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…