Last Thursday, Adrian Chen sponsored a Gawker live chat with David Graeber:
It’s been over a year and a half since Occupy Wall Street took over the streets and the internet. At the time, David Graeber was pegged as the “anti-leader” of the leaderless movement, a prominent scholar and activist in whom many of the intellectual and social strains of the movement came together.
Graeber is Reader in social anthroplogy at Goldsmiths College, Univeristy of London, a frequent contributor to The Baffler and the author of a well-regarded book on the history of debt. In his new book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, Graeber traces the fraught history of the concept of “democracy” and argues the way toward a truly democratic society rests in the anarchist process of consensus, which Occupy used to rally hundreds of thousands during its peak…
You were there from the beginning of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in September, 2011. The occupation is long gone but you speak of Occupy in present tense throughout your book in the present tense. Make your case: Why isn’t Occupy dead?
DG: Well it’s not dead because people are still there. They’re still doing stuff. There is a core group in every city in America of people who are constantly planning and engaged and forms of direct action and civil disobedience. There is a whole infrastructure that has been created, it’s just the nobody talks about it. We had Occupy Sandy. It’s telling that we actually were the first people on the streets doing relief when a disaster struck. We had 40,000 people booked doing relief stuff immediately…
How did your views on Occupy and what happened in 2011 and 2012 change while you were writing the book?
DG: One thing that really shocked me is the complete stupidity of something called the liberal classes in America. It’s bizarre that they don’t seem to have any political common sense, because the right wing has political common sense. Republicans understand you can sell out your radicals on all the policy but not on the existential issues. They’re not going to really ban abortion or appeal Roe v. Wade, they want to keep people mobilized. On the other hand, they might think militia guys are insane, but if anyone suggests touching the second amendment they go crazy. The Democratic left does not behave that way. If the Democratic left got as excited about the First Amendment as the Republicans get about the Second, you know, they’d be in much better shape because they would actually have a radical movement to their left which would make them seem reasonable and they could push their policy agenda. But instead they just completely screw us and get rid of us. And then they can’t understand why suddenly the biggest issue of the day has gone back to cutting social security…
piratedan
maybe because the American left is nominally seen as being represented by people like Jane freaking Hamsher who really isn’t a liberal at all and the DCCC is maintained by corporatists interests. Really, as far as the media is concerned, they trot out a mouthpiece as needed versus actually talking to anyone within the Progressive Caucus that exists in the House. When is the last time anyone has interviewed Grijalva or Ellison on national television about anything?
sb
I tend to agree with TBogg re: OWS and what it eventually became.
Money quote is the last line: “Hopefully it will come back as more of this and less of the inchoate rage against the obvious.”
Dolly Llama
OWS was a silly waste, and this guy sounds like a douche for pretending it did anything but set us back. If The Left wanted a model, Madison, Wisconsin was it.
ETA: I love how he imagines that OWS was the only thing standing in the breach preventing chained CPI.
arguingwithsignposts
I had no idea that consensus was an anarchist process. That’s poorly worded, and uncalled for, given the connotation of the term anarchy.
Suffern ACE
Why the first amendment?
Baud
@arguingwithsignposts:
The whole excerpt is kind of a word salad.
Frankensteinbeck
Sorry, which party is circling the demographic drain because their radicals control the primary process, making the party sound crazy and stupid to everyone who’s had to decide which side they’re on for the last twenty years?
Dolly Llama
@arguingwithsignposts: The whole idea that someone could be prevented from speaking by some fool crossing his/her arms or something epitomized silly lefty stupidity.
Narcissus
The thing about OWS is that it turned out to be all process. There was no there there.
You can only talk about doing stuff for so long before you need to start doing something.
Alison
@sb: Yeah, I feel the same as TBogg. There was some good in the beginning of the movement, and there are some offshoots still doing good work, but by and large, the movement and the people and all of it, like this Graeber dude? BRB looking for some fucks to give.
RobertDSC-eMac 1.25
Occupying the voting booth would have been nice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narcissus: I think Occupy did quite a bit to bring income inequality issues out into the open.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I agree with this. They made it a meme, which is a good thing. I don’t think they went much beyond that, however.
ruemara
Sorry, have to disagree. Did they register? Did they plan to take over local politics? Did they work on developing an action plan? No, but they did offer free massages and readings of Chomsky. Our local Occupy [Rather Liberal City] managed to kill the grass seed in the park and turn down many efforts by one of our city council persons to get help organizing and bring their issues to the council. Whatever.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
They did, but I think Tbogg was right in the piece that sb linked to — once mission creep set in, Occupy Wall Street became about every grievance on the left being given equal time and lost its focus on economic inequality, which was the message that really spoke to a wide range of people.
I’m grateful to them because they were able to kick off a national dialogue about the 99% vs. the 1% that might not have happened otherwise, but mission creep is the bane of the left. How often do you see “pro-life” activists start talking about the Second Amendment in their rallies? Never, even though there’s a lot of crossover between the audiences. They know how to stay focused on one pet issue instead of feeling like they have to give equal time to everyone’s pet issue.
TruthOfAngels
Because nothing would demonstrate ‘political common sense’ better than noted Democrats going in front of TV cameras to say ‘fuck the actual political process, we’re all anarchists now!’
Truly, this man is a visionary.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
No, but what can one really expect from a street protest? Public attention and awareness are the primary things and they succeeded at that. The fact that they did not become a movement that reorganized politics as we know can’t really be held against them.
Narcissus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nothing came of it, though. You raise awareness about something so that you can then do something about it, right? That didn’t happen.
Regnad Kcin
And if only the Silly Party got as excited about the XVII Amendment…
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t hold anything against them. I hold something against people who talk about them as if they were more than they were, because I just don’t think that’s true.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narcissus: Here’s the thing. People who are good at raising awareness might not be good at, for example, drafting legislation.
Culture of Truth
Fine, but she misunderstands that the right and left are not mirror images of each other. The left is not full of amoral ruthless hypocrites. Those people who are, eventually find a place on the right…
John M. Burt
For cryin’ out sake, people, Occupy transformed the debate in 2012. Who was talking about economic inequality at all prior to Occupy?
When I hear people saying Occupy “accomplished nothing”, implying that the subjects under discussion would be exactly the same without them, they remind me of nothing so much as Firebaggers declaring that President McCain would surely have given us health care reform at least as progressive as ObamaCare, maybe more so.
gbear
‘We are the 99%’ was a pretty good meme. The right went to great lengths to bash it. Between that and Romney’s ‘47%’ comment, people started noticing numbers and realizing they were on the losing end.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s why, if they’re smart, they go looking for people who can draft legislation rather than saying that anyone affiliated with the Democratic Party isn’t welcome at their events.
If you want to become a viable political movement, you need to make alliances with politicians who can pass legislation that will get you to your goals. The Civil Rights Movement knew this, but apparently people have forgotten it in the intervening years and think all they have to do is march and chant and laws will magically pass themselves.
Dolly Llama
@Omnes Omnibus: Exactly. Once you’ve successfully established the “99%” meme, following up with a series of interpretive dances about it is not just a comical waste, it’s a frustrating comical waste.
ETA: What Mnemosyne said, too. If you believe a small cadre of glorified Deadheads is going to make a tinker’s damn worth of difference in actually bringing about positive change, you probably think OWS was great.
ETAA: OWS was to economic justice what Queer Nation “Kiss In” events were to GLBT equality issues.
Frankensteinbeck
@John M. Burt:
President Obama, giving multiple speeches about how rich people needed to pay their fair share.
Omnes Omnibus
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes, he did, but for some reason the MSM said fuck all about it. Once Occupy started, people also began noticing what Obama was saying.
scav
Someday, the perfect Swiss Army Pocket Knife / Sonic Screwdriver of Political Activism (with bully pulpit!) will emerge to Save Us All In the Manner We Deserve, but until then . . .
Pooh
@ruemara: this. Reminiscent of the West Wing scene where Toby alternatively ignores and mocks the WTO protesters. Because waving signs is relatively easy. Actually influencing policy at the local level is hard, and their zealots have actually tried to do so unlike ours.
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Until then, we’re going to be echoing Casey Stengel and asking, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
different-church-lady
When it comes to evaluating OWS, it’s frequently maddening to see people claim they created a idea itself, rather than what they actually did, which was seize and frame a zeitgeist.
I mean, when people ask, “Who was talking about income inequality before OWS?” the answer is, “Everybody!” They just weren’t doing it in national news reports filled with videotaped spectacle. There were no handy catchphrases. There were no trending memes.
But there very much was a whole lot of individual and highly stressed people trying to deal with their financial situations, and believe me, they were talking about it PLENTY.
So, kudos to them for heightening the awareness. But let’s not get carried away and give them credit for creating it.
Suffern ACE
@Mnemosyne: because they still want to take their queues from the anti Vietnam war movement and not the civil rights movement. We march, eventually Walter Cronkite says those marchers might be onto something, public opinion changes and … Somehow the war powers act comes from that and we leave Vietnam. But the part after the … Isn’t yet defined for income inequality.
Baud
@Suffern ACE:
When Chris Hayes had his weekend show, someone made that comparison — that the big difference between OWS and the Civil Rights movement was that the latter had “asks” they were fighting for, while OWS (apparently) made a conscious decision not to have “asks.”
Maude
@Omnes Omnibus:
It was a short term awareness protest. I didn’t think it was for the long haul.
Omnes Omnibus
@Maude: I don’t disagree. As a result, I have trouble with people criticizing it for not doing things it was not trying to do.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
That’s the problem, though — they can’t deliberately decide not to ask for anything and then complain that nobody gave them what they wanted. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I seem to recall there were some folks that put OWS into the “This changes everything” column. I don’t know if there was any consensus vision for that protest.
Suffern ACE
@Baud: I thought their ask would be related to Citizens United. However I could be wrong. If they aren’t about limiting corporate power, then what is the first amendment issue they want the public to rally around?
Baud
@Mnemosyne:
Are they complaining, though? I’m not even sure who they is with them.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Um, I dunno if I’d take Graeber’s opinions on politics too seriously. His book isn’t especially “well-regarded” by people who know the topic. DeLong had an epic takedown of it a few weeks ago.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I am not one of those. I think they did a great job of publicizing an important issue. The blame for the fact that there was not significant follow up can be spread quite broadly.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
David Graeber is absolutely complaining in the quotes AL pulled. What did you think he was doing?
He’s complaining that the Democrats didn’t listen to Occupy, but as far as I can tell, Occupy rejected the Democrats first. He sounds like a guy who dumped his girlfriend and then complains that she doesn’t take his calls anymore.
ETA: And perhaps this is because he’s a damned furrnier, but he doesn’t seem to understand that the Republican far right is deeply embedded within the Republican Party and is not pressuring it from the outside. Maybe he mistook the Tea Party for an actual outside movement and not the rebellion of party insiders that it was.
Cassidy
I think it’s a little unfair to say OWS didn’t accomplish anything. A big part of the problem is that the realization that they had no access to the system, other than voting, made it almost impossible for their wants to be championed. Liberals, and most Democrats, weren’t talking about income inequality or life long debt except in broad, vague terms. They put a generational face to a problem and sucked even more if the horrid things conservatives think and say out into the public. Unfortunately, the whole thing became dominated by anarchists and libertarians and lost momentum.
Baud
@Suffern ACE:
I don’t know if they made a specific CU demand, although I’d imagine most of them would have been opposed to it.
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, but I don’t know how many people within OWS (then or now) agree with his views.
ChrisNYC
I am not an OWS fan and never was but I do think the “what did it do” thing is beside the point. Because I think they were after a much larger goal, e.g. no “asks” because a demand presumes the body asked has the power to grant or deny; consensus versus voting because voting has a component of force. I mean that’s a much larger idea which I get but I very much don’t agree with. I think addressing income inequality was in a way the vehicle, not the real or prime purpose.
But I think this guy telling Dems/liberals how they are doing it wrong is the same thing as the shots at OWS — he’s grafting his own goals onto people/orgs with very different aims and avenues and then chiding them for falling short.
Also bull if they were the only people doing relief right after the storm. They were the only people doing relief right after the storm who got a long piece in the Times, is more like it.
Culture of Truth
Believe me, I’m not a drum circle fan. I could hear the, literally.
But OWS did something, rather than nothing. Did they change everything? No. But who does?
Mnemosyne
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Ouch. That list of DeLong’s sounds like Jamie Lee Curtis’s classic rant from A Fish Called Wanda:
1badbaba3
Day-um,did he just call us stupid? Dude sure knows how to sweet-talk.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
That seems to be part of the problem, though — the Occupy “movement” was a loosely-affiliated set of collectives rather than an actual movement, each of which decided to pursue its own agenda. And that was what caused the air to leak out of the movement — no one had a clear idea of what to do with it once they started getting kicked out of their campsites.
srv
You can’t win any war or affect real change without wining the economics.
We seem to remember a lot of marchers for civil rights, but it took years of literal economic warfare in the trenches before it became a common white folk cause.
OWS should have stuck with economics and not diluted the message.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
Wow. Kudos.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: the bit about Apple Computer is particularly funny.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Your first paragraph – that’s exactly my problem with the “professional left.” It’s not a popular movement based around a general theme with broad appeal, like the union movement or civil rights movement or gay rights movement – it’s pushing a comprehensive worldview that covers everything from school reform to the war on terror.
In other words, they want to do the Democratic Party’s job for it. But without any of the building blocs that the party is built on. As if all you had to do to create a political party was stand on a street corner, read your entire political program and wait for everyone to see the light. Not gonna happen, folks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: I would not necessarily equate OWS with the “professional left.” There may be some overlap, but they are different entities.
Mino
I think OWS got Obama re-elected. The frame was out there and when Willard dropped 47%, a big gong went off in everyone’s ears.
Obama got elected on hope the first time, I guess. Frankly, that was pretty used up. Obamacare had been pretty much neutered as a positive. He sure wasn’t using it as a cenrterpiece of his campaign–he was still trying to sell it. I don’t know what he would have used. The economy was in the shitter for way too many people. His refi housing program was turned into a joke by the banks. OWS provided a populist anger at an outsider that he could grab to deflect the anger folks were feeling about what was not getting done–jobs. I know Obama was super organized, but you have to motivate for that to work. OWS allowed him to paint Williard as a vulture capitalist and Williard obliged him by showing everybody that yes, he was, indeed.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
I know. I’ve been trying recently to work out exactly *what* my beef is with the PL, because my views often agree with theirs even if my thoughts on how to get there don’t. Mnemosyne’s description of what went wrong with OWS hit the nail on the head.
ruviana
@Mnemosyne: Just a note, he’s not a furrener, he’s American, but he works at a university in London.
Kay
I met with them several times and we got along fine. I still have an OWS friend, Dolores, we argue from time to time on the phone.
I had two complaints, or things that gave me pause, the first was I don’t like the organization of the meetings. I think it gives the best speakers too loud a voice. There isn’t really any way for people who.might be less inclined to see themselves as “leaders” to influence discussion. That was one of the reasons we have a representative form of government, actually, so those less inclined to speak could be heard.
The second thing that bothered me was how they did not acknowledge the role labor played in providing people in the street. It doesn’t matter that much, I’m sure labor saw it as mutually beneficial, that alliance, or they wouldn’t have been there, but I do think it’s important to recognize the people who actually came out for the big public actions, if not “the occupations.”
Steeplejack
@sb:
FireDogLake has been slower than molasses for about a week for me. TBogg’s pages take forever to load, sometimes to the point where I (reluctantly) give up and cancel.
Just tried to go to this link and had the same experience.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s a basic misunderstanding, though.
They didn’t ask because to “ask” is to imply or admit that you don’t have what you’re asking for, that someone has to “give” it to you.
They don’t accept that whole construct.
Omnes Omnibus
An article about Occupy Madison from a couple of days ago.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
The way it was explained to me was, the First Amendment protects political speech. The SCOTUS said political speech (money) couldn’t be limited. So why is political speech (actual or symbolic) limited?
If your political speech involves walking across a bridge ( just say) why is it okay to limit that to permits or certain hours or certain areas, when we don’t limit political speech that is NOT personal (money to buy ads)?
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: It must be an ad hanging it up. I had no probs getting through.
Suffern ACE
@Kay: yes. But that brings us back to the “ask.” Why not ask that CU be overturned if that’s one if the issues? Is there no connection between the lack of discussion of suffering and remedies and the treatment of money as speech? if you are going to be “first amendment radicals”, you risk your complaints being reduced to “freedom of expression” or the “right to protest”, which aren’t exactly issues that resonate with those who are left behind. Those are class issues that are usually more important to the lower ends of the college educated middle class. “You’re being screwed over politically and economically because we’re not allowed to express ourselves freely” isn’t going to activate many. There’s no relief offered even if someone is suddenly aware for the first time how much they’ve been screwed over.
FlipYrWhig
I was set to like Graeber — the DeLong stuff gives me pause about its merits, though. But in general from this piece he seems to be falling prey to a common lefty tendency, which is wishful thinking about the size of the American left. It’s just not that big. The crazy dumbfuck right is huge. We call them the 27% crazification factor. But the leftier than left segment measured as a proportion of the populace is, what, 5% at most? Sometimes the reason why politicians don’t kiss your butt is because it’s just not worth it to pucker up. No one makes a big to-do over Zoroastrians either.
You can’t skip the step where you actually get people to join your struggle. Just because you’re right, presuming you are, doesn’t mean anyone is going to knock themselves out inviting you into the political process.
FlipYrWhig
@Suffern ACE: I don’t remember OWS having anything to say about the importance of the 1st Amendment anyway. Sure, they _used_ the 1st Amendment, but that wasn’t the cause or the goal, was it? If anything the amendment the left should get behind to be absolutists about is the 14th.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
I think they did eventually “ask” and Citizens was part if it, but I also think the comparison to the Civil Rights movement is WAY off.
Civil rights marchers were demanding to be part of the existing political and social system. They wanted IN.
I don’t think OWS ever wanted in.
The labor piece was amusing to me, because you had this VERY transactional organization (labor) adopting a theme they thought was beneficial (99%) alongside people who weren’t even acknowledging that there’s a need for transactions or alliances.
It didn’t really matter that they’re very far apart, really. Labor wanted to talk about the 99% and OWS needed actual bodies and actual organizing to make a big crowd and draw media.
OWS, though, IMO, wouldn’t admit or acknowledge that’s what was happening, which makes me lose some respect for them, because they DID need that. They needed some organization and leadership to get 25k people to X bridge at X time. Labor provided some of that.
Kay
@Suffern ACE:
I actually agree with you. I don’t think.middle class people think time and place restrictions on political speech are at all burdensome or unfair.
I DO think there was an opening where someone could have opposed Citizens, however.
It polls really poorly. I think people “get” that it’s a bad thing to have unlimited money in politics.
Which is not surprising. We passed campaign finance restrictions for a reason: corruption. We didn’t just decide to limit money in politics. We had to.
We’ll have to again, too.
Gwangung
@FlipYrWhig:
And that, by its nature, means you take on some some f the characteristics of the blocs you oppose, because that’s organization of many to accomplish a shared goal. That means bureaucracy, that means structure.
There’s a deep antipathy to that among many progressive elements, but to deal with the problems of a society of millions of people, you Eire need to invent a whole new way of organizing people (yeah, right), or you make use of pre existing structures that are designed to do exactly that.
Morzer
@Mnemosyne:
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
@FlipYrWhig:
Crooked Timber had a symposium on Graeber’s book and Graeber made a somewhat less than impressive appearance defending his himself.
http://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/
Morzer
Crooked Timber had a symposium on Graeber’s book and Graeber made a somewhat less than impressive appearance defending his work.
http://crookedtimber.org/categ…..t-seminar/
jc
The establishment-system was not and is not about to let the Occupy movement exist. A year ago, the authorities – whose job it is is to protect/defend the Wall St. money players, the corporate advertisers and the media conglomerates – just hadn’t figured out how to neutralize the spontaneous rising up of people in sheer revulsion against the blatant corruption of the banking system and government enablement of that corruption. It took the powers-that-be a few months, but they worked out how to pepper spray, intimidate, infiltrate, surveil and misrepresent the Occupy movement into powerlessness.
The TBTF banks are still corrupt and the government is still enabling that corruption. But they knew the important thing was to snuff Occupy in its cradle, lest people start thinking they really could make a better society.
sb
@Steeplejack: I have not had that problem so I don’t know what to say. He’s posting less than he has in the past–recently asked Jane about shutting it all down and Jane thankfully told him he could feel free to cut back but maybe should post a little while longer. I visit him daily.
El Cid
I hate all those stupid Occupy people, they didn’t manage to get anybody elected, unlike all those Madison protesters who went on to stop the Republicans’ destruction of Wisconsin in their tracks.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Morzer: Thanks.
PJ
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I read Debt. I am not an anthropologist (nor is DeLong), but what Graeber writes in the first 9/10s of the book is extremely thought-provoking. I did not notice any particular factual errors in the vast majority of the book, nor did DeLong. Where Graeber stumbles is in the last chapter, which covers the last 40 years. It appears to have been written in a hurry; unlike the rest of the book, there are many general conclusions which are unsupported by the text. As with too many books these days, there appears to have been no editor, thus some blatant factual errors and textual repetitions that a not-so-careful reader would have caught.
But the rest of the book appears to be sound (or at least has not been publicly challenged by those in the know.) Graeber examines the historical and anthropological relations between money, debt, property and morality. Why is it that we have two historically common and contradictory beliefs that it is wrong to make a profit on lending money, and at the same time, that one should always pay one’s debts, no matter how onerous? Why is it considered right and proper that the vast majority of Americans spend their lives working to pay off debts to a minority who do no productive work at all? Why is labor denigrated and capital worshiped?
In public discourse, Graeber is his own worst enemy. He is smug, conceited, and absolutely certain, and he assumes that right-thinking people will line up behind his notions. (Some of the assumptions behind OWS which I didn’t see as necessarily so and which OWS didn’t deem worthy of discussion included the ideas that a participatory democracy is better than a representative democracy (not borne out by history or referenda), that capitalism is inimical to democracy (OWS refrained from identifying which economic system would be more conducive to democracy), and that violence is permissible and even desirable to effect social change.) He refuses to engage his critics on a substantive basis. He is thin-skinned. He appears to be delusional about what OWS actually accomplished. Nonetheless, the ideas he raises are worthy of discussion, and DeLong (and some commenters here, who appear not to have read the book) wants to dismiss those ideas because he finds fault with the last chapter of the book.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@PJ: Thanks for your comments.
I took DeLong’s criticism a bit differently. I think he said that he was not qualified to judge the first 11 chapters, but he felt that Graeber was vastly overselling his overall “scholarship” since he wouldn’t retract his claims that the book had no errors.
The threads in CrookedTimber’s “David Graeber – Debt Seminar” go into other aspects of the book and the back-and-forth that are more substantive than DeLong’s delight in trolling him.
Your point about separating the scholarship from the poor defense of it is a good one. Lots of excellent scientists and excellent writers are jerks. One does need to be able to separate the person from the case they present. But, when one is shown to be wrong, good scientists and writers learn from those mistakes – they don’t double-down. Graeber seems to be in the double-down camp, and that doesn’t make me willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on things outside his area of expertise (like contemporary banking and contemporary politics).
Cheers,
Scott.
RP
To paraphrase Marge Schott, OWS was good in the beginning, but it went too far. I think it did a great job of raising awareness in the first few weeks, and the 99% thing was brilliant. But after 3-4 they should have declared victory and ended it. By extending it indefinitely, they allowed the focus to shift from the simple and persuasive 99% message to a leftwing kitchen sink approach. And, as noted above, the protest eventually became about itself and its process. Are we going to get evicted? Are the police going to kick us out? Who’s running this thing? Many people who supported them in the beginning lost interest and sympathy.
Learn something from George Costanza: Go out on a high note!
PJ
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Thanks, I will check out the Crooked Timber discussion when I have more time.
I understand your unwillingness to give Graeber the benefit of the doubt, and if I hadn’t started reading the book before listening to him, I don’t know that I would have picked it up. But it started me thinking in a new way about how we order things in our society, and why we give the highest prominence to financial obligations, and how things might be different.