“When [David] Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world” asserts Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (“David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero,” UnHerd, September 2).  An unlikely position for the author of tomes covering “some of the most mind-numbing subjects,” from the originations of finance to managerial administration, whose defiant anti-authoritarianism apparently mapped “a kind of ‘road not taken’ for the political Left” which has since veered ever more sharply into pinning all their hopes and fears on the next election.

Yet Lambert can count Graeber’s bestsellers “among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time,” offering “the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists” — who have taken up such themes as emphasizing “‘values’ as distinct from ‘value'” (no longer the domain of such leftists as The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy author Raj Patel),  “paeans to untrammeled human creativity” Graeber made in the face of the sort of tech billionaire via which such techno-utopianism is now judged guilty by association, and exploring “the horrors of modern bureaucracy” while “the ‘b’ word is hardly ever uttered by progressives” (at least those who, unlike Argentine comic-strip character Mafalda, don’t need to holler the name of an eponymous pet turtle) more comfortable with “the language of enlightened paternalism.”

Even being “deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation,” which Lambert points to as the dividing line between Graeber and the right, could easily sound closer to the “Birkenstocked Burkeans” of National Review‘s Rod Dreher than a Biden-era brat summer. The Economist, the newspaper in which Lambert locates the “orthodox line of rebuttal” to Graeber that seemingly wasteful jobs “ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production,” had once employed the laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer who had argued that in self-managed worker cooperatives where “each obtains exactly the remuneration due for his work, minus only the cost of administration, the productive power of the concern is greatly increased.”

Graeber would at least not quarrel with Lambert that avowed anarchism was “far rarer in academic life” than Marxism.”  In 2004, Graeber himself had asserted (with coauthor Andrej Grubacic) that “there are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists,” with the professoriate preferring “the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D.” Even then, the ranks of respected academic anarchist anthropologists included Harold Barclay and James C. Scott together with Graeber. And for decades before and since 2004, one of the all-time most cited living academics has been anti-Marxist anarchist Noam Chomsky.

Auburn’s academic anarchist Roderick Long summed up: “Graeber’s liberatory vision” has much of value as “a useful corrective for those” — including Graeber himself, who had previously dismissed “terms like free enterprise” as cover for “the sordid economic reality, one where productive wealth was controlled by the few for their own benefit” — “who are too quick to take the case for free enterprise as a validation of the perversities of the existing … market.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 8, 2025
2. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 8, 2025

Six decades after Tom Lehrer adapted his songs on such then-current topics as the Second Vatican Council and the vice-presidency of Hubert Horatio Humphrey from NBC’s That Was the Week That Was into his final album That Was the Year That Was, it remains clear that his works will remain relevant weeks, and years, after his passing on July 26 at 97.

Even at 37, Lehrer agonized that “when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” The more contemporary composer Gustav Mahler had been decomposing for 53 when his widow Alma was memorialized by Lehrer.  An ongoing outpouring of letters to the editor testifies to the outstanding memorableness of Lehrer’s musical output, such as Stephen DeBock’s in the August 1 Wall Street Journal recalling how his “devout Christian mother, upon hearing ‘The Vatican Rag,’ begged me to play it again and again as tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks” — while the popular music of today makes even such then-edgier albums sharing the mid-Sixties Billboard charts with Lehrer as Whipped Cream & Other Delights seem as reverential as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

Admittedly, as LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted on Lehrer’s 90th birthday, writing about “racial conflict, pollution, religious intolerance, nuclear brinkmanship” ensured engaging issues that “have never gone away.”  If anything, Lehrer underestimated the political rancor to come.  The current wave of anti-obscenity legislation won’t be opposed as openly by either what Lehrer called “the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue … as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression” or by those like himself for whom “dirty books are fun!”  He quipped of the era’s Cold War enemies that “Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK, ’cause the balance of power’s maintained that way” and “China got the bomb, but have no fears; they can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

In the 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Lehrer is quoted as a self-described “wishy-washy liberal” who sees little mettle in playing one of his most-requested ditties since “everyone is against pollution.”  Yet the ozone layer was saved from chlorofluorocarbon corrosion in large part via staunch conservative Margaret Thatcher — and thus, as Carl Sagan pointed out, the British leader’s “early studies in chemistry” — while the Ronald Reagan Lehrer jibed years before winning elections initiated nuclear arms reductions influenced by the dramatized telefilm The Day After.

Lehrer foresaw a future where competition between nations produced nuclear weaponry “transistorized at half the price.”  Further exponential dwindling of costs, mostly in areas distant enough from politics for real market competition, has produced a world closer to the surreal exaggerations of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, in which “the Hendersons have the bomb” on the lawn next door. Properly harnessed for social cooperation, free choices can join neighborhoods and nations in harmony, without the chorus being Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “This is Still Tom Lehrer’s Week That Was” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 4, 2025

“Let Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York serve as your periodic reminder that capitalism is in dire need of able defenders.” Matthew Hennessey’s call that “Capitalism Needs Champions” (Wall Street Journal, July 1) would have provoked Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal author Ayn Rand’s trademark reminder to “check your premises.”

According to Hennessey, who uses “capitalism” interchangeably with “free markets” and even plain “markets,” “anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago.” Chris Matthew Sciabarra notes: “For Rand, this ‘unknown ideal’ had been approximated in history but it had never been practiced in its full, unadulterated laissez-faire form. It was largely undercut by state intervention.”

Even while America’s actually existing mixed economy produced the “washing machines [and] chemotherapy” hailed by Hennessey, manufacturing became so intertwined with federal contracts and organizational bureaucracy that Karl Hess could quip in a 1976 Playboy interview that “to find a difference worth dying for in opposing the Soviet Union while supporting General Motors requires a theological position.” Michael Harrington observed in The Next Left that ostensibly private healthcare providers accepted being primarily funded by “socialized insurance premiums” to the point of becoming “the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism combined,” in which “no one was particularly concerned about controlling the outlays or quality.”

“Free people” do “abominate coercion,” but Hennessey overlooks how capitalists have taken the initiative in burdening their competitors.  Asserting that “the owner-operator of a corner deli is no less a capitalist than Jeff Bezos” ignores how, in the words of Roy Childs, “men in larger businesses supported and even initiated acts of government regulation” (and would obviate the case against antitrust breakups).

Hennessey dismisses “soft-headed notions about inequality,” since “the incredible wealth [markets] generate can be used to fill the gaps.”  Yet the most pro-market mayoral candidate in New York’s history, Henry George, saw how unfree markets aggravated what he called the “Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth.”

Hennessey predicts that Mamdani will require “plans to keep New Yorkers captive,” forgetting his own Journal op-ed page’s survey of socialist mayors who “took an entrepreneurial approach to government, improving systems, cutting waste, and finding creative new sources of income” (Michael Trinklein’s “Sanders Can Learn From ‘Sewer Socialists’,” March 19, 2020).  The New York mayor who hailed “the crumbling bricks of the Berlin wall” yielding to “a world liberated from the crushing weight of fascism and totalitarianism” was card-carrying member of Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America David Dinkins.

Harrington’s heirs lack the socialist stalwart’s perceptiveness of “the worst of socialism.”  Mamdani’s proposed municipal groceries would have a harder time recreating efficient supply chains geared to local retail needs than dot-com bubble fiascoes like Kozmo or Webvan.  Free buses would at least not jeopardize free markets in a transit economy so subsidized that fares act like a regressive tax. But no free ride would get as far as free trade.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion capitalism”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska] July 7, 2025
2. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Carolina Panorama [Columbia, South Carolina], July 8, 2025
3. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, PCM Explorer [Prairie City, Iowa], July 10, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]
4. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, Jasper County Tribune [Colfax, Iowa], July 10, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]