{"id":38284,"date":"2013-06-02T08:06:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-02T07:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-anarchy-project\/38284\/"},"modified":"2013-06-02T08:06:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-02T07:06:13","slug":"the-anarchy-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-anarchy-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anarchy Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com\/Daryl Lang<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

May 31, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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In\u00a0The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement\u00a0(Spiegel & Grau, 2013), David Graeber\u2019s engaging new book on Occupy Wall Street, the author writes of the dismal culture in Washington during the summer of 2011, a few months before the occupation of Zucotti Park: <\/p>\n

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Republicans were threatening to cause the US government to default in order to force massive cuts in social services intended to head off a largely imaginary debt crisis\u2026President Obama, in turn, had decided the way to appear reasonable in comparison and thus seem as his advisors liked to put it \u2018the only adult in the room\u2019 was not to point out that the entire debate was founded on false economic premises, but to prepare a milder, \u2018compromise\u2019 version of the exact same program–as if the best way to expose a lunatic is to pretend that 50 percent of his delusions are actually true…This is how a ragtag group of anarchists, hippies, unemployed college students, pagan tree sitters, and peace activists suddenly managed to establish themselves, by default, as America\u2019s adults in the first place. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although OWS publicly had \u201cno leaders,\u201d it was obvious in those heady days that a few individuals held enormous sway on the anarchist presence in the movement. One name that invariably came up was David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the University of London (and formerly at Yale). He is one of several people who are credited with originating the phrase We Are the 99%, and he describes himself as an \u201canarchist with a small \u2018a.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Graeber has a long affiliation with the Global Justice Movement and fondly recalls time he spent in Exarchia, a neighborhood in Athens \u201cfull of squatted social centers, occupied parks, and anarchist caf\u00c3\u00a9s where we\u2019d spent a long night downing glasses of ouzo at street corner caf\u00c3\u00a9s while arguing about the radical implications of Plato\u2019s theory of agape, or universal love.\u201d But he has no trouble articulating the rationale for much of OWS: \u201cOur government has become little more than a system of institutionalized bribery where you can be hauled off to jail just for saying so.\u201d <\/p>\n

Notwithstanding Graeber\u2019s eloquence and moral clarity in describing the \u201cmafia capitalism\u201d of bankers and other oligarchs and the political system that further empowers them, he spends a lot of the book differentiating his brand of anarchism from other political tendencies on the left who share many of the same enemies. He rejects old-school communist and socialist radical groups, which he refers to as \u201cverticles\u201d to contrast their authoritarian hierarchies with the \u201chorizontal\u201d culture of anarchism. Above all, he wants to distinguish Occupy Wall Street from liberals. Graeber writes snarkily, \u201cLiberals tend to be touchy and unpredictable because they claim to share the ideals of radical movements\u2013democracy, egalitarianism, freedom\u2013but they\u2019ve also managed to convince themselves that these ideals are ultimately unattainable. For that reason, they see anyone determined to bring about a world based on those principles as a kind of moral threat.\u201d <\/p>\n

It is not at all clear whom Graeber is stigmatizing since he uses the word \u201cliberal\u201d (or interchangeably, to Graeber, \u201cprogressive\u201d) to describe both the Obama administration and some of its critics on the left. Over the course of\u00a0The Democracy Project\u00a0he singles out leaders of the groups Moveon.org and Rebuild The Dream and readers of DailyKos, but it seems as if he views any person or group not committed to anarchist \u201chorizontal\u201d process as inherently suspect, or to use the ultimate anarchist insult, \u201creformist.\u201d <\/p>\n

Graeber writes \u201cFor \u2018small a\u2019 anarchists such as myself\u2014that is, the sort willing to work in broad coalitions as long as they work on horizontal principals\u2013this is what we\u2019d always dreamed of.\u201d Of course, to limit coalitions to partners who work on \u201chorizontal principals\u201d guarantees that they will not be very \u201cbroad\u201d at all. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com\/Daryl Lang May 31, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In\u00a0The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement\u00a0(Spiegel & Grau, 2013), David Graeber\u2019s engaging new book on Occupy Wall Street, the author writes of the dismal culture in Washington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}