His Kansas-born father, Kenneth, who at college had been a member of the Youth Communist League, later fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war before returning to New York to become a plate stripper for offset printers. His Polish-born mother, Ruth (nee Rubinstein), had been a garment worker who played the lead role in Pins and Needles, a 1930s musical revue staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. I always say the principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”īorn in New York, David was the son of working-class Jewish parents. And Occupy Wall Street can’t have a bank account. You have all these rules and regulations. People kept giving us money but we weren’t going to put it in the bank.

In fact at one point at Zuccotti Park there was a huge plastic garbage bag that had $800,000 in it. Indeed, he described the Occupy movement as an “experiment in a post-bureaucratic society”, telling the Guardian in 2015: “We wanted to demonstrate that we could do all the services that social service providers do without endless bureaucracy.

The system has completely failed them … If there’s going to be any kind of society worth living in, we’re going to have to create it ourselves.” He noted that many of the people who protested with him, as well as those who took to the streets in Egypt and Spain in 2011, had one big thing in common: “Most of them were people who had gone through the educational system who were deeply in debt and who found it completely impossible to find jobs.

Graeber debt book