate challenges look different:
- not only to resist Wall Street’s structural veto, but also to reframe New York’s bonds as instruments that mobilize unions, pensions, and residents around shared projects;
- not only to avoid borrowing, but also to build complementary currencies, public payment systems, and institutional “swap lines” between schools, clinics, unions, and campaigns that expand the field of receivability;
- not only to determine extant constraints, but also to openly contest the inherited design choices that organize fiscal and legal limitations;
- not only to resist capital and its vested interests, but also to organize coalitions that experiment with different ways of insulating essential services from federal sabotage and punishing rating agencies.
In the end, the imaginary of debt popularized by Graeber and amplified by today’s chorus of left experts threatens to clip our collective wings before we have left the ground. Conspicuously, the primal scenes of this imaginary are always elsewhere—at the still-unattainable heights of power, in the origins of the creditor’s encounter with the debtor, or in dramatic moments of refusal and jubilee. The generative infrastructural work of writing budgets (and writing about them), designing bond programs, creating complementary currencies, and revising accounting categories appears as naïve at best or collaborationist at worst.
Beyond refusal
DPF does not deny that debt can be cruel or that cancellation is often necessary. It simply refuses to let such scenarios exhaust the scope of left politics. Governance is not what comes after the real struggle is over. It is one of the main arenas in which struggles over what will count, quite literally, as a public obligation actually take place.
Within the DPF framework, the politics of refusal can be creatively transvalued. That is, we can redirect refusal to target the underlying legal architecture that naturalizes scarcity in the first place—what we describe as a “fourth area” of intervention. Rather than merely canceling particular debts or rejecting coordination altogether, this fourth area loudly repudiates the deep rules that restrict the powers of monetary creation to the federal government, while casting sub-federal entities as mere debtors. The point is to contest specific budget priorities in ways that simultaneously call out and labor to change the economic playing field itself. For example, at the same time as we work to advance Mamdani’s budget priorities, we can press at the federal level to amend the Constitution, extending the finance franchise to cities and states that have been denied monetary powers.
Proposals like “Blue Bonds”—a Money on the Left initiative to politicize state bond issuance as public credit for democratic investment—often trigger familiar worries that “we” will simply be on the hook for more debt. It is striking that, from a horizon shaped by debt and jubilee, this kind of redesign can appear too risky or unrealistic, while large-scale debt cancellation is held out as the natural outer limit of the left’s political imagination. Why is it easier to picture ceremonially erasing all debts than to envision institutionally reclassifying them? Why merely work toward punctual cleansing when we can wholly rewrite certain obligations as public assets and guarantees?
Many readers influenced by Graeber’s work, despite insisting on the fictive character of money and law, end up acquiescing to legal categories and balance-sheet positions as if they had only one possible meaning. Either we live inside the iron cage of debtor obligations, or we abolish it in a moment of jubilee. According to DPF, refusal calls for a very different strategy: make the existing playing field non-obligatory, so that more capacious arrangements of public credit can be built in its place.
This requires a different image of obligation, and of money. Instead of treating obligation only as quantified, enforceable debt to be discharged or forgiven, we can approach it as public credit: authorized capacity to coordinate work, infrastructure, and care over time. As a result, we avoid conflating ethics with a biopolitical ruse or a fleeting, pre-institutional kindness. Ethics involves the perpetual work of designing and contesting the fiscal and accounting forms that decide whose needs are seen, whose obligations are articulated, whose costs are counted, and whose futures are backed.
Graeber’s critique of debt and bureaucracy remains indispensable for anyone trying to build a more just monetary order. We argue not for setting his work aside, but rather for recognizing where its utopia of refusal leads to dead ends. The time has come to take up the emphatically political task of remaking credit systems as sites of democratic experimentation, obligation, and support. Graeber’s work can surely guide us, but it can only take us so far.
