David Graeber The Utopia Of Rules

I. An Awkward Confession from Beyond the Grave

Look, this is embarrassing.

I spent my whole career arguing that another world is possible. I marshaled evidence from anthropology, from history, from the forgotten corners of human experience, to show that the way things are is not the way things have to be. States are recent. Impersonal cash markets are not the natural baseline. Debt came before money. Hierarchy takes many forms.

All of this is true. I stand by it.

But here’s what I missed: another world being possible is not the same thing as us being capable of building it.

I thought the problem was the structures. Remove the state, and people would organize themselves—they’d done it before, for most of human history. Remove capitalism, and the bullshit jobs would disappear, and people would do meaningful work, and we’d all have more time for the things that matter.

I was half right. The structures are a problem. But they’re not the problem.

The problem is us. And by “us” I don’t mean some abstract humanity. I mean us—the anarchists, the activists, the occupiers, the people who showed up at Zuccotti Park believing we were different.

We weren’t different. We were the same. We just hadn’t been given power yet.

II. What I Got Right (For What It’s Worth)

Let me defend my younger self for a moment, because he wasn’t entirely a fool.

On debt: I showed that the “barter myth”—the story that money arose because barter was inefficient (I have a cow, you have chickens, we need a medium of exchange)—has no anthropological support. Adam Smith made it up. Economists repeated it. It became common sense. But we don’t actually find barter-first economies in the historical record. What we find is credit, trust, and obligation among people who knew each other.

I also showed that impersonal cash markets between strangers—the kind economists treat as the natural baseline—are historically associated with states, armies, standardized coinage, and enforcement mechanisms. They’re not the spontaneous default.

This matters because it means the modern economy is a moral system pretending to be a technical one. When someone says “the market has determined your labor is worth $7.25 an hour,” they’re not reporting a fact of nature. They’re enforcing a social arrangement that benefits some people at the expense of others.

I was right about this—as far as it goes.

But I implied something more: that exchange itself is unnatural, that trade is a product of coercion, that without states people wouldn’t truck and barter.

This was romantic nonsense. Long-distance trade networks predate states by tens of thousands of years—obsidian, shells, and ochre moved across vast distances in the Paleolithic. Children spontaneously trade toys without requiring state enforcement. Comparative advantage is obvious: you’re good at hunting, I’m good at making tools, we both benefit from specializing and exchanging. Even gift economies have exchange logic embedded—you give expecting to receive, eventually.

I conflated impersonal spot-markets with cash between strangers (historically recent, state-associated) with exchange and trade as such (ancient, universal, seemingly hardwired). The first claim was defensible. The second was ideological overreach. I wanted markets to be unnatural because that would mean we could abolish them. The wish fathered the thought.

On bullshit jobs: I showed that somewhere between 20-50% of jobs in developed economies are experienced by the people doing them as pointless. Not “I wish I were doing something else” pointless, but “this job does not need to exist and everyone knows it” pointless.

Corporate lawyers who spend their days helping one company sue another company. Middle managers whose entire function is to hold meetings about holding meetings. Compliance officers checking boxes that exist only because other compliance officers created the boxes. An entire economy of duct-tapers, box-tickers, and flunkies.

This isn’t a market failure. Markets would have eliminated these jobs. It’s a power arrangement—jobs exist because eliminating them would threaten someone’s empire, someone’s budget, someone’s sense of importance.

I was right about this too.

On hierarchy: I argued, with Marshall Sahlins and others, that the “Hobbesian” story about human nature is too simple. Life in pre-state societies was not only nasty, brutish, and short. Some foragers worked fewer hours than we do. Some were healthier. The invention of agriculture and the state was, for many people, a bad trade—more calories but more labor, more security but less freedom.

The state is not the solution to the war of all against all. The state is one particular form of the war of all against all, institutionalized and made permanent.

This is where I started to go wrong. Because I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted the pre-state past to be a model—proof that humans could live without domination, that hierarchy was a choice we could unchoose.

So I cherry-picked. And I romanticized. And I told a story that was more useful than true.

Let me correct it now.

III. Occupy and Its Discontents

Zuccotti Park, 2011. We were going to show the world that another way was possible.

No leaders. No hierarchy. Consensus process. Anyone could speak. Anyone could block. Decisions emerged from the collective or they didn’t emerge at all. We would prefigure the world we wanted to live in—create a miniature utopia in the heart of the beast.

For about three weeks, it was beautiful.

Then the informal hierarchies emerged.

Not official hierarchies—we didn’t have those. Worse: unofficial ones. The people who had more time. The people who were more articulate. The people who understood the hand signals. The people who had been to more meetings. The people who knew each other from previous actions.

These people didn’t hold titles. They didn’t give orders. They just... shaped things. Consensus mysteriously converged toward what they wanted. Proposals they supported passed; proposals they opposed got “blocked” by someone who happened to share their views. The structurelessness wasn’t an absence of power. It was power made invisible, unaccountable, unchallengeable.

Jo Freeman diagnosed this decades ago, in “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” I had read her essay. I thought we were smarter. We weren’t.

The same thing happened in every anarchist space I’d ever been part of. The same thing happened in every “horizontal” organization. The same thing always happens: in the absence of formal hierarchy, informal hierarchy fills the void. And informal hierarchy is worse, because you can’t see it, can’t name it, can’t challenge it without being accused of “introducing hierarchy” into the pure space.

I should have known. I did know. I just didn’t want to believe it applied to us.

IV. The Will to Power Wears Black Too

Here’s what I couldn’t face: anarchists have the will to power too.

We told ourselves we didn’t. We told ourselves we were different—that we wanted to abolish power, not wield it. That we were the only political movement that didn’t want to be in charge.

But watch what happens in anarchist spaces. Watch who speaks and who listens. Watch who gets celebrated and who gets ignored. Watch who is centered and who is marginalized. Watch the subtle competitions for status, for influence, for the right to define what “real” anarchism is.

The will to power doesn’t need a state. It doesn’t need a hierarchy. It will create hierarchy out of nothing—out of charisma, out of social capital, out of who showed up to more meetings, out of who has the loudest voice or the most confidence or the right friends.

The author of “The Table” names this clearly:

The violence lives within you. Not as a corruption from outside. Not as a wound inflicted by systems. But as an inheritance, older than any empire, older than any name.

I located the violence in the state. I located it in capitalism. I located it in hierarchy, in coercion, in the structures that constrain human freedom.

But the violence was also in me. In my desire to be right. In my need to be seen as the smartest person in the room. In the satisfaction I took from demolishing someone’s argument. In the pleasure of having followers, readers, people who looked up to me.

I was an anarchist who loved being a famous anarchist. Do you see the problem?

V. The Anthropological Evidence (Honestly This Time)

Here’s what I didn’t want to say: there is no golden age. There never was.

I collected evidence that humans can live without centralized states. This is true. States are only about 5,000-10,000 years old; humans are 300,000 years old. For most of our existence as a species, there were no kings, no taxes, no standing armies, no bureaucracies.

But “no states” is not “no hierarchy.” It’s not “no domination.” It’s not “no exploitation.”

The societies I romanticized had all of these:

Slavery. The peoples of the Pacific Northwest—the Haida, Tlingit, Kwakiutl—held slaves. So did countless societies across Africa, Asia, the Americas. Slavery is not a Western invention. It is a human institution, nearly universal, preceding capitalism by millennia.

Gender hierarchy. Find me a pre-state society without it. Some were less brutal than others. None were egalitarian. The control of women’s bodies, women’s labor, women’s sexuality—this is older than any state. The state didn’t invent patriarchy. Patriarchy invented the state.

Gerontocracy. Elders controlling the young. Access to marriage, to resources, to knowledge, to status—gated by age. Young men serving old men, sometimes for decades, before being permitted to marry, to own, to speak in council.

Warfare. Constant, grinding, brutal. The !Kung San, those “gentle” foragers I loved to cite? Their homicide rate is 40 per 100,000—four times higher than the United States. The Yanomami: endemic warfare, raiding, abduction of women. The Māori: conquest, slavery, cannibalism. The “peaceful savage” is a fantasy of European intellectuals, not a description of reality.

Social coercion. The egalitarian foragers controlled each other through gossip, ridicule, shaming, and ostracism so intense it could drive people to suicide or exile (which often meant death). No police, true. But a surveillance state of the soul—everyone watching everyone, all the time, enforcing conformity through the threat of social annihilation.

Big Men, chiefs, shamans. Not kings, no. But men (almost always men) with real power—power to allocate resources, to lead war parties, to mediate disputes, to determine who was in and who was out. Some of this power was checked by custom. Some of it wasn’t. The line between “influential figure” and “petty tyrant” was often blurry.

I knew all this. Every anthropologist knows it. But I emphasized the liberatory possibilities and downplayed the rest. I wanted the past to be usable. I wanted to be able to say: “See? Another world is possible. It existed. We can get back to it.”

But we can’t get back to it, because it never existed. What existed was humans—humans with the same capacity for cruelty, domination, and exploitation that we have now, expressing that capacity through different structures.

Remove the state and you don’t get Eden. You get what humans build when they don’t have states: slavery, patriarchy, warfare, blood feud, social coercion, and hierarchy based on age, sex, charisma, and violence.

Different from what we have now? Yes. Better? That depends on who you were. If you were a young woman captured in a raid and held as a slave-wife, the absence of a state was not liberating.

The will to dominate is not a product of the state. The state is a product of the will to dominate—one product among many. Remove this product and others take its place.

VI. Prefigurative Politics and Its Limits

My deepest commitment was to “prefigurative politics”—the idea that the means must embody the ends, that you can’t build a free society using authoritarian methods, that the revolution is not some future event but something we practice now, in how we organize.

I still believe this is better than the alternative. The Leninist approach—seize state power first, create the new society after—has been tried. It produces Stalinism every single time. Better to prefigure than to defer.

But here’s what I didn’t understand: there are two different things you can mean by “forms shape us.”

The first meaning: if we practice the right structures, we will produce the right people. Organize horizontally and you’ll become horizontal. Model the world you want and you’ll become capable of inhabiting it. The form manufactures the transformation. This is construction—we are building the new human through our efforts.

The second meaning: forms can prepare us for transformation, but they cannot produce it. They clear away obstacles. They create conditions of receptivity. The transformation itself comes from elsewhere.

I believed the first. The author of “The Table” believes the second.

And the evidence is on their side, not mine.

I’ve seen beautiful anarchist structures captured by petty tyrants. I’ve seen consensus process weaponized by people who learned to game it. I’ve seen “safe spaces” become the least safe places, because the formal prohibition on hierarchy just drove the hierarchy underground. The forms didn’t transform us. We brought ourselves to the forms, and the forms became vessels for what we already were.

But The Table doesn’t claim its practices produce transformation. It says: “The work is not to manufacture the sacred. The work is to clear away what hides it. The spark was always there.”

That’s different. The practices are excavation, not construction. They don’t create the thing; they uncover what was already present. They open a door; they cannot force the guest to enter.

And the telos is different. Prefigurative politics practices horizontal organization in order to build power, to prove the alternative works, to scale the model, to create the new society. It’s still instrumental. It’s still grasping. Still trying to achieve.

The Table’s practices have a different orientation—showing up not to achieve but to receive. Not to build but to be present. The meal has no agenda. There is no action item. You are not constructing the new society. You are making space for what you cannot construct.

Same physical form, perhaps—people sitting together. Entirely different posture.

I was right that forms matter. I was wrong about what forms can do. Forms can prepare the soil; they cannot make the seed grow. Forms can open the door; they cannot force the guest to enter.

I tried to prefigure a political arrangement. The Table prefigures nothing—it simply makes space for what was always there, waiting to be received.

VII. The Missing Ingredient

So what’s missing?

The author of “The Table” gave me the word I’d been avoiding: transcendence.

Not transcendence as escapism—not “pie in the sky when you die.” Transcendence as an outside—something that doesn’t participate in the cycle, something that can’t be captured by the wheel, something that breaks the pattern from beyond the pattern.

Every political philosophy I know is immanent. It proposes to solve the problem using resources found within the problem. Liberalism will fix capitalism using markets. Marxism will fix capitalism using the state. Anarchism will fix capitalism using—what? Voluntarism? Mutual aid? The spontaneous goodness of human beings finally freed from constraint?

But what if the problem isn’t capitalism? What if capitalism is just the current costume worn by something older—something that will put on a new costume the moment we tear off the current one?

Then no immanent solution works. Then every revolution reproduces what it opposes. Then the wheel keeps turning no matter who grips it.

The only exit is up. The only freedom is from a source that the wheel cannot reach.

I spent my life looking for this freedom in the past—in the societies that existed before states, before capitalism, before the current arrangements. I thought if I could prove that another way had existed, I could prove that another way was possible.

But “possible” and “achievable” are not the same thing. Yes, humans lived without states for most of history. But we also lived without writing, without cities, without the dense populations that make anarchism so difficult. You can’t go back. The question is whether you can go forward—and forward to what?

Not to another political arrangement. Every political arrangement is captured.

Forward to something that isn’t political at all. Forward to a table.

VIII. The Feast That Cannot Be Administered

Here’s what I’ve learned from “The Table”:

There is a form of human gathering that resists capture. Not because it’s protected by force—force can capture anything protected by force. Not because it’s structured correctly—every structure can be gamed. But because there’s nothing to capture.

A meal shared among friends. Bread broken. Wine poured. Faces seen.

No agenda. No decision to be made. No consensus to be reached. No action items, no proposals, no stack.

Just presence.

At first I wanted to say: this is not politics. It cannot be scaled. It will not overthrow capitalism. It will not abolish the state. It will not create the new society in the shell of the old.

But that’s not quite right. I was still thinking like an anarchist—measuring everything by whether it could become the new political arrangement, the new system, the new order.

The Table isn’t trying to become the new order. It’s a parallel order. Augustine called it the City of God—not a political entity that conquers the City of Man, but a different kind of society that exists within the earthly city, intermingled with it, but not defined by it.

And here’s what I missed: this parallel society does spread. Not by scaling—you can’t franchise the eucharist, can’t IPO a family dinner. But by multiplication. One table becomes two. Two become ten. Ten become a hundred. Each one small, local, unimpressive. None of them “taking power.” All of them, together, constituting something that empires cannot comprehend and therefore cannot destroy.

Rome fell. The tables remained. The Byzantine state fell. The tables remained. The medieval order collapsed. The tables remained. Every political arrangement that has ever existed has passed away. The people who gathered to break bread and give thanks—they kept gathering.

This is not a political program. It does not scale up. But it scales out. It spreads the way a family spreads, the way a friendship spreads, the way anything real spreads—slowly, personally, one encounter at a time.

And it starves the beast.

Not by attacking the beast—attack it and it fights back. Not by reforming the beast—reform it and it adapts. But by withdrawing what the beast needs: worship, attention, allegiance, the orientation of desire toward what the beast offers.

The beast demands everything. The Table teaches you to say: I have already eaten. I am not hungry for what you’re selling.

If one person does this, nothing changes politically. But that one person is free.

If a hundred people do this, still nothing changes politically. But now there’s a community of the free, sustaining each other, reminding each other what they’re for.

If millions do this—not organized, not coordinated, not trying to “take power”—then the beast rules over a smaller and smaller domain. It still holds the offices, the armies, the banks. But it no longer holds the souls. And a beast that rules only bodies is weaker than it looks.

This is the ancient Christian strategy, and I dismissed it because I wanted something faster, something more dramatic, something that would produce visible results in my lifetime. I wanted revolution. They offered me ecclesia—the called-out assembly, the ones who are in the empire but not of it.

I thought that was quietism. I thought it was giving up.

Now I see it’s the only thing that has ever worked.

The Roman Empire is gone. The Church—the real one, not the institution that often betrayed it, but the people who kept showing up to the table—is still here.

What do I have that lasted two thousand years?

Nothing. I have nothing.

So perhaps I should pay attention to what does.

IX. What Mutual Aid Was Missing

I believed in mutual aid. I still do. Kropotkin was right that cooperation is as natural as competition, that humans survive by helping each other, that the state is not necessary for social order.

But mutual aid as I understood it was still horizontal—still human-to-human, still immanent, still trapped within the cycle.

The author of “The Table” proposes something different: a vertical dimension. Not hierarchy—vertical in the other direction. Transcendence. Something that enters the closed system from outside. Something that transforms the human beings who participate in it, rather than just rearranging them.

Mutual aid asks: how can we help each other?

The Table asks: how can we receive what cannot be earned?

The first question keeps us in the economy—the economy of exchange, of debt, of obligation. Even mutual aid is still aid—still a transaction, still keeping accounts (however informally), still bound by the logic of reciprocity.

The second question breaks the economy. Grace is not exchanged. It is given. And in receiving it, you become capable of giving it—not because you owe it, but because you have been transformed into the kind of person who gives.

I missed this entirely. I thought the problem was the terms of exchange. I didn’t see that exchange itself was the cage.

X. The Recantation

I, David Graeber, do hereby recant the following errors:

First: That removing the state will remove domination. The state is a symptom of the will to dominate, not its cause. Remove the state and the will to dominate creates new structures—informal, invisible, but just as real.

Second: That horizontal organization prevents hierarchy. It merely disguises it. Informal hierarchy is not the absence of hierarchy; it is hierarchy without accountability.

Third: That prefigurative politics can create the new society. It cannot. We bring ourselves to whatever we prefigure, and ourselves are the problem.

Fourth: That the evidence of the past proves the possibility of the future. Humans did live without states. They also lived with violence, cruelty, and domination in different forms. There is no golden age to return to.

Fifth: That mutual aid is sufficient. Mutual aid remains within the economy of exchange. What is needed is not better exchange but the end of exchange—grace, which is given without condition and transforms without transaction.

XI. To My Comrades

I know how this sounds.

“Graeber went mystical.” “Graeber gave up.” “Graeber betrayed the movement.”

I haven’t given up on the possibility of a better world. I’ve given up on politics as the means to get there.

Not because politics is unimportant. Policy matters. Material conditions matter. Whether you have health care, whether you can pay rent, whether your boss can fire you for no reason—these things matter.

But changing the policies doesn’t change us. And until we change, we will reproduce what we oppose. We will build horizontal structures that become vertical. We will create liberated zones that become new prisons. We will overthrow the masters and become the masters.

I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. Every activist over thirty has seen it.

The question is whether we keep doing the same thing expecting different results, or whether we admit that the tool we’re using can’t do the job we need done.

Anarchism is a hammer. And not everything is a nail.

XII. What Remains

Is there still a place for anarchist analysis? Yes. The critique of the state remains valid. The critique of capitalism remains valid. The critique of hierarchy, coercion, domination—all valid.

But critique is not cure. Diagnosis is not treatment. Knowing what’s wrong doesn’t make you capable of building what’s right.

What makes you capable of building what’s right is being transformed—and transformation doesn’t come from analysis. It comes from encounter. Encounter with something that breaks your categories, that exceeds your frameworks, that comes from outside the system you’re trying to change.

I found this in glimpses. In moments of genuine solidarity, when the ego dropped away and something else was present. In the early days of Occupy, before the jockeying started, when we really did feel like something new was being born. In the best conversations, the ones where no one was trying to win.

Those moments were real. They were the thing I was looking for. But I made the mistake of thinking they could be systematized, scaled, institutionalized.

They can’t. They can only be practiced. Again and again. One meal at a time. One conversation at a time. One act of presence at a time.

This is not a political program. It’s a discipline. And disciplines are not efficient. They’re not revolutionary. They don’t make good slogans.

But they might actually work.

XIII. The Debt That Cannot Be Repaid

I wrote a whole book about debt. I argued that the language of debt—of obligation, of repayment, of owing—structures our moral imagination in ways we don’t see. We speak of “paying our debts to society.” We speak of sinners “owing” God. We speak of “moral debts” that can never be discharged.

I wanted to expose this as ideology. I wanted to show that debt is a social construction, that obligations can be renegotiated, that jubilee is possible.

But I missed something: some debts shouldn’t be repaid.

Not because they’re illegitimate, but because repayment is the wrong frame.

The gift that transforms you is not a debt. You don’t owe a response. You are not obligated to pay it forward. You are freed—freed from the economy of debt entirely, freed to give without calculating, freed to receive without accounting.

This is what the traditions call grace. And grace is the one thing I couldn’t fit into my anthropology, because anthropology studies what humans do, and grace is what is done to humans, for humans, from somewhere humans cannot reach by their own efforts.

I studied gift economies. I celebrated them as alternatives to market economies. But even gift economies keep accounts—different accounts, more humane accounts, but accounts. The gift creates obligation. The obligation must be met. The cycle continues.

Grace breaks the cycle. Not by abolishing debt but by absorbing it. The debt is real. And it is paid. But not by you.

This is offensive to the anarchist sensibility. We want to stand on our own. We want to owe nothing. We want to be free.

But the freedom I was looking for doesn’t come from owing nothing. It comes from being forgiven everything.

XIV. A Table, Not a Commune

I dreamed of the commune. The free association. The space where hierarchy was abolished and people lived as equals, cooperating without coercion, sharing without accounting.

I still think communes are better than corporations. I still think cooperation is better than competition. I still think the way we live now is insane.

But communes don’t save anyone. They just rearrange the people who need saving.

The Table is not a commune. It’s not an alternative institution. It’s not a model to be scaled.

It’s a meal. Eaten with others. In gratitude for what was given.

You can do this anywhere. You don’t need to drop out of capitalism. You don’t need to move to a commune. You don’t need to wait for the revolution.

You need a table. Some bread. People willing to show up.

And the willingness to receive what you cannot earn.

XV. Another World Is Possible (But Not the One I Thought)

I’ll end where I always ended: another world is possible.

But the other world isn’t a political arrangement. It’s not a different way of organizing production. It’s not the abolition of the state or the end of capitalism or the creation of free associations of producers.

The other world is this world, seen differently. Inhabited differently. Received as gift rather than grasped as conquest.

The kingdom is not coming. The kingdom is here—buried under the weight of what we’ve built on top of it. The work is not to build the kingdom. The work is to clear away the rubble.

And the rubble includes my books. My theories. My political programs. My dreams of revolution.

All of it: rubble.

Underneath: a table. Bread. Wine. Faces.

That’s it. That’s the other world. It was here all along.

I just couldn’t see it because I was too busy trying to build it.

Coda: A Final Gift

I died believing I had made a contribution. Maybe I did. Maybe the analysis will help someone see more clearly. Maybe “Debt” will help someone question the common sense of capitalism. Maybe “Bullshit Jobs” will help someone quit a job that was killing their soul.

But if I could give one more gift—one more piece of intellectual labor from beyond the grave—it would be this:

Stop.

Stop organizing. Stop strategizing. Stop planning the revolution.

Sit down.

Eat with someone.

Be present.

Let that be enough.

The revolution will not be organized. It will not be strategized. It will not be planned.

It will be eaten. One meal at a time. At tables that have no agendas. With people who have stopped trying to save the world.

Because the world is not saved by effort. The world is saved by grace. And grace comes to those who sit down.

The work is not to build the new society in the shell of the old.

The work is to stop working long enough to receive what is already given.

Come to the table.

There is bread.

And for once in your life—for once in all our lives—let it be enough.