graeber collection of essays

8/3/2019 Graeber Collection of Essays

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/graeber-collection-of-essays 1/92

1

Contents

David GraeberAre You An Anarist? e Answer May Surprise You! 3

Andrej Grubacic & David GraeberAnarism, Or e Revolutionary Movement Of eTwenty-first Century 9

David GraeberHope in Common 18

David Graebere New Anarists 25

A globalization movement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Billionaires and clowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Anarchy and peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Practising direct democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Prefigurative politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

David GraeberRevolution in Reverse 37

Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conflict between

political ontologies of violence and politicalontologies of the imagination) 38

Part I. “Be realistic . . . ” 41

Part II. On violence and imaginative displacement 46

Excursus on transcendent versus immanent imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Part III. On alienation 53

Part IV. On Revolution 56

Revolution in Reverse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

David Graebere Twilight of Vanguardism 64

Why So Few Anarchists in the Academy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66



2

History of the Idea of Vanguardism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Non-alienated Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

David Graebere Sho of Victory 74

I: e Anti-Nuclear Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

II: e Global Justice Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Perspectives (with a brief return to ’30s Spain) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85



David Graeber

Are You An Anarist? e

Answer May Surprise You!



4

Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and

what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you haveheard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponentsof violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order andorganization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everythingup. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simplypeople who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashionwithout having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one thatthe rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions.e first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reason-able and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and theircommunities without needing to be told how. e second is that power corrupts.

Most of all, anarchism is just a maer of having the courage to take the simpleprinciples of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through totheir logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important waysyou are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.

Let’s start by taking a few examples from everyday life.

• If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrainfrom elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?

If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist! e mostbasic anarchist principle is self-organization: the assumption that human beingsdo not need to be threatened with prosecution in order to be able to come to

reasonable understandings with each other, or to treat each other with dignityand respect.

Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If theythink laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that otherpeople are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the sameway about you? Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior whichmakes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments tocontrol our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injusticethose armies, police, prisons and governments make possible. It’s all a viciouscircle. If people are used to being treated like their opinions do not maer, theyare likely to become angry and cynical, even violent — which of course makes

it easy for those in power to say that their opinions do not maer. Once theyunderstand that their opinions really do maer just as much as anyone else’s, theytend to become remarkably understanding. To cut a long story short: anarchistsbelieve that for the most part it is power itself, and the effects of power, that makepeople stupid and irresponsible.



5

• Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization

where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of generalconsent?

If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works onanarchist principles! Another basic anarchist principle is voluntary association.is is simply a maer of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. eonly difference is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a societyin which everything could be organized along these lines, all groups based onthe free consent of their members, and therefore, that all top-down, militarystyles of organization like armies or bureaucracies or large corporations, basedon chains of command, would no longer be necessary. Perhaps you don’t believethat would be possible. Perhaps you do. But every time you reach an agreement

by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangementwith another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by takingdue consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you arebeing an anarchist — even if you don’t realize it.

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose,and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails. is leads to another crucial point: thatwhile people can be reasonable and considerate when they are dealing with equals,human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power overothers. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in someway or another.

• Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’treally care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economicsystem which is stupid and unfair?

If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’ssociety — at least, in its broadest outlines. Anarchists believe that power corruptsand those who spend their entire lives seeking power are the very last people whoshould have it. Anarchists believe that our present economic system is more likelyto reward people for selfish and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent,caring human beings. Most people feel that way. e only difference is that mostpeople don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it, or anyway — and

this is what the faithful servants of the powerful are always most likely to insist— anything that won’t end up making things even worse.But what if that weren’t true?And is there really any reason to believe this? When you can actually test

them, most of the usual predictions about what would happen without states or



6

capitalism turn out to be entirely untrue. For thousands of years people lived

without governments. In many parts of the world people live outside of thecontrol of governments today. ey do not all kill each other. Mostly they just geton about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban,technological society all this would be more complicated: but technology canalso make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begunto think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshaledto fit human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order tomaintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructiveoccupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, publicrelations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific mindsaway from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanizingaway dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom,

and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day?Four? ree? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.

• Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parentstold you)?

“It doesn’t maer who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Cleanup your own mess.” “Do unto others . . . ” “Don’t be mean to people just becausethey’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our childrenwhen we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take ourown injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their

logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.Take the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right. If you really took it

seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and thecriminal justice system. e same goes for sharing: we’re always telling childrenthat they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each other’s needs, to helpeach other; then we go off into the real world where we assume that everyone isnaturally selfish and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, whatwe say to our children is right. Prey much every great worthwhile achievementin human history, every discovery or accomplishment that’s improved our lives,has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend moreof our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not

there will always be competitive people in the world, there’s no reason whysociety has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making peoplecompete over the basic necessities of life. at only serves the interests of peoplein power, who want us to live in fear of one another. at’s why anarchists callfor a society based not only on free association but mutual aid. e fact is that



7

most children grow up believing in anarchist morality, and then gradually have

to realize that the adult world doesn’t really work that way. at’s why so manybecome rebellious, or alienated, even suicidal as adolescents, and finally, resignedand bier as adults; their only solace, oen, being the ability to raise children of their own and pretend to them that the world is fair. But what if we really couldstart to build a world which really was at least founded on principles of justice?Wouldn’t that be the greatest gi to one’s children one could possibly give?

• Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or thatcertain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are notrich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by theirbeers?

If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist aerall. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord withthem. Every time you treat another human with consideration and respect, youare being an anarchist. Every time you work out your differences with others bycoming to reasonable compromise, listening to what everyone has to say ratherthan leing one person decide for everyone else, you are being an anarchist. Everytime you have the opportunity to force someone to do something, but decide toappeal to their sense of reason or justice instead, you are being an anarchist. esame goes for every time you share something with a friend, or decide who isgoing to do the dishes, or do anything at all with an eye to fairness.

Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups

of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is anentirely different maer. And of course there is something to this. Even if youdecentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of smallcommunities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, fromrunning railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just becausesomething is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically.It would just be complicated. In fact, anarchists have all sorts of different ideasand visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain themthough would go far beyond the scope of a lile introductory text like this. Sufficeit to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up withmodels for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and

just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. e last thingwe want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. e truth is we probablycan’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to createa democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what itis, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic



8

principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental

human decency.

http://nymaa.org/surprise_anarist

http://nymaa.org/surprise_anarchist

http://nymaa.org/surprise_anarchist



Andre j Grubacic & David Graeber

Anarism, Or e

Revolutionary Movement Of

e Twenty-first Century

2004



10

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s

becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twentyfirst century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, oreven of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

Everywhere from Eastern Europe to Argentina, from Seale to Bombay, an-archist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions.Oen their exponents do not call themselves “anarchists”. ere are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, directdemocracy . . . Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentral-ization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, therejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the businessof a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s visionat the point of a gun. Above all, anarchism, as an ethics of practice — the idea

of building a new society “within the shell of the old” — has become the basicinspiration of the “movement of movements” (of which the authors are a part),which has from the start been less about seizing state power than about exposing,de-legitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-largerspaces of autonomy and participatory management within it.

ere are some obvious reasons for the appeal of anarchist ideas at the begin-ning of the 21st century: most obviously, the failures and catastrophes resultingfrom so many eff orts to overcome capitalism by seizing control of the apparatusof government in the 20th. Increasing numbers of revolutionaries have begun torecognize that “the revolution” is not going to come as some great apocalypticmoment, the storming of some global equivalent of the Winter Palace, but a very

long process that has been going on for most of human history (even if it has likemost things come to accelerate of late) full of strategies of flight and evasion asmuch as dramatic confrontations, and which will never — indeed, most anarchistsfeel, should never — come to a definitive conclusion.

It’s a lile disconcerting, but it offers one enormous consolation: we do nothave to wait until “aer the revolution” to begin to get a glimpse of what genuinefreedom might be like. As the Crimethinc Collective, the greatest propagandistsof contemporary American anarchism, put it: “Freedom only exists in the momentof revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think.” For an anarchist,in fact, to try to create non-alienated experiences, true democracy, is an ethicalimperative; only by making one’s form of organization in the present at least arough approximation of how a free society would actually operate, how everyone,

someday, should be able to live, can one guarantee that we will not cascade backinto disaster. Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all pleasure to the causecan only produce grim joyless societies.



11

ese changes have been difficult to document because so far anarchist ideas

have received almost no aention in the academy. ere are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists. is lag is somewhat diffi-cult to interpret. In part, no doubt, it’s because Marxism has always had a certainaffinity with the academy which anarchism obviously lacked: Marxism was, aerall, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar to Marxism: anarchism ispresented as the brainchild of certain 19th century thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin,Kropotkin . . . ) that then went on to inspire working-class organizations, becameenmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects . . .

Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’s poorercousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, withpassion and sincerity. Really the analogy is strained. e “founders” of anarchism

did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. esaw its basic principles — mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decision-making — as as old as humanity. e same goes for the rejection of the state andof all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literallymeans “without rulers”) — even the assumption that all these forms are somehowrelated and reinforce each other. None of it was seen as some startling newdoctrine, but a longstanding tendency in the history human thought, and one thatcannot be encompassed by any general theory of ideology. 1

On one level it is a kind of faith: a belief that most forms of irresponsibility thatseem to make power necessary are in fact the effects of power itself. In practicethough it is a constant questioning, an effort to identify every compulsory or

hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves, andif they cannot — which usually turns out to be the case — an effort to limit theirpower and thus widen the scope of human liberty. Just as a Sufi might say thatSufism is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue thatanarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.

1 is doesn’t mean anarchists have to be against theory. It might not need High eory, in thesense familiar today. Certainly it will not need one single, Anarchist High eory. at would becompletely inimical to its spirit. Much beer, we think, something more in the spirit of anarchistdecision-making processes: applied to theory, this would mean accepting the need for a diversityof high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain shared commitments and understandings.Rather than based on the need to prove others’ f undamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find

particular pro jectsonwhich they reinf orceeach other. J ust because theories are incommensurable incertain respects doesnot mean they cannot exist or even reinf orceeach other, any more than the f act

that individuals have unique and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot becomefriends, or lovers, or work on common projects. Even more than High eory, what anarchismneeds is what might be called low theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questionsthat emerge from a transformative project.



12

Schools of Marxism always have founders. Just as Marxism sprang from the

mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Althusserians . . . (Note how the liststarts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French prof essors —who, in turn, can spawn their own sects: Lacanians, Foucauldians . . . )

Schools of anarchism, in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kindof organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anar-cho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists,Individualists, and so on.

Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize them-selves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchistshave spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. ey have never beenmuch interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions thatpreoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class?

(anarchists consider this something for peasants to decide) or what is the natureof the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly demo-cratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops empoweringpeople and starts squelching individual freedom. Is “leadership” necessarily a badthing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action?Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state? When is it okayto throw a brick?

Marxism, then, has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse aboutrevolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse aboutrevolutionary practice. As a result, where Marxism has produced brilliant theoriesof praxis, it’s mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself.

At the moment, there’s something of a rupture between generations of anar-chism: between those whose political formation took place in the 60s and 70s —and who oen still have not shaken the sectarian habits of the last century — orsimply still operate in those terms, and younger activists much more informed,among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-criticalideas. e former organize mainly through highly visible Anarchist Federationslike the IWA, NEFAC or IWW. e laer work most prominently in the networksof the global social movement, networks like Peoples Global Action, which unitesanarchist collectives in Europe and elsewhere with groups ranging from Maoriactivists in New Zealand, fisherfolk in Indonesia, or the Canadian postal workers’union2. e laer — what might be loosely referred to as the “small-a anarchists”,are by now by far the majority. But it is sometimes hard to tell, since so many

of them do not trumpet their affinities very loudly. ere are many, in fact, who

2 Fore more information about the exciting history of Peoples Global Action we suggest the bookWe are Everywhere: e Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-capitalism, edited by Notes from Nowhere,London: Verso 2003. See also the PGA web site: http://www.agp.org

http://www.agp.org/

http://www.agp.org/



13

take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously

that they refuse to refer to themselves as ‘anarchists’ for that very reason3

.But the three essentials that run throughout all manifestations of anarchist

ideology are definitely there — anti-statism, anti-capitalism and prefigurativepolitics (i.e. modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you wantto create. Or, as an anarchist historian of the revolution in Spain has f ormulated

“an effort to think of not only the ideas but the facts of the future itself”. 4 is ispresent in anything from jamming collectives and on to Indy media, all of whichcan be called anarchist in the newer sense. 5 In some countries, there is only avery limited degree of confluence between the two coexisting generations, mostlytaking the form of following what each other is doing — but not much more.

One reason is that the new generation is much more interested in developingnew forms of practice than arguing about the finer points of ideology. e most

dramatic among these have been the development of new forms of decision-making process, the beginnings, at least, of an alternate culture of democracy. efamous North American spokescouncils, where thousands of activists coordinatelarge-scale events by consensus, with no formal leadership structure, are only themost spectacular.

Actually, even calling these forms “new” is a lile bit deceptive. One of the maininspirations for the new generation of anarchists are the Zapatista autonomousmunicipalities of Chiapas, based in Tzeltal or Tojolobal — speaking communitieswho have been using consensus process for thousands of years — only nowadopted by revolutionaries to ensure that women and younger people have anequal voice. In North America, “consensus process” emerged more than anything

else from the feminist movement in the ’70s, as part of a broad backlash againstthe macho style of leadership typical of the ’60s New Le. e idea of consensusitself was borrowed from the Qakers, who again, claim to have been inspired bythe Six Nations and other Native American practices.

Consensus is oen misunderstood. One oen hears critics claim it wouldcause stifling conformity but almost never by anyone who has actually observedconsensus in action, at least, as guided by trained, experienced facilitators (somerecent experiments in Europe, where there is lile tradition of such things, havebeen somewhat crude). In fact, the operating assumption is that no one couldreally convert another completely to their point of view, or probably should.Instead, the point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a commoncourse of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked

and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and

3 Cf. David Graeber, “New Anarchists”, New le Review 13, January — February 20024 See Diego Abad de Santillan, Aer the Revolution, New York: Greenberg Publishers 19375 For more information on global indymedia project go to: http://www.indymedia.org

http://www.indymedia.org/

http://www.indymedia.org/



14

synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it

comes to the final stage, actually “finding consensus”, there are two levels of possible objection: one can “stand aside”, which is to say “I don’t like this andwon’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it”, or “block”, whichhas the eff ect of a veto. One can only block if one f eels a proposal is in violationof the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group. One might say thatthe function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of strikingdown legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegatedwith anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined willof the group (though of course there are also ways of challenging unprincipledblocks).

One could go on at length about the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticatedmethods that have been developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modified

consensus required f or very large groups; of the way consensus itself reinf orcesthe principle of decentralization by ensuring one doesn’t really want to bringproposals before very large groups unless one has to, of means of ensuring genderequity and resolving conflict . . . e point is this is a form of direct democracywhich is very different than the kind we usually associate with the term — or, forthat maer, with the kind of majority-vote system usually employed by Europeanor North American anarchists of earlier generations, or still employed, say, inmiddle class urban Argentine asambleas (though not, significantly, among themore radical piqueteros, the organized unemployed, who tend to operate byconsensus.) With increasing contact between different movements internationally,the inclusion of indigenous groups and movements from Africa, Asia, and Oceania

with radically different traditions, we are seeing the beginnings of a new globalreconception of what “democracy” should even mean, one as far as possible fromthe neoliberal parlaimentarianism currently promoted by the existing powers of the world.

Again, it is difficult to follow this new spirit of synthesis by reading mostexisting anarchist literature, because those who spend most of their energy onquestions of theory, rather than emerging forms of practice, are the most likelyto maintain the old sectarian dichotomizing logic. Modern anarchism is imbuedwith countless contradictions. While small-a anarchists are slowly incorporatingideas and practices learned from indigenous allies into their modes of organizingor alternative communities, the main trace in the wrien literature has been theemergence of a sect of Primitivists, a notoriously contentious crew who call for the

complete abolition of industrial civilization, and, in some cases, even agriculture.6

6 Cf. Jason McQinn, “Why I am not a Primitivist”, Anary: a journal of desire armed , printemps/été2001.Cf. le site anarchiste http://www.anarcymag.org . Cf. J ohn Zerzan, Future Primitive & Other

Essays, Autonomedia, 1994.

http://www.anarchymag.org/

http://www.anarchymag.org/



15

Still, it is only a maer of time before this older, either/or logic begins to give way

to something more resembling the practice of consensus-based groups.What would this new synthesis look like? Some of the outlines can already

be discerned within the movement. It will insist on constantly expanding thefocus of anti-authoritarianism, moving away from class reductionism by tryingto grasp the “totality of domination”, that is, to highlight not only the state butalso gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations andecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not onlythrough the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer andmore diverse concepts.

is approach does not call for an endless expansion of material production,or hold that technologies are neutral, but it also doesn’t decry technology perse. Instead, it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as

appropriate. It not only doesn’t decry institutions per se, or political forms perse, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism andfor a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making,new ways of coordinating, along the same lines as it already has with revitalizedaffinity groups and spokes structures. And it not only doesn’t decry ref orms perse, but struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, aentive to people’simmediate needs and beering their lives in the here-and-now at the same timeas moving toward further gains, and eventually, wholesale transformation. 7

And of course theory will have to catch up with practice. To be fully effective,modern anarchism will have to include at least three levels: activists, people’sorganizations, and researchers. e problem at the moment is that anarchist

intellectuals who want to get past old-fashioned, vanguardist habits — the Marxistsectarian hangover that still haunts so much of the radical intellectual world —are not quite sure what their role is supposed to be. Anarchism needs to becomereflexive. But how? On one level the answer seems obvious. One should notlecture, not dictate, not even necessarily think of oneself as a teacher, but mustlisten, explore and discover. To tease out and make explicit the tacit logic alreadyunderlying new forms of radical practice. To put oneself at the service of activistsby providing information, or exposing the interests of the dominant elite carefullyhidden behind supposedly objective, authoritative discourses, rather than tryingto impose a new version of the same thing. But at the same time most recognizethat intellectual struggle needs to reaffirm its place. Many are beginning to pointout that one of the basic weaknesses of the anarchist movement today is, with

respect to the time of, say, Kropotkin or Reclus, or Herbert Read, exactly the

7 Cf. Andrej Grubacic, Towards an Another Anarism, in: Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar andPeter Waterman, e World Social Forum: Against all Empires, New Delhi: Viveka 2004.



16

neglecting of the symbolic, the visionary, and overlooking of the effectiveness of

theory. How to move from ethnography to utopian visions — ideally, as manyutopian visions as possible? It is hardly a coincidence that some of the greatestrecruiters for anarchism in countries like the United States have been feministscience fiction writers like Starhawk or Ursula K. LeGuin8.

One way this is beginning to happen is as anarchists begin to recuperate theexperience of other social movements with a more developed body of theory,ideas that come from circles close to, indeed inspired by anarchism. Let’s takefor example the idea of participatory economy, which represents an anarchisteconomist vision par excellence and which supplements and rectifies anarchisteconomic tradition. Parecon theorists argue for the existence of not just two,but three major classes in advanced capitalism: not only a proletariat and bour-geoisie but a “coordinator class” whose role is to manage and control the labor

of the working class. is is the class that includes the management hierarchyand the professional consultants and advisors central to their system of control— as lawyers, key engineers and accountants, and so on. ey maintain theirclass position because of their relative monopolization over knowledge, skills,and connections. As a result, economists and others working in this traditionhave been trying to create models of an economy which would systematicallyeliminate divisions between physical and intellectual labor. Now that anarchismhas so clearly become the center of revolutionary creativity, proponents of suchmodels have increasingly been, if not rallying to the flag, exactly, then at least,emphasizing the degree to which their ideas are compatible with an anarchistvision.9

Similar things are starting to happen with the development of anarchist politi-cal visions. Now, this is an area where classical anarchism already had a leg upover classical Marxism, which never developed a theory of political organizationat all. Different schools of anarchism have oen advocated very specific formsof social organization, albeit oen markedly at variance with one another. Still,anarchism as a whole has tended to advance what liberals like to call ‘negativefreedoms,’ ‘freedoms from,’ rather than substantive ‘freedoms to.’ Oen it hascelebrated this very commitment as evidence of anarchism’s pluralism, ideolog-ical tolerance, or creativity. But as a result, there has been a reluctance to gobeyond developing small-scale forms of organization, and a faith that larger, morecomplicated structures can be improvised later in the same spirit.

ere have been exceptions. Pierre Joseph Proudhon tried to come up with a

total vision of how a libertarian society might operate.10 It’s generally considered

8 Cf. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from Global Uprising , San Francisco 2002. See also: http://www

.starhawk.org9 Albert, Michael, Participatory Economics , Verso, 2003. See also: http://www.parecon.org

http://www.starhawk.org/






http://www.parecon.org/

http://www.parecon.org/





17

to have been a failure, but it pointed the way to more developed visions, such

as the North American Social Ecologists’s “libertarian municipalism”. ere’s alively developing, for instance, on how to balance principles of worker’s control— emphasized by the Parecon folk — and direct democracy, emphasized by theSocial Ecologists.11

Still, there are a lot of details still to be filled in: what are the anarchist’s full setsof positive institutional alternatives to contemporary legislatures, courts, police,and diverse executive agencies? How to offer a political vision that encompasseslegislation, implementation, ad judication, and enf orcement and that shows howeach would be effectively accomplished in a non-authoritarian way — not onlyprovide long-term hope, but to inf orm immediate responses to today’s electoral,law-making, law enforcement, and court system, and thus, many strategic choices.Obviously there could never be an anarchist party line on this, the general feeling

among the small-a anarchists at least is that we’ll need many concrete visions. Still,between actual social experiments within expanding self-managing communitiesin places like Chiapas and Argentina, and efforts by anarchist scholar/activists likethe newly formed Planetary Alternatives Network or the Life Aer Capitalismforums to begin locating and compiling successful examples of economic andpolitical forms, the work is beginning12. It is clearly a long-term process. Butthen, the anarchist century has only just begun.

ZNet. January 06, 2004. David Graeber is an assistant professor at Yale University(USA) and a political activist. Andrej Grubacic is a historian and social critic from

Yugoslavia. ey are involved in Planetary Alternatives Network (PAN).Retrieved on May 14th, 2009 from http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/9258

10 Avineri, Shlomo. Te Social and Political Tought of Karl Marx . London: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1968

11 See e Murray Bookin Reader , edited by Janet Biehl, London: Cassell 1997. See also the web siteof the Institute for Social Ecology: http://www.social-ecology.org

12 For more information on Life Aer Capitalism forums go to : http://www.zmag.org/lacsite.htm

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/9258



http://www.social-ecology.org/

http://www.zmag.org/lacsite.htm

http://www.zmag.org/lacsite.htm

http://www.social-ecology.org/




David Graeber

Hope in Common

2008



19

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to

be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is noobvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scaered and incoherent; theglobal justice movement a shadow of its former self. ere is good reason tobelieve that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simplereason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth foreveron a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of

“progressives” — is, oen, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’timagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

e first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normalfor human beings to be unable to imagine what a beer world would even belike?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to

understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirtyyears have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creationand maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, firstand foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root isa veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring thatsocial movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives;that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under anycircumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatusof armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police andmilitary intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety,most of which do not aack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive

climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thoughtof changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seemseven more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintainingany sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance,what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imaginedthe end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army andKGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely theother way around? is is just one extreme example of what has been happeningeverywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns,surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive andreally produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist systemdown with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

e spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’vebeen experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that theUnited States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and



20

the major promoter of bogus securities. is apparatus exists to shred and pulver-

ize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternativefutures. As a result, the only thing le to imagine is more and more money, anddebt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, aer all, but imaginary moneywhose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of theexploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying andselling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalismitself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy le toimagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market — to grab theirown piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the rightto share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed

there appeared to be — at least for the moment — simply nothing le.e effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice

movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. is is what effectivelyhappened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be movingtoward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fiy years, whenever there seems tobe any possibility of peace breakingout, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatorydemocracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political lif e. In the late

‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement.is time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on.

ese movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justicemovement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker inand out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly.None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seale in 1999or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years,the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would beconsidered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw atus — from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act — would have beendefeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’spopulation, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. e fateof the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, bynow, a shaered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to

selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this

was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance soeffectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that



21

those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by

their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Muchof the reason the movement was thrown into conf usion was because none of ushad really considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world,and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democ-racy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge — particu-larly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action — the reactionis the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can havevoting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. emovement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which,prey much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rightsmovement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars

in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.”But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and

obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanentglobal condition. If the roen architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, itwas at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplishedby a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression aer 911, combinedwith conf usion over how to f ollow up its startling initial success, had seemed tohave largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imag-

ination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there.e problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decadesof relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here theterm “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so uerly reviled. e standardline, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means statecontrol of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because historyhas shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus theonly remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situationwhere people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abili-ties, to each according to their needs” — which is the way prey much everyonealways act if they are working together to get something done. If two people arefixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what

do I get for it?”(at is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) is is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. ey apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. is is also the reasonwhole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism



22

in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those

circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries theycan’t afford.) e more creativity is required, the more people have to improviseat a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely tobe: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate newsoware ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when workbecomes standardized and boring — as on production lines — that it becomespossible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. Butthe fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. e question is how to further democratizeit. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism — and,it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to bethinking about a beer one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically

set us all at each others’ throats.All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour

such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism isnot just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendencyto periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from ithave to convince everyone — and most of all the technical people, the doctorsand teachers and surveyors and insurance claims ad justors — that there is reallyno choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like theoriginal form. is despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing thework of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at leastthe vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday

communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a lileless stupid and unfair.is is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-

seeming alternative — even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s —can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.

ose wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bier experi-ence, that we cannot place our faith in states. e last decade has instead seenthe development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of whichhave not even made it onto the radar of the global media. ey range from tinycooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantationsand fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent commu-

nities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squaers,neighborhood alliances, that spring up prey much anywhere that where statepower and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. ey mighthave almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s



23

existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital.

And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity”exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at thepoint where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit togetheron a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuineinsurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shaer the sense of inevitability, that the system must,necessarily, be patched together in the same form — this is why it became such animperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible,to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us tosee everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all alreadycommunists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists whenwe solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when

we make something genuinely new.One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. at’s true. In

this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer onesuggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements havetended to center on struggles over debt — this was true long before capitalismeven existed. ere is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means evercreated to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violentinequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. Whenthe trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt hasshown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where itspirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing.

Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.Perhaps so — but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions:to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us areto be driven from our homes. e power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism — its moral foundation — nowrevealed to be a collection of broken promises — but in doing so, to create a newone. A debt aer all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds withpromises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made usby the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs,we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offeredby capitalism — that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in ourown collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains

is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. e revolution begins by asking: what sortof promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by makingthem, do we begin to make another world?



24

is also appeared in “Adbusters”, #82, volume 17, number

2. March/April 2009. Under the title of “Tactical Briefing”Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 from http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11569

http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11569
























David Graeber

e New Anarists

2002



26

It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between

intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners.Writers who for years have been publishing essays that sound like position papersfor vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion orworse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are everywhere emerging. It’sparticularly scandalous in the case of what’s still, for no particularly good reason,referred to as the ‘anti-globalization’ movement, one that has in a mere two orthree years managed to transform completely the sense of historical possibilitiesfor millions across the planet. is may be the result of sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might be gleaned from such overtly hostile sources as the New Y o r k Ti mes ; then again, most of what’s wrien even in progressive outlets seemslargely to miss the point — or at least, rarely focuses on what participants in themovement really think is most important about it.

As an anthropologist and active participant — particularly in the more radical,direct-action end of the movement — I may be able to clear up some commonpoints of misunderstanding; but the news may not be gratefully received. Muchof the hesitation, I suspect, lies in the reluctance of those who have long f anciedthemselves radicals of some sort to come to terms with the fact that they arereally liberals: interested in expanding individual freedoms and pursuing social

justice, but not in ways that would seriously challenge the existence of reigninginstitutions like capital or state. And even many of those who would like to seerevolutionary change might not feel entirely happy about having to accept thatmost of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism— a tradition that they have hitherto mostly dismissed — and that taking this

movement seriously will necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it.I am writing as an anarchist; but in a sense, counting how many people involvedin the movement actually call themselves ‘anarchists’, and in what contexts, is abit beside the point.1 e very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politicswhich appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physicalintervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative— all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition. Anarchism is theheart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s new and hopefulabout it. In what follows, then, I will try to clear up what seem to be the threemost common misconceptions about the movement — our supposed oppositionto something called ‘globalization’, our supposed ‘violence’, and our supposedlack of a coherent ideology — and then suggest how radical intellectuals might

think about reimagining their own theoretical practice in the light of all of this.

1 ere are some who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously

that they are sometimes reluctant to call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason.



27

A globalization movement?

e phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US media andactivists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a movement againstanything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of marketf undamentalism — or, beer, market Stalinism — that holds there is only onepossible direction for human historical development. e map is held by an eliteof economists and corporate flacks, to whom must be ceded all power once heldby institutions with any shred of democratic accountability; from now on it willbe wielded largely through unelected treaty organizations like the IMF, WTOor NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be possible to say thisstraight out: ‘We are a movement against neoliberalism’. But in the US, language

is always a problem. e corporate media here is probably the most politicallymonolithic on the planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see — the backgroundreality; as a result, the word itself cannot be used. e issues involved can onlybe addressed using propaganda terms like ‘free trade’ or ‘the free market’. SoAmerican activists find themselves in a quandary: if one suggests puing ‘the Nword’ (as it’s oen called) in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells immediatelygo off: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. ere havebeen all sorts of aempts to frame alternative expressions — we’re a ‘global justicemovement’, we’re a movement ‘against corporate globalization’. None are espe-cially elegant or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to hearthe speakers using ‘globalization movement’ and ‘anti-globalization movement’prey much interchangeably.

e phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite apropos. If onetakes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it’s prey clear that not only is the movementitself a product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in it — themost radical ones in particular — are far more supportive of globalization ingeneral than are the IMF or WTO. It was an international network called People’sGlobal Action, for example, that put out the first summons for planet-wide daysof action such as J18 and N30 — the laer the original call for protest against the1999 WTO meetings in Seale. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famousInternational Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which tookplace knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas, in August 1996; andwas itself initiated, as Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around theworld’. People from over 50 countries came streaming into the Zapatista-heldvillage of La Realidad. e vision for an ‘intercontinental network of resistance’was laid out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘We declare that we willmake a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an



28

intercontinental network of resistance against neoliberalism, an intercontinental

network of resistance for humanity’:

Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on them.

A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and resist forhumanity and against neoliberalism.

A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist the death thatPower promises us.2

is, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing structure; it has nocentral head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We arethe network, all of us who resist.’

e following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya Basta! groupsorganized a second encuentro in Spain, where the idea of the network process wastaken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva in February 1998. Fromthe start, it included not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain,Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist f armers’ league in India (the KRRS),associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’union, indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador,the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, a network made up of communitiesfounded by escaped slaves in South and Central America — and any number of others. For a long time, North America was scarcely represented, save for theCanadian Postal Workers’ Union — which acted as PGA’s main communicationshub, until it was largely replaced by the internet — and a Montreal-based anarchistgroup called CLAC.

If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its demands. e three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls for a universally guar-anteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of peopleacross borders, and free access to new technology — which in practice wouldmean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of pro-tectionism). e noborder network — their slogan: ‘No One is Illegal’ — hasorganized week-long campsites, laboratories for creative resistance, on the Pol-ish — German and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activistshave dressed up as border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder andblockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to protest against the

deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of suffocation on Luhansa and

2 Read by Subcomandante Marcos during the closing session of the First Intercontinental Encuentro,3 August 1996: Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, Juana Ponce de León, ed., New York2001.



29

KLM flights). is summer’s camp is planned for Strasbourg, home of the Schen-

gen Information System, a search-and-control database with tens of thousands of terminals across Europe, targeting the movements of migrants, activists, anyonethey like.

More and more, activists have been trying to draw aention to the fact thatthe neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is prey much limited to the movementof capital and commodities, and actually increases barriers against the free flowof people, information and ideas — the size of the US border guard has almosttripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible toeffectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves,there would be no incentive for Nike or e Gap to move production there tobegin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project wouldcollapse. is is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline

of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavilypoliced barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization.

ese connexions — and the broader links between neoliberal policies andmechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism) — have played a moreand more salient role in our analyses as we ourselves have confronted escalatinglevels of state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during theIMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At the FTAA summitin Qebec City last summer, invisible lines that had previously been treatedas if they didn’t exist (at least for white people) were converted overnight into

fortifications against the movement of would-be global citizens, demanding theright to petition their rulers. e three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed through thecenter of Qebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from anycontact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what neoliberalismactually means in human terms. e spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wirecuers and grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to Mohawkwarriors to tear down the wall, became — for that very reason — one of the mostpowerful moments in the movement’s history. 3

ere is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, how-ever. e former usually ended up exporting Western organizational models tothe rest of the world; in this, the flow has if anything been the other way around.Many, perhaps most, of the movement’s signature techniques — including mass

nonviolent civil disobedience itself — were first developed in the global South. Inthe long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it.

3 Helping tear it down was certainly one of the more exhilarating experiences of this author’s life.



30

Billionaires and clowns

In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of mantra —invariably, repeatedly — whenever a large action takes place: ‘violent protests’,

‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid headquarters of violent protesters’, even ‘violent riots’(there are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically invoked when a simple,plain-English description of what took place (people throwing paint-bombs, break-ing windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as they blockaded intersections,cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression that the only trulyviolent parties were the police. e US media is probably the biggest off enderhere — and this despite the f act that, aer two years of increasingly militantdirect action, it is still impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom

a US activist has caused physical in jury. I would say that what really disturbsthe powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of the movement but its relative lack of it; governments simply do not know how to deal with an overtly revolutionarymovement that refuses to fall into familiar paerns of armed resistance.

e effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite self-conscious. Whereonce it seemed that the only alternatives to marching along with signs were eitherGandhian non-violent civil disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like theDirect Action Network, Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche haveall, in their own ways, been trying to map out a completely new territory inbetween. ey’re aempting to invent what many call a ‘new language’ of civildisobedience, combining elements of street theatre, festival and what can onlybe called non-violent warfare — non-violent in the sense adopted by, say, Black

Bloc anarchists, in that it eschews any direct physical harm to human beings. YaBasta! for example is famous for its tute bianche or white-overalls tactics: menand women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armourto inner tubes to rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this mock armypushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting each otheragainst injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings tocartoon characters — misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. eeffect is only increased when lines of costumed figures aack police with balloonsand water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere, dress as fairiesand tickle them with feather dusters.

At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) dressedin high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads of fake moneyinto the cops’ pockets, thanking them for repressing the dissent. None were evenslightly hurt — perhaps police are given aversion therapy against hiing anyonein a tuxedo. e Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high bicycles,



31

rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by aacking each other

(or the billionaires). ey had all the best chants: ‘Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!’, ‘epizza united can never be defeated’, ‘Hey ho, hey ho — ha ha, hee hee!’, as well asmeta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and — everyone’s favourite —

‘ree Word Chant! ree Word Chant!’In Qebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines (with help from

the le caucus of the Society for Creative Anachronism) lobbed so toys at theFTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violentbut very militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts and hoplites (theformer mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the laer from Montreal) atQebec City, and research continues into Roman-style shield walls. Blockadinghas become an art form: if you make a huge web of strands of yarn across anintersection, it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like

flies. e Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can block a four-lanehighway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile blockade. Rebels in Londonlast Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions — Building Hotels on Mayfair forthe homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla Gardening — onlypartly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most militantof the militant — eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front — scrupulouslyavoid doing anything that would cause harm to human beings (or animals, forthat maer). It’s this scrambling of conventional categories that so throws theforces of order and makes them desperate to bring things back to familiar territory(simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of encouraging fascist hooligansto run riot as an excuse to use overwhelming force against everybody else.

One could trace these forms of action back to the stunts and guerrilla theaterof the Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’ in the sixties, the squaer balesin Germany or Italy in the seventies and eighties, even the peasant resistanceto the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it seems to me that here, too, the reallycrucial origins lie with the Zapatistas, and other movements in the global South.In many ways, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents anaempt by people who have always been denied the right to non-violent, civilresistance to seize it; essentially, to call the bluff of neoliberalism and its pretensesto democratization and yielding power to ‘civil society’. It is, as its commanderssay, an army which aspires not to be an army any more (it’s something of anopen secret that, for the last five years at least, they have not even been carryingreal guns). As Marcos explains their conversion from standard tactics of guerrilla

war:

We thought the people would either not pay aention to us, or come togetherwith us to fight. But they did not react in either of these two ways. It turnedout that all these people, who were thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds



32

of thousands, perhaps millions, did not want to rise up with us but . . .

neither did they want us to be annihilated. ey wanted us to dialogue. iscompletely broke our scheme and ended up defining zapatismo, the neo-zapatismo.4

Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes ‘invasions’ of Mexican militarybases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to yell at and tryto shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the Landless Workers’Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying unusedlands entirely non-violently. In either case, it’s prey clear that if the same peoplehad tried the same thing twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot.

Anary and peace

However you choose to trace their origins, these new tactics are perfectly inaccord with the general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is lessabout seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantlingmechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it. ecritical thing, though, is that all this is only possible in a general atmosphere of peace. In fact, it seems to me that these are the ultimate stakes of struggle atthe moment: one that may well determine the overall direction of the twenty-first century. We should remember that during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century, when most Marxist parties were rapidly becoming ref ormist

social democrats, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were the centre of therevolutionary le.5 e situation only really changed with World War I and theRussian Revolution. It was the Bolsheviks’ success, we are usually told, that led tothe decline of anarchism — with the glorious exception of Spain — and catapultedCommunism to the fore. But it seems to me one could look at this another way.

In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that war betweenindustrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures were a constant,but a war between France and England, on French or English soil, seemed asunthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered

4 Interviewed by Yvon LeBot, Subcomandante Marcos: El Sueño Zapatista, Barcelona 1997, pp. 214 —

5; Bill Weinberg, Homage to Chiapas, London 2000, p. 188.5 ‘In 1905 — 1914 the Marxist le had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionarymovement, the main body of Marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary socialdemocracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary le was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer

to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism.’ Eric Hobsbawm,

‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, Revolutionaries, New York 1973, p. 61.



33

an antiquated barbarism. e ‘short twentieth century’ was, by contrast, probably

the most violent in human history, almost entirely preoccupied with either wagingworld wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quicklycame to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political effectiveness becamethe ability to maintain huge mechanized killing machines. is is one thing thatanarchists, by definition, can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising thatMarxist parties — who have been only too good at it — seemed eminently practicaland realistic in comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, andwar between industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchismreappeared just where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as aninternational movement at the very centre of the revolutionary le.

If this is right, it becomes clearer what the ultimate stakes of the current ‘anti-terrorist’ mobilization are. In the short run, things do look very frightening.

Governments who were desperately scrambling for some way to convince thepublic we were terrorists even before September 11 now feel they’ve been givencarteblane ; there is lile doubt that a lot of good people are about to sufferterrible repression. But in the long run, a return to twentieth-century levels of violence is simply impossible. e September 11 aacks were clearly something of a fluke (the first wildly ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually worked);the spread of nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and larger portions of theglobe will be for all practical purposes off-limits to conventional warfare. Andif war is the health of the state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing canonly be improving.

Practising direct democracy

A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the progressivepress is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks any central theme or coherentideology. (is seems to be the le equivalent of the corporate media’s claims thatwe are a bunch of dumb kids touting a bundle of completely unrelated causes —free Mumia, dump the debt, save the old-growth forests.) Another line of aackis that the movement is plagued by a generic opposition to all forms of structureor organization. It’s distressing that, two years aer Seale, I should have towrite this, but someone obviously should: in North America especially, this is amovement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is

about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. osenew forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enactinghorizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corpora-tions; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus



34

democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it

aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of radicalism,it has first organized itself in the political sphere — mainly because this was aterritory that the powers that be (who have shied all their heavy artillery intothe economic) have largely abandoned.

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been puing enormouscreative energy into reinventing their groups’ own internal processes, to createviable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like.In this we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve noted, on examples from outside theWestern tradition, which almost invariably rely on some process of consensusfinding, rather than majority vote. e result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments — spokescouncils, affinity groups, facilitation tools,break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so on — all aimed at

creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below andaain maximum effective solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, creatingleadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have notfreely agreed to do.

e basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try to comeup with proposals acceptable to everyone — or at least, not highly objectionableto anyone: first state the proposal, then ask for ‘concerns’ and try to address them.Oen, at this point, people in the group will propose ‘friendly amendments’ to addto the original proposal, or otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed.en, finally, when you call for consensus, you ask if anyone wishes to ‘block’or ‘stand aside’. Standing aside is just saying, ‘I would not myself be willing to

take part in this action, but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it’. Blockingis a way of saying ‘I think this violates the fundamental principles or purposesof being in the group’. It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposalcompletely by blocking it — although there are ways to challenge whether a blockis genuinely principled.

ere are different sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for example, are largeassemblies that coordinate between smaller ‘affinity groups’. ey are most oenheld before, and during, large-scale direct actions like Seale or Qebec. Eachaffinity group (which might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a ‘spoke’, who isempowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes can take part inthe actual process of finding consensus at the council, but before major decisionsthey break out into affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on

what position they want their spoke to take (not as unwieldy as it might sound).Break-outs, on the other hand, are when a large meeting temporarily splits up intosmaller ones that will focus on making decisions or generating proposals, whichcan then be presented for approval before the whole group when it reassembles.



35

Facilitation tools are used to resolve problems or move things along if they seem

to be bogging down. You can ask for a brainstorming session, in which peopleare only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other people’s; or for a non-binding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to see how everyone feelsabout a proposal, rather than to make a decision. A fishbowl would only be usedif there is a profound difference of opinion: you can take two representativesfor each side — one man and one woman — and have the four of them sit in themiddle, everyone else surrounding them silently, and see if the four can’t work outa synthesis or compromise together, which they can then present as a proposalto the whole group.

Prefigurative politicsis is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of democracy

among people who have lile experience of such things is necessarily a painfuland uneven business, f ull of all sorts of stumblings and f alse starts, but — as almostany police chief who has faced us on the streets can aest — direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find anyone who hasfully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has notbeen profoundly transformed as a result. It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world ispossible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the bestway to start thinking about these organizations — the Direct Action Network,for example — is to see them as the diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist

groups; or, for that maer, of the sectarian Anarchist groups.6

Where the demo-cratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correcttheoretical analysis, demands ideological unif ormity and tends to juxtapose thevision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organizationin the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always f ocuses on particularcourses of action; it’s taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone elseentirely to their point of view. e moo might be, ‘If you are willing to act like ananarchist now, your long-term vision is prey much your own business’. Whichseems only sensible: none of us know how f ar these principles can actually takeus, or what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. eirideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their

6 What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North East Federation of Anarchist

Communists — whose members must accept the Platf orm of the Anarchist Communists set downin 1926 by Nestor Makhno — do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists are the real locus of

historical dynamism right now.



36

practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this

way.Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action networks

raise about alienation, and its broader implications for political practice. Forexample: why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency forrevolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sym-pathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involvedin some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link betweenthe actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into be-ing, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives —particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated formsof creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tendto rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most op-

pressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen whenthese two categories most broadly overlap.

is would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be peasants andcrasmen — or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants and crasmen— who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and not those inured to genera-tions of wage labour. It would also help explain the extraordinary importanceof indigenous people’s struggles in the new movement: such people tend to besimultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth. Nowthat new communication technologies have made it possible to include them inglobal revolutionary alliances, as well as local resistance and revolt, it is well-nighinevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational role.

Previous texts in this series have been Naomi Klein, ‘Reclaiming the Commons’ ( N LR 9 ), Subcomandant e Mar cos , ‘e Pun Car d and t he Hou r g l ass ’ ( N LR 9 ),John Sellers, ‘Raising a Ruus’ (NLR 10) and José Bové, ‘A Farmers’ Interna- tional?’ (NLR 12).

Originally published in “New Le Review”, 13 — January-February 2002.Retrieved on May 14 th, 2009 from http://www.newlereview.org/A2368

http://www.newleftreview.org/A2368






David Graeber

Revolution in Reverse

2007



Revolution in Reverse (or, on

the conflict between political

ontologies of violence and political

ontologies of the imagination)



39

“All power to the imagination.” “Be realistic, demand the impossible . . . ” Any-

one involved in radical politics has heard these expressions a thousand times.Usually they charm and excite the first time one encounters them, then eventuallybecome so familiar as to seem hackneyed, or just disappear into the ambientbackground noise of radical life. Rarely if ever are they the object of serioustheoretical reflection.

It seems to me that at the current historical juncture, some such reflectionwouldn’t be a bad idea. We are at a moment, aer all, when received definitionshave been thrown into disarray. It is quite possible that we are heading fora revolutionary moment, or perhaps a series of them, but we no longer haveany clear idea of what that might even mean. is essay then is the product of a sustained effort to try to rethink terms like realism, imagination, alienation,bureaucracy, revolution itself. It’s born of some six years of involvement with

the alternative globalization movement and particularly with its most radical,anarchist, direct action-oriented elements. Consider it a kind of preliminarytheoretical report. I want to ask, among other things, why is it these terms,which for most of us seem rather to evoke long-since forgoen debates of the1960s, still resonate in those circles? Why is it that the idea of any radical socialtransformation so oen seems “unrealistic”? What does revolution mean once oneno longer expects a single, cataclysmic break with past structures of oppression?ese seem disparate questions but it seems to me the answers are related. If inmany cases I brush past existing bodies of theory, this is quite intentional: I amtrying to see if it is possible to build on the experience of these movements andthe theoretical currents that inform them to begin to create something new.

Here is the gist of my argument:

1. Right and Le political perspectives are f ounded, above all, on diff erent as-sumptions about the ultimate realities of power. e Right is rooted in apolitical ontology of violence, where being realistic means taking into accountthe forces of destruction. In reply the Le has consistently proposed variationson a political ontology of the imagination, in which the forces that are seenas the ultimate realities that need to be taken into account are those forces (of production, creativity . . . ) that bring things into being.

2. e situation is complicated by the fact that systematic inequalities backedby force — structural violence — always produces skewed and fractured struc-

tures of the imagination. It is the experience of living inside these fracturedstructures that we refer to as “alienation”.

3. Our customary conception of revolution is insurrectionary: the idea is tobrush aside existing realities of violence by overthrowing the state, then, to



40

unleash the powers of popular imagination and creativity to overcome the

structures that create alienation. Over the twentieth century it eventuallybecame apparent that the real problem was how to institutionalize such cre-ativity without creating new, oen even more violent and alienating structures.As a result, the insurrectionary model no longer seems completely viable, butit’s not clear what will replace it.

4. One response has been the revival of the tradition of direct action. In practice,mass actions reverse the ordinary insurrectionary sequence. Rather than adramatic confrontation with state power leading first to an outpouring of popular festivity, the creation of new democratic institutions, and eventuallythe reinvention of everyday life, in organizing mass mobilizations, activistsdrawn principally from subcultural groups create new, directly democratic

institutions to organize “festivals of resistance” that ultimately lead to con-frontations with the state. is is just one aspect of a more general movementof reformulation that seems to me to be inspired in part by the influence of anarchism, but in even larger part, by feminism — a movement that ultimatelyaims to recreate the effects of those insurrectionary moments on an ongoingbasis

Let me take these one by one.



Part I

“Be realistic . . . ”



42

From early 2000 to late 2002 I was working with the Direct Action Network in

New York — the principal group responsible for organizing mass actions as partof the global justice movement in that city at that time. Actually, DAN was not,technically, a group, but a decentralized network, operating on principles of directdemocracy according to an elaborate, but strikingly effective, form of consensusprocess. It played a central role in ongoing efforts to create new organizationalforms that I wrote about in an earlier essay in these pages. DAN existed ina purely political space; it had no concrete resources, not even a significanttreasury, to administer. en one day someone gave DAN a car. It caused aminor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible fora decentralized network to own a car. Cars can be owned by individuals, orthey can be owned by corporations, which are fictive individuals. ey cannotbe owned by networks. Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a

nonprofit corporation (which would have required a complete reorganization andabandoning most of our egalitarian principles) the only expedient was to finda volunteer willing to claim to be the owner for legal purposes. But then thatperson was expected to pay all outstanding fines, insurance fees, provide wrienpermission to allow others to drive out of state, and, of course, only he couldretrieve the car if it were impounded. Before long the DAN car had become sucha perennial problem that we simply abandoned it.

It struck me there was something important here. Why is it that projects likeDAN’s — projects of democratizing society — are so oen perceived as idle dreamsthat melt away as soon as they encounter anything that seems like hard materialreality? In our case it had nothing to do with inefficiency: police chiefs across

the country had called us the best organized force they’d ever had to deal with. Itseems to me the reality effect (if one may call it that) comes rather from the fact thatradical projects tend to founder, or at least become endlessly difficult, the momentthey enter into the world of large, heavy objects: buildings, cars, tractors, boats,industrial machinery. is is in turn is not because these objects are somehowintrinsically difficult to administer democratically; it’s because, like the DAN car,they are surrounded by endless government regulation, and effectively impossibleto hide from the government’s armed representatives. In America, I’ve seenendless examples. A squat is legalized aer a long struggle; suddenly, buildinginspectors arrive to announce it will take ten thousand dollars worth of repairs tobring it up to code; organizers are forced spend the next several years organizingbake sales and soliciting contributions. is means seing up bank accounts, and

legal regulations then specify how a group receiving funds, or dealing with thegovernment, must be organized (again, not as an egalitarian collective). All theseregulations are enforced by violence. True, in ordinary life, police rarely come inswinging billy clubs to enforce building code regulations, but, as anarchists oen



43

discover, if one simply pretends they don’t exist, that will, eventually, happen.

e rarity with which the nightsticks actually appear just helps to make theviolence harder to see. is in turn makes the effects of all these regulations —regulations that almost always assume that normal relations between individualsare mediated by the market, and that normal groups are organized hierarchically— seem to emanate not from the government’s monopoly of the use of force, butfrom the largeness, solidity, and heaviness of the objects themselves.

When one is asked to be “realistic” then, the reality one is normally beingasked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts; neither is it really somesupposed ugly truth about human nature. Normally it’s a recognition of theeffects of the systematic threat of violence. It even threads our language. Why,for example, is a building referred to as “real property”, or “real estate”? e “real”in this usage is not derived from Latin res, or “thing”: it’s from the Spanish real,

meaning, “royal”, “belonging to the king.” All land within a sovereign territoryultimately belongs to the sovereign; legally this is still the case. is is why thestate has the right to impose its regulations. But sovereignty ultimately comesdown to a monopoly of what is euphemistically referred to as “force” — that is,violence. Just as Giorgio Agamben famously argued that from the perspectiveof sovereign power, something is alive because you can kill it, so property is

“real” because the state can seize or destroy it. In the same way, when one takesa “realist” position in International Relations, one assumes that states will usewhatever capacities they have at their disposal, including force of arms, to pursuetheir national interests. What “reality” is one recognizing? Certainly not materialreality. e idea that nations are human-like entities with purposes and interests

is an entirely metaphysical notion. e King of France had purposes and interests.“France” does not. What makes it seem “realistic” to suggest it does is simply thatthose in control of nation-states have the power to raise armies, launch invasions,bomb cities, and can otherwise threaten the use of organized violence in the nameof what they describe as their “national interests” — and that it would be f oolishto ignore that possibility. National interests are real because they can kill you.

e critical term here is “force”, as in “the state’s monopoly of the use of coercive force.” Whenever we hear this word invoked, we find ourselves in thepresence of a political ontology in which the power to destroy, to cause otherspain or to threaten to break, damage, or mangle their bodies (or just lock themin a tiny room for the rest of their lives) is treated as the social equivalent of thevery energy that drives the cosmos. Contemplate, for instance, the metaphors

and displacements that make it possible to construct the following two sentences:Scientists investigate the nature of physical laws so as to understand the forces

that govern the universe.



44

Police are experts in the scientific application of physical force in order to

enforce the laws that govern society.is is to my mind the essence of Right-wing thought: a political ontology

that through such subtle means, allows violence to define the very parameters of social existence and common sense.

e Le, on the other hand, has always been founded on a different set of as-sumptions about what is ultimately real, about the very grounds of political being.Obviously Leists don’t deny the reality of violence. Many Leist theorists havethought about it quite a lot. But they don’t tend to give it the same foundationalstatus. Instead, I would argue that Leist thought is founded on what I will calla “political ontology of the imagination” — though I could as easily have calledit an ontology of creativity or making or invention. Nowadays, most of us tendto identify it with the legacy of Marx, with his emphasis on social revolution

and forces of material production. But really Marx’s terms emerged from muchwider arguments about value, labor, and creativity current in radical circles of his day, whether in the worker’s movement, or for that maer various strains of Romanticism. Marx himself, for all his contempt for the utopian socialists of hisday, never ceased to insist that what makes human beings different from animalsis that architects, unlike bees, first raise their structures in the imagination. Itwas the unique property of humans, for Marx, that they first envision things,then bring them into being. It was this process he referred to as “production”.Around the same time, utopian socialists like St. Simon were arguing that artistsneeded to become the avant garde or “vanguard”, as he put it, of a new social order,providing the grand visions that industry now had the power to bring into being.

What at the time might have seemed the fantasy of an eccentric pamphleteer soonbecame the charter for a sporadic, uncertain, but apparently permanent alliancethat endures to this day. If artistic avant gardes and social revolutionaries have felta peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languagesand ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained commied tothe idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something thatwe make, and, could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like“all power to the imagination” expresses the very quintessence of the Le.

To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production of course the Righttends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historicalimportance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarianinvasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not

there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring thatle-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than thosethat have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.



45

Obviously, this dichotomy is very much a simplification. One could level end-

less qualifications. e bourgeoisie of Marx’s time for instance had an extremelyproductivist philosophy — one reason Marx could see it as a revolutionary force.Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and 20th century Marxistregimes oen embraced essentially right-wing theories of power, and paid lilemore than lip service to the determinant nature of production. Nonetheless, Ithink these are useful terms because even if one treats “imagination” and “vio-lence” not as the single hidden truth of the world but as immanent principles, asequal constituents of any social reality, they can reveal a great deal one would notbe able to see otherwise. For one thing, everywhere, imagination and violenceseem to interact in predictable, and quite significant, ways.

Let me start with a few words on violence, providing a very schematic overviewof arguments that I have developed in somewhat greater detail elsewhere:



Part II

On violence and

imaginative displacement



47

I’m an anthropologist by profession and anthropological discussions of violence

are almost always prefaced by statements that violent acts are acts of communica-tion, that they are inherently meaningful, and that this is what is truly importantabout them. In other words, violence operates largely through the imagination.

All of this is true. I would hardly want to discount the importance of fearand terror in human life. Acts of violence can be — indeed oen are — acts of communication. But the same could be said of any other form of human action,too. It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhapsthe only form of human action that holds out the possibility of operating on otherswithout being communicative. Or let me put this more precisely. Violence maywell be the only way in which it is possible for one human being to have relativelypredictable effects on the actions of another without understanding anythingabout them. Prey much any other way one might try to influence another’s

actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who theythink you are, what they might want out of the situation, and a host of similarconsiderations. Hit them over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant.It’s true that the effects one can have by hiing them are quite limited. But theyare real enough, and the fact remains that any alternative form of action cannot,without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any sortof effect at all. What’s more, even aempts to influence another by the threatof violence, which clearly does require some level of shared understandings (atthe very least, the other party must understand they are being threatened, andwhat is being demanded of them), requires much less than any alternative. Mosthuman relations — particularly ongoing ones, such as those between longstanding

friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely complicated, endlessly densewith experience and meaning. ey require a continual and oen subtle work of interpretation; everyone involved must put constant energy into imagining theother’s point of view. reatening others with physical harm on the other handallows the possibility of cuing through all this. It makes possible relations of afar more schematic kind: i.e., ‘cross this line and I will shoot you and otherwiseI really don’t care who you are or what you want’. is is, for instance, whyviolence is so oen the preferred weapon of the stupid: one could almost say,the trump card of the stupid, since it is the form of stupidity to which it is mostdifficult to come up with any intelligent response.

ere is, however, one crucial qualification to be made. e more evenlymatched two parties are in their capacity for violence, the less all this tends to

be true. If one is involved in a relatively equal contest of violence, it is indeeda very good idea to understand as much as possible about them. A militarycommander will obviously try to get inside his opponent’s mind. It’s really onlywhen one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical



48

harm this is no longer the case. Of course, when one side has an overwhelming

advantage, they rarely have to actually resort to actually shooting, beating, orblowing people up. e threat will usually suffice. is has a curious effect. Itmeans that the most characteristic quality of violence — its capacity to imposevery simple social relations that involve lile or no imaginative identification —becomes most salient in situations where actual, physical violence is likely to beleast present.

We can speak here (as many do) of structural violence: that systematic in-equalities that are ultimately backed up by the threat of force can be seen as aform of violence in themselves. Systems of structural violence invariably seem toproduce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification. It’s not thatinterpretive work isn’t carried out. Society, in any recognizable form, could notoperate without it. Rather, the overwhelming burden of the labor is relegated to

its victims.Let me start with the household. A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies,

in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. e jokes of course were always told by men. Women’s logic was always being treatedas alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand,that women had much trouble understanding the men. at’s because the womenhad no choice but to understand men: this was the heyday of the Americanpatriarchal family, and women with no access to their own income or resourceshad lile choice but to spend a fair amount of time and energy understandingwhat the relevant men thought was going on. Actually, this sort of rhetoricabout the mysteries of womankind is a perennial feature of patriarchal families:

structures that can, indeed, be considered forms of structural violence insofaras the power of men over women within them is, as generations of feministshave pointed out, ultimately backed up, if oen in indirect and hidden ways,by all sorts of coercive force. But generations of female novelists — VirginiaWoolf comes immediately to mind — have also documented the other side of this:the constant work women perform in managing, maintaining, and adjusting theegos of apparently oblivious men — involving an endless work of imaginativeidentification and what I’ve called interpretive labor. is carries over on everylevel. Women are always imagining what things look like from a male point of view. Men almost never do the same for women. is is presumably the reasonwhy in so many societies with a pronounced gendered division of labor (that is,most societies), women know a great deal about men do every day, and men have

next to no idea about women’s occupations. Faced with the prospect of eventrying to imagine a women’s perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, onepopular trick among High School creative writing teachers is to assign studentsto write an essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what



49

it would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. e results

are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write long and detailedessays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal of time thinking aboutsuch questions; roughly half the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Almostinvariably they express profound resentment about having to imagine what itmight be like to be a woman.

It should be easy enough to multiply parallel examples. When somethinggoes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, heis unlikely to pay much aention to a collection of workers all scrambling toexplain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and

just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the newguy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those whodo not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring

out what actually happened. What occurs on the most pey or intimate levelalso occurs on the level of society as a whole. Curiously enough it was AdamSmith, in his Teory of Moral Sentiments (wrien in 1761), who first made noticeof what’s nowadays labeled “compassion fatigue”. Human beings, he observed,appear to have a natural tendency not only to imaginatively identify with theirfellows, but also, as a result, to actually feel one another’s joys and pains. epoor, however, are just too consistently miserable, and as a result, observers, fortheir own self-protection, tend to simply blot them out. e result is that whilethose on the boom spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, andactually caring about, those on the top, but it almost never happens the other wayaround. at is my real point. Whatever the mechanisms, something like this

always seems to occur: whether one is dealing with masters and servants, menand women, bosses and workers, rich and poor. Structural inequality — structuralviolence — invariably creates the same lopsided structures of the imagination. Andsince, as Smith correctly observed, imagination tends to bring with it sympathy,the victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries, or at least,to care far more about them than those beneficiaries care about them. In fact,this might well be (aside from the violence itself) the single most powerful forcepreserving such relations.

It is easy to see bureaucratic procedures as an extension of this phenomenon.One might say they are not so much themselves forms of stupidity and ignoranceas modes of organizing situations already marked by stupidity and ignoranceowing the existence of structural violence. True, bureaucratic procedure operates

as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the sub-tleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-establishedmechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a maer of forms, rules, statistics,or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the



50

effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap

decision as to what went wrong: it’s a maer of applying very simple schemas tocomplex, ambiguous situations. e same goes, in fact, for police, who are aerall simply low-level administrators with guns. Police sociologists have long sincedemonstrated that only a tiny fraction of police work has anything to do withcrime. Police are, rather, the immediate representatives of the state’s monopolyof violence, those who step in to actively simplify situations (for example, weresomeone to actively challenge some bureaucratic definition). Simultaneously,police they have become, in contemporary industrial democracies, America inparticular, the almost obsessive objects of popular imaginative identification. Inf act, the public is constantly invited, in a thousand TV shows and movies, to seethe world from a police officer’s perspective, even if it is always the perspectiveof imaginary police officers, the kind who actually do spend their time fighting

crime rather than concerning themselves with broken tail lights or open containerlaws.

Excursus on transcendent versus immanent

imagination

To imaginatively identify with an imaginary policeman is of course not thesame as to imaginatively identify with a real one (most Americans in fact avoid areal policeman like the plague). is is a critical distinction, however much anincreasingly digitalized world makes it easy to confuse the two.

It is here helpful to consider the history of the word “imagination”. e commonAncient and Medieval conception, what we call “the imagination” was consideredthe zone of passage between reality and reason. Perceptions from the materialworld had to pass through the imagination, becoming emotionally charged inthe process and mixing with all sorts of phantasms, before the rational mindcould grasp their significance. Intentions and desires moved in the oppositedirection. It’s only aer Descartes, really, that the word “imaginary” came tomean, specifically, anything that is not real: imaginary creatures, imaginaryplaces (Middle Earth, Narnia, planets in faraway Galaxies, the Kingdom of Prester

John. . . ), imaginary friends. By this definition of course a “political ontology of the imagination” would actually a contradiction in terms. e imagination cannot

be the basis of reality. It is by definition that which we can think, but has noreality.I’ll refer to this laer as “the transcendent notion of the imagination” since it

seems to take as its model novels or other works of fiction that create imaginaryworlds that presumably, remain the same no maer how many times one reads



51

them. Imaginary creatures — elves or unicorns or TV cops — are not affected by

the real world. ey cannot be, since they don’t exist. In contrast, the kind of imagination I have been referring to here is much closer to the old, immanent,conception. Critically, it is in no sense static and free-floating, but entirely caughtup in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world, and assuch, always changing and adapting. is is equally true whether one is crainga knife or a piece of jewelry, or trying to make sure one doesn’t hurt a friend’sfeelings.

One might get a sense of how important this distinction really is by returningto the ‘68 slogan about giving power to the imagination. If one takes this to referto the transcendent imagination — preformed utopian schemes, for example —doing so can, we know, have disastrous effects. Historically, it has oen meantimposing them by violence. On the other hand, in a revolutionary situation, one

might by the same token argue that not giving full power to the other, immanent,sort of imagination would be equally disastrous.

e relation of violence and imagination is made much more complicatedbecause while in every case, structural inequalities tend to split society into thosedoing imaginative labor, and those who do not, they do so in very different ways.Capitalism here is a dramatic case in point. Political economy tends to see workin capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for whichthe paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor — housework, childcare —relegated mainly to women. e first is seen primarily as a maer of creatingand maintaining physical objects. e second is probably best seen as a maer of creating and maintaining people and social relations. e distinction is obviously

a bit of a caricature: there has never been a society, not even Engels’ Manchesteror Victor Hugo’s Paris, where most men were factory workers or most womenworked exclusively as housewives. Still, it is a useful starting point, since itreveals an interesting divergence. In the sphere of industry, it is generally thoseon top that relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks (i.e., that designthe products and organize production), whereas when inequalities emerge in thesphere of social production, it’s those on the boom who end up expected to dothe major imaginative work (for example, the bulk of what I’ve called the ‘laborof interpretation’ that keeps life running).

No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally differentsorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example,or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my

mind it would probably be beer to recognize it as the primary form of labor.Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labordirected at human beings that should be considered fundamental. e things wecare most about — our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions — are always other



52

people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that

the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspectsof capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around,and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.



Part III

On alienation



54

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real

life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a lile bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until thatdeath which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.

— Raoul Vaneigem, Te Revolution of Everyday Life

Creativity and desire — what we oen reduce, in political economy terms, to“production” and “consumption” — are essentially vehicles of the imagination.Structures of inequality and domination, structural violence if you will, tend toskew the imagination. ey might create situations where laborers are relegatedto mind-numbing, boring, mechanical jobs and only a small elite is allowed toindulge in imaginative labor, leading to the feeling, on the part of the workers, that

they are alienated from their own labor, that their very deeds belong to someoneelse. It might also create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities orCEOs prance about oblivious to almost everything around them while their wives,servants, staff, and handlers spend all their time engaged in the imaginative workof maintaining them in their fantasies. Most situations of inequality, I suspect,combine elements of both.

e subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures of imagina-tion is what we are referring to when we talk about “alienation”.

It strikes me that if nothing else, this perspective would help explain the lin-gering appeal of theories of alienation in revolutionary circles, even when theacademic Le has long since abandoned them. If one enters an anarchist infoshop,almost anywhere in the world, the French authors one is likely to encounter will

still largely consist of Situationists like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, thegreat theorists of alienation (alongside theorists of the imagination like CorneliusCastoriadis). For a long time I was genuinely puzzled as to how so many suburbanAmerican teenagers could be entranced, for instance, by Raoul Vaneigem’s Te Re v o l u ti on o f E v e ry day Lif e — a book, aer all, wrien in Paris almost forty yearsago. In the end I decided it must be because Vaneigem’s book was, in its own way,the highest theoretical expression of the feelings of rage, boredom, and revulsionthat almost any adolescent at some point feels when confronted with the middleclass existence. e sense of a life broken into fragments, with no ultimate mean-ing or integrity; of a cynical market system selling its victims commodities andspectacles that themselves represent tiny f alse images of the very sense of totalityand pleasure and community the market has in fact destroyed; the tendency toturn every relation into a f orm of exchange, to sacrifice lif e f or “survival”, pleasuref or renunciation, creativity f or hollow homogenous units of power or “dead time”— on some level all this clearly still rings true.



55

e question though is why. Contemporary social theory offers lile explana-

tion. Poststructuralism, which emerged in the immediate aermath of ‘68, waslargely born of the rejection of this sort of analysis. It is now simple commonsense among social theorists that one cannot define a society as “unnatural” un-less one assumes that there is some natural way for society to be, “inhuman”unless there is some authentic human essence, that one cannot say that the self is

“fragmented” unless it would be possible to have a unified self, and so on. Sincethese positions are untenable — since there is no natural condition for society, noauthentic human essence, no unitary self — theories of alienation have no basis.Taken purely as arguments, these seem difficult to refute. But how then do weaccount for the experience?

If one really thinks about it, though, the argument is much less powerful thanit seems. Aer all, what are academic theorists saying? ey are saying that the

idea of a unitary subject, a whole society, a natural order, are unreal. at all thesethings are simply figments of our imagination. True enough. But then: what elsecould they be? And why is that a problem? If imagination is indeed a constituentelement in the process of how we produce our social and material realities, thereis every reason to believe that it proceeds through producing images of totality.at’s simply how the imagination works. One must be able to imagine oneself and others as integrated subjects in order to be able to produce beings that arein fact endlessly multiple, imagine some sort of coherent, bounded “society” inorder to produce that chaotic open-ended network of social relations that actuallyexists, and so forth. Normally, people seem able to live with the disparity. equestion, it seems to me, is why in certain times and places, the recognition of it

instead tends to spark rage and despair, feelings that the social world is a hollowtravesty or malicious joke. is, I would argue, is the result of that warping andshaering of the imagination that is the inevitable effect of structural violence.



Part IV

On Revolution



57

e Situationists, like many ‘60s radicals, wished to strike back through a

strategy of direct action: creating “situations” by creative acts of subversion thatundermined the logic of the Spectacle and allowed actors to at least momentarilyrecapture their imaginative powers. At the same time, they also felt all thiswas inevitably leading up to a great insurrectionary moment — ”the” revolution,properly speaking. If the events of May ‘68 showed anything, it was that if onedoes not aim to seize state power, there can be no such fundamental, one-timebreak. e main difference between the Situationists and their most avid currentreaders is that the millenarian element has almost completely fallen away. No onethinks the skies are about to open any time soon. ere is a consolation though:that as a result, as close as one can come to experiencing genuine revolutionaryfreedom, one can begin to experience it immediately. Consider the followingstatement from the Crimethinc collective, probably the most inspiring young

anarchist propagandists operating in the Situationist tradition today:“We must make our freedom by cuing holes in the fabric of this reality, by

forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Puing yourself in newsituations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisionsunencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up toyou to create these situations

Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are notas rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly andeverywhere — and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not.”

What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the defiantinsistence on acting as if one is already free? e obvious question is how it

can contribute to an overall strategy, one that should lead to a cumulative move-ment towards a world without states and capitalism. Here, no one is completelysure. Most assume the process could only be one of endless improvisation. Insur-rectionary moments there will certainly be. Likely as not, quite a few of them.But they will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifac-eted revolutionary process whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be fullyanticipated.

In retrospect, what seems strikingly naïve is the old assumption that a singleuprising or successful civil war could, as it were, neutralize the entire apparatusof structural violence, at least within a particular national territory: that withinthat territory, right-wing realities could be simply swept away, to leave the fieldopen for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity. But if so, the

truly puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that appearedto be exactly what was happening. It seems to me that if we are to have anychance of grasping the new, emerging conception of revolution, we need to beginby thinking again about the quality of these insurrectionary moments.



58

One of the most remarkable things about such moments is how they can seem

to burst out of nowhere — and then, oen, dissolve away as quickly. How is it thatthe same “public” that two months before say, the Paris Commune, or SpanishCivil War, had voted in a fairly moderate social democratic regime will suddenlyfind itself willing to risk their lives for the same ultra-radicals who received afraction of the actual vote? Or, to return to May ‘68, how is it that the samepublic that seemed to support or at least feel strongly sympathetic toward thestudent/worker uprising could almost immediately aerwards return to the pollsand elect a right-wing government? e most common historical explanations— that the revolutionaries didn’t really represent the public or its interests, butthat elements of the public perhaps became caught up in some sort of irrationaleffervescence — seem obviously inadequate. First of all, they assume that ‘thepublic’ is an entity with opinions, interests, and allegiances that can be treated

as relatively consistent over time. In fact what we call “the public” is created,produced, through specific institutions that allow specific forms of action — takingpolls, watching television, voting, signing petitions or writing leers to electedofficials or aending public hearings — and not others. ese frames of actionimply certain ways of talking, thinking, arguing, deliberating. e same “public”that may widely indulge in the use of recreational chemicals may also consistentlyvote to make such indulgences illegal; the same collection of citizens are likely tocome to completely different decisions on questions affecting their communitiesif organized into a parliamentary system, a system of computerized plebiscites,or a nested series of public assemblies. In fact the entire anarchist project of reinventing direct democracy is premised on assuming this is the case.

To illustrate what I mean, consider that in America, the same collection of people referred to in one context as “the public” can in another be referred to as“the workforce.” ey become a “workforce”, of course, when they are engaged indifferent sorts of activity. e “public” does not work — at least, a sentence like

“most of the American public works in the service industry” would never appearin a magazine or paper — if a journalist were to aempt to write such a sentence,their editor would certainly change it. It is especially odd since the public doesapparently have to go to work: this is why, as leist critics oen complain, themedia will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconveniencethe public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them thatthose striking are themselves part of the public, or that whether if they succeedin raising wage levels this will be a public benefit. And certainly the “public”

does not go out into the streets. Its role is as audience to public spectacles, andconsumers of public services. When buying or using goods and services privatelysupplied, the same collection of individuals become something else (“consumers”),



59

just as in other contexts of action they are relabeled a “nation”, “electorate”, or

“population”.All these entities are the product of institutions and institutional practices that,

in turn, define certain horizons of possibility. Hence when voting in parliamentaryelections one might feel obliged to make a “realistic” choice; in an insurrectionarysituation, on the other hand, suddenly anything seems possible.

A great deal of recent revolutionary thought essentially asks: what, then, doesthis collection of people become during such insurrectionary moments? For thelast few centuries the conventional answer has been “the people”, and all modernlegal regimes ultimately trace their legitimacy to moments of “constituent power”,when the people rise up, usually in arms, to create a new constitutional order.e insurrectionary paradigm, in fact, is embedded in the very idea of the modernstate. A number of European theorists, understanding that the ground has shied,

have proposed a new term, “the multitude”, an entity that cannot by definitionbecome the basis for a new national or bureaucratic state. For me the project isdeeply ambivalent.

In the terms I’ve been developing, what “the public”, “the workforce”, “con-sumers”, “population” all have in common is that they are brought into being byinstitutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore,profoundly alienating. Voting booths, television screens, office cubicles, hospitals,the ritual that surrounds them — one might say these are the very machineryof alienation. ey are the instruments through which the human imaginationis smashed and shaered. Insurrectionary moments are moments when this bu-reaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the effect of

throwing horizons of possibility wide open. is only to be expected if one of themain things that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited ones.(is is probably why, as Rebecca Solnit has observed, people oen experiencesomething very similar during natural disasters.) is would explain why revolu-tionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic,and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identi-fication are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the worldfrom unfamiliar points of view. Normally unequal structures of creativity aredisrupted; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practicalneed to recreate and reimagine everything around them.

Hence the ambivalence of the process of renaming. On the one hand, it isunderstandable that those who wish to make radical claims would like to know

in whose name they are making them. On the other, if what I’ve been saying istrue, the whole project of first invoking a revolutionary “multitude”, and then tostart looking for the dynamic forces that lie behind it, begins to look a lot like thefirst step of that very process of institutionalization that must eventually kill the



60

very thing it celebrates. Subjects (publics, peoples, workforces . . . ) are created by

specific institutional structures that are essentially frameworks for action. eyare what they do. What revolutionaries do is to break existing frames to createnew horizons of possibility, an act that then allows a radical restructuring of thesocial imagination is is perhaps the one form of action that cannot, by definition,be institutionalized. is is why a number of revolutionary thinkers, from RaffaeleLaudani in Italy to the Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina, have begun to suggestit might be beer her to speak not of “constituent” but “destituent power”.

Revolution in Reverse

ere is a strange paradox in Marx’s approach to revolution. Generally speak-ing, when Marx speaks of material creativity, he speaks of “production”, and herehe insists, as I’ve mentioned, that the defining feature of humanity is that wefirst imagine things, and then try to bring them into being. When he speaks of social creativity it is almost always in terms of revolution, but here, he insiststhat imagining something and then trying to bring it into being is precisely whatwe should never do. at would be utopianism, and for utopianism, he had onlywithering contempt.

e most generous interpretation, I would suggest, is that Marx on some levelunderstood that the production of people and social relations worked on diff erentprinciples, but also knew he did not really have a theory of what those principleswere. Probably it was only with the rise of f eminist theor y — that I wasdrawingon

so liberally in my earlier analysis — that it became possible to think systematicallyabout such issues. I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quicklysequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on thework of most male theorists.

It seems to me no coincidence, then, that so much of the real practical workof developing a new revolutionary paradigm in recent years has also been thework of feminism; or anyway, that feminist concerns have been the main drivingforce in their transformation. In America, the current anarchist obsession withconsensus and other forms of directly democratic process traces back directlyto organizational issues within the feminist movement. What had begun, in thelate ‘60s and early ‘70s, as small, intimate, oen anarchist-inspired collectives

were thrown into crisis when they started growing rapidly in size. Rather thanabandon the search for consensus in decision-making, many began trying todevelop more formal versions on the same principles. is, in turn, inspired someradical Qakers (who had previously seen their own consensus decision-making



61

as primarily a religious practice) to begin creating training collectives. By the

time of the direct action campaigns against the nuclear power industry in thelate ‘70s, the whole apparatus of affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus andfacilitation had already begun to take something like its contemporary form. eresulting outpouring of new forms of consensus process constitutes the mostimportant contribution to revolutionary practice in decades. It is largely the workof feminists engaged in practical organizing — a majority, probably, tied to theanarchist tradition. is makes it all the more ironic that male theorists who havenot themselves engaged in on-the-ground organizing or taken part in anarchistdecision-making processes, but who find themselves drawn to anarchism as aprinciple, so oen feel obliged to include in otherwise sympathetic statements,that of course they don’t agree with this obviously impractical, pie-in-the-sky,unrealistic notion of consensus.

e organization of mass actions themselves — f estivals of resistance, as theyare oen called — can be considered pragmatic experiments in whether it is indeedpossible to institutionalize the experience of liberation, the giddy realignmentof imaginative powers, everything that is most powerful in the experience of asuccessful spontaneous insurrection. Or if not to institutionalize it, perhaps, toproduce it on call. e effect for those involved is as if everything were happeningin reverse. A revolutionary uprising begins with bales in the streets, and if successful, proceeds to outpourings of popular effervescence and festivity. erefollows the sober business of creating new institutions, councils, decision-makingprocesses, and ultimately the reinvention of everyday life. Such at least is theideal, and certainly there have been moments in human history where something

like that has begun to happen — much though, again, such spontaneous creationsalways seems to end being subsumed within some new form of violent bureau-cracy. However, as I’ve noted, this is more or less inevitable since bureaucracy,however much it serves as the immediate organizer of situations of power andstructural blindness, does not create them. Mainly, it simply evolves to managethem.

is is one reason direct action proceeds in the opposite direction. Probablya majority of the participants are drawn from subcultures that are all aboutreinventing everyday life. Even if not, actions begin with the creation of newforms of collective decision-making: councils, assemblies, the endless aention to

‘process’ — and uses those forms to plan the street actions and popular festivities.e result is, usually, a dramatic confrontation with armed representatives of

the state. While most organizers would be delighted to see things escalate to apopular insurrection, and something like that does occasionally happen, mostwould not expect these to mark any kind of permanent breaks in reality. eyserve more as something almost along the lines of momentary advertisements



62

— or beer, foretastes, experiences of visionary inspiration — for a much slower,

painstaking struggle of creating alternative institutions.One of the most important contributions of feminism, it seems to me, has been

to constantly remind everyone that “situations” do not create themselves. ere isusually a great deal of work involved. For much of human history, what has beentaken as politics has consisted essentially of a series of dramatic performancescarried out upon theatrical stages. One of the great gis of feminism to politicalthought has been to continually remind us of the people is in fact making andpreparing and cleaning those stages, and even more, maintaining the invisiblestructures that make them possible — people who have, overwhelmingly, beenwomen. e normal process of politics of course is to make such people disappear.Indeed one of the chief functions of women’s work is to make itself disappear.One might say that the political ideal within direct action circles has become to

efface the difference; or, to put it another way, that action is seen as genuinelyrevolutionary when the process of production of situations is experienced as justas liberating as the situations themselves. It is an experiment one might say in therealignment of imagination, of creating truly non-alienated forms of experience.

Conclusion

Obviously it is also aempting to do so in a context in which, far from beingput in temporary abeyance, state power (in many parts of the globe at least) sosuff uses every aspect of daily existence that its armed representatives intervene to

regulate the internal organizational structure of groups allowed to cash checks orown and operate motor vehicles. One of the remarkable things about the current,neoliberal age is that bureaucracy has come to be so all-encompassing — thisperiod has seen, aer all, the creation of the first eff ective global administrativesystem in human history — that we don’t even see it any more. At the sametime, the pressures of operating within a context of endless regulation, repression,sexism, racial and class dominance, tend to ensure many who get drawn into thepolitics of direct action experience a constant alteration of exaltation and burn-out, moments where everything seems possible alternating with moments wherenothing does. In other parts of the world, autonomy is much easier to achieve, butat the cost of isolation or almost complete absence of resources. How to createalliances between different zones of possibility is a fundamental problem.

ese however are questions of strategy that go well beyond the scope of thecurrent essay. My purpose here has been more modest. Revolutionary theory, itseems to me, has in many fronts advanced much less quickly than revolutionarypractice; my aim in writing this has been to see if one could work back from the



63

experience of direct action to begin to create some new theoretical tools. ey

are hardly meant to be definitive. ey may not even prove useful. But perhapsthey can contribute to a broader project of re-imagining.

Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 fromhttp://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-revolution-reverse

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-revolution-reverse

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-revolution-reverse



David Graeber

e Twilight of Vanguardism

2003



65

Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over

for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it’salmost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their roleshould be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, soas to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction. But (ratherlike the idea of progress itself, to which it’s obviously connected), it seems mucheasier to renounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought.Vanguardist, even, sectarian aitudes have become deeply ingrained in academicradicalism it’s hard to say what it would mean to think outside them.

e depth of the problem first really struck me when I first became acquaintedwith the consensus modes of decision-making employed in North American an-archist and anarchist-inspired political movements, which, in turn, bore a lot of similarities to the style of political decision-making current where I had done

my anthropological fieldwork in rural Madagascar. ere’s enormous variationamong different styles and forms of consensus but one thing almost all the NorthAmerican variants have in common is that they are organized in conscious oppo-sition to the style of organization and, especially, of debate typical of the classicalsectarian Marxist group. Where the laer are invariably organized around someMaster eoretician, who offers a comprehensive analysis of the world situationand, oen, of human history as a whole, but very lile theoretical reflection onmore immediate questions of organization and practice, anarchist-inspired groupstend to operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, everconvert another person completely to one’s own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should

concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and considering imme-diate questions of action in the present. One of the fundamental principles of political debate, for instance, is that one is obliged to give other participants thebenefit of the doubt for honesty and good intentions, whatever else one mightthink of their arguments. In part too this emerges from the style of debate consen-sus decision-making encourages: where voting encourages one to reduce one’sopponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever it takes to defeat them, aconsensus process is built on a principle of compromise and creativity where oneis constantly changing proposals around until one can come up with somethingeveryone can at least live with; therefore, the incentive is always to put the bestpossible construction on other’s arguments.

All this struck home to me because it brought home to me just how much

ordinary intellectual practice — the kind of thing I was trained to do at the Uni-versity of Chicago, for example — really does resemble sectarian modes of debate.One of the things which had most disturbed me about my training there wasprecisely the way we were encouraged to read other theorists’ arguments: that if



66

there were two ways to read a sentence, one of which assumed the author had

at least a smidgen of common sense and the other that he was a complete idiot,the tendency was always to chose the laer. I had sometimes wondered how thiscould be reconciled with an idea that intellectual practice was, on some ultimatelevel, a common enterprise in pursuit of truth. e same goes for other intel-lectual habits: for example, that of carefully assembling lists of different “waysto be wrong” (usually ending in “ism”: i.e., subjectivism, empiricism, all muchlike their sectarian parallels: ref ormism, le deviationism, hegemonism. . . ) andbeing willing to listen to points of view differing from one’s own only so longas it took to figure out which variety of wrongness to plug them into. Combinethis with the tendency to treat (oen minor) intellectual differences not only astokens of belonging to some imagined “ism” but as profound moral flaws, on thesame level as racism or imperialism (and oen in fact partaking of them) then

one has an almost exact reproduction of style of intellectual debate typical of themost ridiculous vanguardist sects.

I still believe that the growing prevalence of these new, and to my mind farhealthier, modes of discourse among activists will have its effects on the academybut it’s hard to deny that so far, the change has been very slow in coming.

Why So Few Anarists in the Academy?

One might argue this is because anarchism itself has made such small inroadsinto the academy. As a political philosophy, anarchism is going through verita-

ble explosion in recent years. Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements aregrowing everywhere; anarchist principles — autonomy, voluntary association,self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy — have become the basis for or-ganizing within the globalization movement and beyond. As Barbara Epsteinhas recently pointed out, at least in Europe and the Americas, it has by nowlargely taken the place Marxism had in the social movements of the ’60s: thecore revolutionary ideology, it is the source of ideas and inspiration; even thosewho do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to define themselves inrelation to it. Yet this has found almost no reflection in academic discourse. Mostacademics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; ordismiss it with the crudest stereotypes (“anarchist organization! but isn’t thata contradiction in terms?”) In the United States — and I don’t think is all that

different elsewhere — there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort oranother, but hardly anyone who is willing to openly call herself an anarchist.

I don’t think this is just because the academy is behind the times. Marxism hasalways had an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, aer



67

all was invented by a Ph.D.; and there’s always been something about its spirit

which fits that of the academy. Anarchism on the other hand was never reallyinvented by anyone. True, historians usually treat it as if it were, constructingthe history of anarchism as if it’s basically a creature identical in its nature toMarxism: it was created by specific 19th century thinkers, perhaps Godwin orStirner, but definitely Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, it inspired working-classorganizations, became enmeshed in political struggles . . . But in fact the analogyis rather strained. First of all, the 19th century generally credited with inventinganarchism didn’t think of themselves as having invented anything particularlynew. e basic principles of anarchism — self-organization, voluntary association,mutual aid — are as old as humanity Similarly, the rejection of the state and of allforms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means

“without rulers”), even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related

and reinforce each other, was hardly some startlingly new 19 th century doctrine.One can find evidence of people making similar arguments throughout history,despite the fact there is every reason to believe that such opinions were the onesleast likely to be wrien down. We are talking less about a body of theory thanabout an aitude, or perhaps a faith: a rejection of certain types of social relation,a confidence that certain others are a much beer ones on which to build a decentor humane society, a faith that it would be possible to do so.

One need only compare the historical schools of Marxism, and anarchism,then, to see we are dealing with a fundamentally different sort of thing. Marxistschools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we haveLeninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians . . . Note how the list

starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors.Pierre Bourdieu once noted that, if the academic field is a game in which scholarsstrive for dominance, then you know you have won when other scholars startwondering how to make an adjective out of your name. It is, presumably, topreserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals insist, in discussingeach other, on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man theories of historythey would scoff at in discussing just about anything else: Foucault’s ideas, likeTrotsky’s, are never treated as primarily the products of a certain intellectualmilieu, as something that emerging from endless conversations and arguments incafes, classrooms, bedrooms, barber shops involving thousands of people insideand outside the academy (or Party), but always, as if they emerged from a singleman’s genius. It’s not quite either that Marxist politics organized itself like an

academic discipline or become a model for how radical intellectuals, or increas-ingly, all intellectuals, treated one another; rather, the two developed somewhatin tandem.



68

Schools of anarchism, in contrast, emerge from some kind of organizational

principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists,Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Individualists, and so on. (Sig-nificantly, those few Marxist tendencies which are not named aer individuals,like Autonomism or Council Communism, are themselves the closest to anar-chism.) Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organizethemselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchistshave spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. ey have never beenmuch interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions thatpreoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class?(anarchists consider this something for the peasants to decide) or what is thenature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the trulydemocratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops being

empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is “leadership” nec-essarily a bad thing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What isdirect action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state?When is it okay to break a window?

One might sum it up like this:

1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolu-tionary strategy.

2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.

Now, this does imply there’s a lot of potential complementary between the two

(and indeed there has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his endless bales withMarx over practical questions, also personally translated Marx’s Capital into Russ-ian.) One could easily imagine a systematic division of labor in which Marxistscritique the political economy, but stay out of organizing, and Anarchists handlethe day-to-day organizing, but defer to the Marxists on questions of abstracttheory; i.e., in which the Marxists explain why the economic crash in Argentinaoccurred and the anarchists deal with what to do about it. (I also should pointout that I am aware I am being a bit hypocritical here by indulging in some of thesame sort of sectarian reasoning I’m otherwise critiquing: there are schools of Marxism which are far more open-minded and tolerant, and democratically orga-nized, there are anarchist groups which are insanely sectarian; Bakunin himself

was hardly a model for democracy by any standards, etc. etc. etc.). But it alsomakes it easier to understand why there are so few anarchists in the academy. It’snot just that anarchism does not lend itself to high theory. It’s that it is primarilyan ethics of practice; and it insists, before anything else, that one’s means mostbe consonant with one’s ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian



69

means; that as much as possible, one must embody the society one wishes to

create. is does not square very well with operating within Universities that stillhave an essentially Medieval social structure, presenting papers at conferencesin expensive hotels, and doing intellectual bale in language no one who hasn’tspent at least two or three years in grad school would ever hope to be able tounderstand. At the very least, then, it would tend to get one in trouble.

All this does not, of course, mean that anarchist theory is impossible — thoughit does suggest that a single Anarchist High eory in the style typical of univer-sity radicalism might be rather a contradiction in terms. One could imagine abody of theory that presumes and indeed values a diversity of sometimes incom-mensurable perspectives in much the same way that anarchist decision-makingprocess does, but which nonetheless organizes them around an presumption of shared commitments. But clearly, it would also have to self-consciously reject

any trace of vanguardism: which leads to the question the role of revolutionintellectuals is not to form an elite that can arrive at the correct strategic analysesand then lead the masses to follow, what precisely is it? is is an area whereI think anthropology is particularly well positioned to help. And not only be-cause most actual, self-governing communities, non-market economies, and otherradical alternatives have been mainly studied by anthropologists; also, becausethe practice of ethnography provides at least something of a model, an incipientmodel, of how non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice might work.Ethnography is about teasing out the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logicsthat underly certain types of social action; the way people’s habits and actionsmakes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely aware of. One

obvious role for a radical intellectual is precisely that: the first thing we need todo is to look at those who are creating viable alternatives on the group, and try tofigure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing.

History of the Idea of Vanguardism

Untwining social theory from vanguardist habits might seem a particularly diffi-cult task because historically, modern social theory and the idea of the vanguardwere born more or less together. On the other hand, so was the idea of an artisticavant garde (“avant garde” is in f act simply the French word f or vanguard), andthe relation between the three might itself suggest some unexpected possibilities.

e term avant garde was actually coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, the productof a series of essays he wrote at the very end of his life. Like his onetime secretaryand disciple (and later bier rival Auguste Comte), Saint-Simon was writing inthe wake of the French revolution and essentially, were asking what had gone



70

wrong: why the transition from a medieval, feudal Catholic society to a modern,

industrial democratic one seemed to be creating such enormous violence andsocial dislocation. e problem he concluded was that modern society lackedany force of ideological cohesion that could play the same role as the Medievalchurch, which gave everyone the sense of having a meaningful place in the overallsocial order. Towards the end of their lives each actually ended up creating hisown religion: Saint-Simon’s called his the “New Christianity”, Comte, the “NewCatholicism”. In the first, artists were to play the role of the ultimate spiritualleaders; in an imaginary dialogue with a scientist, he has an artist explainingthat in their role of imagining possible futures and inspiring the public, they canplay the role of an “avant garde”, a “truly priestly function” as he puts it; in hisideal f uture, artists would hatch the ideas which they would then pass on to thescientists and industrialists to put into effect. Saint-Simon was also perhaps the

first to conceive the notion of the withering away of the state: once it had becomeclear that the authorities were operating for the good of the public, one wouldno more need f orce to compel the public to heed their advice than one needed itto compel patients to take the advice of their doctors. Government would passaway into at most some minor police functions.

Comte, of course, is most famous as the founder of sociology; he invented theterm to describe what he saw as the master-discipline which could both under-stand and direct society. He ended up taking a different, far more authoritarianapproach: ultimately proposing the regulation and control of almost all aspectsof human life according to scientific principles, with the role of high priests(effectively, the vanguard, though he did not actually call them this) in his New

Catholicism being played by the sociologists themselves.It’s a particularly fascinating opposition because in the early twentieth century,the positions were effectively reversed. Instead of the le-wing Saint-Simonianslooking to artists for leadership, while the right-wing Comtians fancied them-selves scientists, we had the fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini who imaginedthemselves as great artists inspiring the masses, and sculpting society accordingto their grandiose imaginings, and the Marxist vanguard which claimed the roleof scientists.

At any rate the Saint Simonians at any rate actively sought to recruit artists fortheir various ventures, salons, and utopian communities; though they quickly raninto difficulties because so many within “avant garde” artistic circles preferredthe more anarchistic Fourierists, and later, one or another branch of outright

anarchists. Actually, the number of 19 th century artists with anarchist sympa-thies is quite staggering, ranging from Pissaro to Tolstoy or Oscar Wilde, notto mention almost all early 20th century artists who later became Communists,from Malevich to Picasso. Rather than a political vanguard leading the way to



71

a future society, radical artists almost invariably saw themselves as exploring

new and less alienated modes of life. e really significant development in the19th century was less to idea of a vanguard than that of Bohemia (a term firstcoined by Balzac in 1838): marginal communities living in more or less voluntarypoverty, seeing themselves as dedicated to the pursuit of creative, unalienatedforms of experience, united by a profound hatred of bourgeois life and everythingit stood for. Ideologically, they were about equally likely to be proponents of

“art for art’s sake” or social revolutionaries. Contemporary theorists are actuallyquite divided over how to evaluate their larger significance. Pierre Bourdieu forexample insisted that the promulgation of the idea of “art for art’s sake”, far frombeing depoliticizing, should be considered a significant accomplishment, as wasany which managed to establish the autonomy of one particular field of humanendeavor from the logic of the market. Colin Campbell on the other hand argues

that insofar as bohemians actually were an avant garde, they were really the van-guard of the market itself, or more precisely, of consumerism: their actual socialfunction, much though they would have loathed to admit it, was to explore newforms of pleasure or aesthetic territory which could be commoditized in the nextgeneration. (One might call this the Tom Franks version of history.) Campbellalso echoes common wisdom that bohemia was almost exclusively inhabited bythe children of the bourgeoisie, who had — temporarily, at least — rejecting theirf amilies’ money and privilege; and who, if they did not die young of dissipation,were likely to end up back on the board of father’s company. is is a claim thathas been repeated so oen about activists and revolutionaries over the years thatit makes me, at least, immediately wary: in fact, I strongly suspect that bohemian

circles emerged from the same sort of social conjuncture as most current activistcircles, and historically, most vanguardist revolutionary parties as well: a kindof meeting between certain elements of (intentionally) downwardly mobile pro-fessional classes, in broad rejection of bourgeois values, and upwardly mobilechildren of the working class. ough such suspicions can only be confirmed byhistorical investigation.

In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely andvery loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radicalnewspapers for example oen called themselves “the Avant Garde”. It was Marxthough who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion thatthe proletariat were the true revolutionary class — he didn’t actually use the term

“vanguard” in his own writing — because they were the one that was the most

oppressed, or as he put it “negated” by capitalism, and therefore had the least tolose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienatedenclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers whotended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. e



72

results we all know. e idea of a vanguard party to dedicated to both organizing

and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as theagent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willing-ness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to BeDone?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late ’60s couldend up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should beconsidered the vanguard of e Movement as the leaders of its most oppressedelement. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde whoincreasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning withthe Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiques, purgingone another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional)parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always definedthemselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than aer some

heroic founder.) e ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finallythe Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematicin trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundariesbetween art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, dis-played a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bierdenunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusionwas for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whomwould purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too farfrom what actually ended up happening.)

Non-alienated Production

e historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have beenexplored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is:why is it that artists have so oen been so drawn to revolutionary politics tobegin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and placeswhen there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the oneplace on is most likely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; evenmore so, in fact, that among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answermust have something to do with alienation. ere would appear to be a directlink between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into

being (individually or collectively) — that is, the experience of certain forms of un-alienated production — and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly,the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity.Which would allow us to see the historical shi between seeing the vanguard as



73

the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to seeing them as the

representatives of the “most oppressed” in a new light. In fact, I would suggest,revolutionary coalitions always tend to consist of an alliance between a society’sleast alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than itmight sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend tooccur when these two categories come to overlap. at would at any rate explainwhy it almost always seems to be peasants and craspeople — or alternately,newly proletarianized former peasants and craspeople — who actually rise upand overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wagelabor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importanceof indigenous people’s struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to asthe “anti-globalization” movement: such people tend to be simultaneously thevery least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technolog-

ically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitablethat they should take a leading role.

e role of indigenous peoples in turn leads us back to the role of ethnographyas a possible model for the would-be non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual— as well as some of its potential pitfalls. Obviously what I am proposing wouldonly work if it was, ultimately, a form of auto-ethnography, combined, perhaps,with a certain utopian extrapolation: a maer of teasing out the tacit logic orprinciples underlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only offeringthe analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions(“if one applied the same principles as you are applying to political organizationto economics, might it not look something like this?” . . . ) Here too there are

suggestive parallels in the history of radical artistic movements, which becamemovements precisely as they became their own critics (and of course the idea of self-criticism took on a very different, and more ominous, tone within Marxistpolitics); there are also intellectuals already trying to do precisely this sort of auto-ethnographic work. But I say all this not so much to provide models as toopen up a field for discussion, first of all, by emphasizing that even the notion of vanguardism itself far more rich in its history, and full of alternative possibilities,than most of us would ever be given to expect.

is essay was delivered as a keynote address during the “History Maers: SocialMovements Past, Present, and Future” conference at the New School for Social

Research (http://www.newsool.edu/gf/historymatters for more information).Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 from http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/71522/index.php

http://www.newschool.edu/gf/historymatters

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/71522/index.php

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/71522/index.php

http://www.newschool.edu/gf/historymatters



David Graeber

e Sho of Victory

2007



75

e biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know

how to handle victory.is might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling

particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice move-ment was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movementthat succeeded either in puing down lasting organizational roots or transform-ing the contours of power in the world. e anti-war movement was even morefrustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. ewar will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feelingthey contributed much to it.

I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initialpropositions here:

1. Odd though it may seem, the ruling classes live in fear of us. ey appear tostill be haunted by the possibility that, if average Americans really get windof what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees. It knowit seems implausible but it’s hard to come up with any other explanationfor the way they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of massmobilization, and especially mass direct action, and usually try to distractaention by starting some kind of war.

2. In a w ay thispanic is justified. Mass direct action — especially when organizedon democratic lines — is incredibly effective. Over the last thirty years inAmerica, there have been only two instances of mass action of this sort: theanti-nuclear movement in the late ‘70s, and the so called “anti-globalization”movement from roughly 1999–2001. In each case, the movement’s mainpolitical goals were reached far more quickly than almost anyone involvedimagined possible.

3. e real problem such movements face is that they always get taken by surpriseby the speed of their initial success. We are never prepared for victory. Itthrows us into confusion. We start fighting each other. e ratcheting of repression and appeals to nationalism that inevitably accompanies some newround of war mobilization then plays into the hands of authoritarians on everyside of the political spectrum. As a result, by the time the full impact of ourinitial victory becomes clear, we’re usually too busy feeling like failures to

even notice it.

Let me take the two most prominent examples case by case:



76

I: e Anti-Nuclear Movement

e anti-nuclear movement of the late ‘70s marked the first appearance inNorth America of what we now consider standard anarchist tactics and forms of organization: mass actions, affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process,

jail solidarity, the very principle of decentralized direct democracy. It was allsomewhat primitive, compared to now, and there were significant differences —notably a much stricter, Gandhian-style conceptions of non-violence — but all theelements were there and it was the first time they had come together as a package.For two years, the movement grew with amazing speed and showed every sign of becoming a nation-wide phenomenon. en almost as quickly, it distintegrated.

It all began when, in 1974, some veteran peaceniks turned organic f armers

in New England successfully blocked construction of a proposed nuclear powerplant in Montague, Massachuses. In 1976, they joined with other New Englandactivists, inspired by the success of a year-long plant occupation in Germany, tocreate the Clamshell Alliance. Clamshell’s immediate goal was to stop construc-tion of a proposed nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. While thealliance never ended up managing an occupation so much as a series of dramaticmass-arrests, combined with jail solidarity, their actions — involving, at peak,tens of thousands of people organized on directly democratic lines — succeeded inthrowing the very idea of nuclear power into question in a way it had never beenbefore. Similar coalitions began springing up across the country: the Palmeoalliance in South Carolina, Oystershell in Maryland, Sunflower in Kansas, andmost famous of all, the Abalone Alliance in California, reacting originally to a

completely insane plan to build a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, almostdirectly on top of a major geographic fault line.

Clamshell first three mass actions, in 1976 and 1977, were wildly successful.But it soon fell into crisis over questions of democratic process. In May 1978, anewly created Coordinating Commiee violated process to accept a last-minutegovernment offer for a three-day legal rally at Seabrook instead of a plannedfourth occupation (the excuse was reluctance to alienate the surrounding com-munity). Acrimonious debates began about consensus and community relations,which then expanded to the role of non-violence (even cuing through fences, ordefensive measures like gas masks, had originally been forbidden), gender bias,and so on. By 1979 the alliance split into two contending, and increasingly ineffec-tive, factions, and aer many delays, the Seabrook plant (or half of it anyway) didgo into operation. e Abalone Alliance lasted longer, until 1985, in part becauseits strong core of anarcha-feminists, but in the end, Diablo Canyon too got itslicense and went into operation in December 1988.



77

On the surface this doesn’t sound too inspiring. But what was the movement

really trying to achieve? It might helpful here to map out its full range of goals:

1. Short-Term Goals: to block construction of the particular nuclear plant inquestion (Seabrook, Diablo Canyon . . . )

2. Medium-Term Goals: to block construction of all new nuclear plants, delegit-imize the very idea of nuclear power and begin moving towards conservationand green power, and legitimate new forms of non-violent resistance andfeminist-inspired direct democracy

3. Long-Term Goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash the state anddestroy capitalism

If so the results are clear. Short-term goals were almost never reached. Despitenumerous tactical victories (delays, utility company bankruptcies, legal injunc-tions) the plants that became the focus of mass action all ultimately went on line.Governments simply cannot allow themselves to be seen to lose in such a bale.Long-term goals were also obviously not obtained. But one reason they weren’tis that the medium-term goals were all reached almost immediately. e actionsdid delegitimize the very idea of nuclear power — raising public awareness to thepoint that when ree Mile Island melted down in 1979, it doomed the industryforever. While plans for Seabrook and Diablo Canyon might not have been can-celled, just about every other then-pending plan to build a nuclear reactor was,and no new ones have been proposed for a quarter century. ere was indeed a

more towards conservation, green power, and a legitimizing of new democraticorganizing techniques. All this happened much more quickly than anyone hadreally anticipated.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see most of the subsequent problems emerged directlyfrom the very speed of the movement’s success. Radicals had hoped to makelinks between the nuclear industry and the very nature of the capitalist systemthat created it. As it turns out, the capitalist system proved more than willing to

jeison the nuclear industry the moment it became a liability. Once giant utilitycompanies began claiming they too wanted to promote green energy, effectivelyinviting what we’d now call the NGO types to a space at the table, there was anenormous temptation to jump ship. Especially because many of them only allied

with more radical groups so as to win themselves a place at the table to beginwith.e inevitable result was a series of heated strategic debates. But it’s impossible

to understand this though without first understanding that strategic debates,within directly democratic movements, are rarely conducted as such. ey almost



78

always take the form of debates about something else. Take for instance the

question of capitalism. Anti-capitalists are usually more than happy to discusstheir position on the subject. Liberals on the other hand really don’t like to have tosay “actually, I am in favor of maintaining capitalism”, so whenever possible, theytry to change the subject. So debates that are actually about whether to directlychallenge capitalism usually end up geing argued out as if they were short-termdebates about tactics and non-violence. Authoritarian socialists or others who aresuspicious of democracy itself don’t like to make that an issue either, and pref erto discuss the need to create the broadest possible coalitions. ose who do likedemocracy but feel a group is taking the wrong strategic direction oen find itmuch more effective to challenge its decision-making process than to challengeits actual decisions.

ere is another factor here that is even less remarked, but I think equally

important. Everyone knows that faced with a broad and potentially revolutionarycoalition, any governments’ first move will be to try to split in it. Making conces-sions to placate the moderates while selectively criminalizing the radicals — thisis Art of Governance 101. e US government, though, is in possession of a globalempire constantly mobilized for war, and this gives it another option that mostgovernments do not. ose running it can, prey much any time they like, decideto ratchet up the level of violence overseas. is has proved a remarkably effectiveway to defuse social movements founded around domestic concerns. It seemsno coincidence that the civil rights movement was followed by major politicalconcessions and a rapid escalation of the war in Vietnam; that the anti-nuclearmovement was followed by the abandonment of nuclear power and a ramping

up of the Cold War, with Star Wars programs and proxy wars in Afghanistan andCentral America; that the Global Justice Movement was followed by the collapsethe Washington consensus and the War on Terror. As a result early SDS had toput aside its early emphasis on participatory democracy to become a mere anti-war movement; the anti-nuclear movement morphed into a nuclear freeze move-ment; the horizontal structures of DAN and PGA gave way to top-down massorganizations like ANSWER and UFPJ. From the point of view of governmentthe military solution does have its risks. e whole thing can blow up in one’sface, as it did in Vietnam (hence the obsession, at least since the first Gulf War todesign a war that was effectively protest-proof.) ere is also always a small risksome miscalculation will accidentally trigger a nuclear Armageddon and destroythe planet. But these are risks politicians faced with civil unrest appear to have

normally been more than willing to take — if only because directly democraticmovements genuinely scare them, while anti-war movements are their preferredadversary. States are, aer all, ultimately forms of violence. For them, changingthe argument to one about violence is taking things back to their home turf, what



79

they really prefer to talk about. Organizations designed either to wage, or to

oppose, wars will always tend to be more hierarchically organized than thosedesigned with almost anything else in mind. is is certainly what happened inthe case of the anti-nuclear movement. While the anti-war mobilizations of the

‘80s turned out far larger numbers than Clamshell or Abalone ever had, but it alsomarked a return to marching along with signs, permied rallies, and abandoningexperiments with new forms of direct democracy.

II: e Global Justice Movement

I’ll assume our gentle reader is broadly familiar with the actions at Seale, IMF-World Bank blockades six months later in Washington at A16, and so on.

In the US, the movement flared up so quickly and dramatically even the me-dia could not completely dismiss it. It also quickly started eating itself. DirectAction Networks were founded in almost every major city in America. Whilesome of these (notably Seale and L.A. DAN) were reformist, anti-corporate, andfans of strict non-violence codes, most (like New York and Chicago DAN) wereoverwhelmingly anarchist and anti-capitalist, and dedicated to diversity of tactics.Other cities (Montreal, Washington D.C.) created even more explicitly anarchistAnti-Capitalist Convergences. e anti-corporate DANs dissolved almost imme-diately, but very few lasted more than a couple years. ere were endless andbier debates: about non-violence, about summit-hopping, about racism andprivilege issues, about the viability of the network model. en there was 9/11,

followed by a huge increase up of the level of repression and resultant paranoia,and the panicked flight of almost all our former allies among unions and NGOs.By Miami, in 2003, it seemed like we’d been put to rout, and a paralysis sweptover the movement from which we’ve only recently started to recover.

September 11th was such a weird event, such a catastrophe, that it makes italmost impossible for us to perceive anything else around it. In its immediateaermath, almost all of the structures created in the globalization movementcollapsed. But one reason it was so easy for them to collapse was — not just thatwar seemed such an immediately more pressing concern — but that once again,in most of our immediate objectives, we’d already, unexpectedly, won.

Myself, I joined NYC DAN right around the time of A16. At the time DAN as awhole saw itself as a group with two major objectives. One was to help coordinate

the North American wing of a vast global movement against neoliberalism, andwhat was then called the Washington Consensus, to destroy the hegemony of ne-oliberal ideas, stop all the new big trade agreements (WTO, FTAA), and to discreditand eventually destroy organizations like the IMF. e other was to disseminate a



80

(very much anarchist-inspired) model of direct democracy: decentralized, affinity-

group structures, consensus process, to replace old-fashioned activist organizingstyles with their steering commiees and ideological squabbles. At the time wesometimes called it “contaminationism”, the idea that all people really needed wasto be exposed to the experience of direct action and direct democracy, and theywould want to start imitating it all by themselves. ere was a general feelingthat we weren’t trying to build a permanent structure; DAN was just a means tothis end. When it had served its purpose, several founding members explained tome, there would be no further need for it. On the other hand these were preyambitious goals, so we also assumed even if we did aain them, it would probablytake at least a decade.

As it turned out it took about a year and a half.Obviously we failed to spark a social revolution. But one reason we never got

to the point of inspiring hundreds of thousands of people to rise up was, again,that we achieved our other goals so quickly. Take the question of organization.While the anti-war coalitions still operate, as anti-war coalitions always do, astop-down popular front groups, almost every small-scale radical group that isn’tdominated by Marxist sectarians of some sort or another — and this includesanything from organizations of Syrian immigrants in Montreal or communitygardens in Detroit — now operate on largely anarchist principles. ey might notknow it. But contaminationism worked. Alternately, take the domain of ideas.e Washington consensus lies in ruins. So much so it’s hard no to rememberwhat public discourse in this country was even like before Seale. Rarely havethe media and political classes been so completely unanimous about anything.

at “free trade”, “free markets”, and no-holds-barred supercharged capitalismwas the only possible direction for human history, the only possible solutionfor any problem was so completely assumed that anyone who cast doubt on theproposition was treated as literally insane. Global justice activists, when they firstforced themselves into the aention of CNN or Newsweek, were immediatelywrien off as reactionary lunatics. A year or two later, CNN and Newsweek weresaying we’d won the argument.

Usually when I make this point in front of anarchist crowds someone immedi-ately objects: “well, sure, the rhetoric has changed, but the policies remain thesame.”

is is true in a manner of speaking. at is to say, it’s true that we didn’tdestroy capitalism. But we (taking the “we” here as the horizontalist, direct-action

oriented wing of the planetary movement against neoliberalism) did arguably dealit a bigger blow in just two years than anyone since, say, the Russian Revolution.

Let me take this point by point:



81

• FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS. All the ambitious free trade treaties planned

since 1998 have failed, e MAI was routed; the FTAA, focus of the actionsin Qebec City and Miami, stopped dead in its tracks. Most of us rememberthe 2003 FTAA summit mainly for introducing the “Miami model” of extremepolice repression even against obviously non-violent civil resistance. It wasthat. But we forget this was more than anything the enraged flailings of apack of extremely sore losers — Miami was the meeting where the FTAA wasdefinitively killed. Now no one is even talking about broad, ambitious treatieson that scale. e US is reduced to pushing for minor country-to-countrytrade pacts with traditional allies like South Korea and Peru, or at best dealslike CAFTA, uniting its remaining client states in Central America, and it’snot even clear it will manage to pull off that.

• THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION. Aer the catastrophe (for them)in Seale, organizers moved the next meeting to the Persian Gulf island of Doha, apparently deciding they would rather run the risk of being blownup by Osama bin Laden than having to face another DAN blockade. Forsix years they hammered away at the “Doha round”. e problem was that,emboldened by the protest movement Southern governments began insistingthey would no longer agree open their borders to agricultural imports fromrich countries unless those rich countries at least stopped pouring billionsof dollars of subsidies at their own farmers, thus ensuring Southern farmerscouldn’t possibly compete. Since the US in particular had no intention of itself making any of the sort of sacrifices it demanded of the rest of the world,all deals were off. In J uly 2006, Pierre Lamy, head of the WTO, declared theDoha round dead and at this point no one is even talking about another WTOnegotiation f or at least two years — at which point the organization mightvery possibly not exist.

• THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND WORLD BANK. is isthe most amazing story of all. e IMF is rapidly approaching bankruptcy,and it is a direct result of the worldwide mobilization against them. To putthe maer bluntly: we destroyed it. e World Bank is not doing all thatmuch beer. But by the time the f ull eff ects were f elt, we weren’t even payingaention.

is last story is worth telling in some detail, so let me leave the indentedsection here for a moment and continue in the main text:e IMF was always the arch-villain of the struggle. It is the most powerful,

most arrogant, most pitiless instrument through which neoliberal policies have,for the last 25 years been imposed on the poorer countries of the global South,



82

basically, by manipulating debt. In exchange for emergency refinancing, the

IMF would demand “structural adjustment programs” that forced massive cuts inhealth, education, price supports on food, and endless privatization schemes thatallowed f oreign capitalists to buy up local resources at firesale prices. Structuraladjustment never somehow worked to get countries back on their feet economi-cally, but that just meant they remained in crisis, and the solution was always toinsist on yet another round of structural adjustment.

e IMF had another, less celebrated, role: of global enforcer. It was their job to ensure that no country (no maer how poor) could ever be allowed todefault on loans to Western bankers (no maer how foolish). Even if a bankerwere to offer a corrupt dictator a billion dollar loan, and that dictator placed itdirectly in his Swiss bank account and fled the country, the IMF would ensurebillion dollars (plus generous interest) would have to be extracted from his former

victims. If a country did default, for any reason, the IMF could impose a creditboyco whose economic effects were roughly comparable to that of a nuclearbomb. (All this flies in the face of even elementary economic theory, wherebythose lending money are supposed to be accepting a certain degree of risk, but inthe world of international politics, economic laws are only held to be binding onthe poor.) is role was their downfall.

What happened was that Argentina defaulted and got away with it. In the ‘90s,Argentina had been the IMF’s star pupil in Latin America — they had literallyprivatized every public facility except the customs bureau. en in 2002, theeconomy crashed. e immediate results we all know: bales in the streets,popular assemblies, the overthrow of three governments in one month, road

blockades, occupied factories . . . “Horizontalism” — broadly anarchist principles— were at the core of popular resistance. e political class was so completelydiscredited that politicians were obliged to put on wigs and phony mustachesto be able to eat in restaurants without being physically aacked. When NestorKirchner, a moderate social democrat, took power in 2003, he knew he had to dosomething dramatic in order to get most of the population even to accept eventhe idea of having a government, let alone his own. So he did. He did, in fact,the one thing no one in that position is ever supposed to do. He defaulted onArgentina’s foreign debt.

Actually Kirchner was quite clever about it. He did not default on his IMF loans.He defaulted on Argentina’s private debt, announcing that for all outstandingloans, he would only pay 25 cents on the dollar. Citibank and Chase of course

went to the IMF, their accustomed enforcer, to demand punishment. But for thefirst time in its history, the IMF balked. First of all, with Argentina’s economyalready in ruins, even the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb would do lilemore than make the rubble bounce. Second of all, just about everyone was aware



83

it was the IMF’s disastrous advice that set the stage for Argentina’s crash in the

first place. ird and most decisively, this was at the very height of the impact of the global justice movement: the IMF was already the most hated institution onthe planet, and willfully destroying what lile remained of the Argentine middleclass would have been pushing things just a lile bit too far.

So Argentina was allowed to get away with it. Aer that, everything changed.Brazil and Argentina together arranged to pay back their outstanding debt to theIMF itself. With a lile help from Chavez, so did the rest of the continent. In 2003,Latin American IMF debt stood at $49 billion. Now it’s $694 million. To put that inperspective: that’s a decline of 98.6%. For every thousand dollars owed four yearsago, Latin America now owes fourteen bucks. Asia followed. China and Indianow both have no outstanding debt to the IMF and refuse to take out new loans.e boyco now includes Korea, ailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines

and prey much every other significant regional economy. Also Russia. e Fundis reduced to lording it over the economies of Africa, and maybe some parts of the Middle East and former Soviet sphere (basically those without oil). As a resultits revenues have plummeted by 80% in four years. In the irony of all possibleironies, it’s increasingly looking like the IMF will go bankrupt if they can’t findsomeone willing to bail them out. Neither is it clear there’s anyone particularlywants to. With its reputation as fiscal enforcer in taers, the IMF no longer servesany obvious purpose even for capitalists. ere’s been a number of proposals atrecent G8 meetings to make up a new mission for the organization — a kind of international bankruptcy court, perhaps — but all ended up geing torpedoed forone reason or another. Even if the IMF does survive, it has already been reduced

to a cardboard cut-out of its former self.e World Bank, which early on took on the role of good cop, is in somewhatbeer shape. But emphasis here must be placed on the word “somewhat” — as in,its revenue has only fallen by 60%, not 80%, and there are few actual boycos. Onthe other hand the Bank is currently being kept alive largely by the fact India andChina are still willing to deal with it, and both sides know that, so it is no longerin much of a position to dictate terms.

Obviously, all of this does not mean all the monsters have been slain. In LatinAmerica, neoliberalism might be on the run, but China and India are carrying outdevastating “reforms” within their own countries, European social protectionsare under aack, and most of Africa, despite much hypocritical posturing on thepart of the Bonos and rich countries of the world, is still locked in debt, and now

also facing a new colonization by China. e US, its economic power retreatingin most of the world, is frantically trying to redouble its grip over Mexico andCentral America. We’re not living in utopia. But we already knew that. equestion is why we never noticed our victories.



84

Olivier de Marcellus, a PGA activist from Switzerland, points to one reason:

whenever some element of the capitalist system takes a hit, whether it’s thenuclear industry or the IMF, some leist journal will start explaining to us thatreally, this is all part of their plan — or maybe, an effect of the inexorable workingout of the internal contradictions of capital, but certainly, nothing for whichwe ourselves are in any way responsible. Even more important, perhaps, is ourreluctance to even say the word “we”. e Argentine default, wasn’t that reallyengineered by Nestor Kirchner? What does he have to do with the globalizationmovement? I mean, it’s not as if his hands were forced by thousands of citizenswere rising up, smashing banks, and replacing the government with popularassemblies coordinated by the IMC. Or, well, okay, maybe it was. Well, in thatcase, those citizens were People of Color in the Global South. How can “we” takeresponsibility for their actions? Never mind that they mostly saw themselves

as part of the same global justice movement as us, espoused similar ideas, woresimilar clothes, used similar tactics, in many cases even belonged to the sameconfederacies or organizations. Saying “we” here would imply the primal sin of speaking for others.

Myself, I think it’s reasonable for a global movement to consider its accom-plishments in global terms. ese are not inconsiderable. Yet just as with the anti-nuclear movement, they were almost all focused on the middle term. Let me mapout a similar hierarchy of goals:

1. Short-Term Goals: blockade and shut down particular summit meetings (IMF,WTO, G8, etc)

2. Medium-Term Goals: destroy the “Washington Consensus” around neolib-eralism, block all new trade pacts, delegitimize and ultimately shut downinstitutions like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank; disseminate new models of direct democracy.

3. Long-Term Goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash the state anddestroy capitalism.

Here again, we find the same paern. Aer the miracle of Seale, short term— tactical — goals were rarely achieved. But this was mainly because faced withsuch a movement, governments tend to dig in their heels and make it a maer

of principle that they shouldn’t be. is was usually considered much moreimportant, in fact, than the success of the summit in question. Most activists donot seem to be aware that in a lot of cases — the 2001 and 2002 IMF and WorldBank meetings for example — police ended up enforcing security arrangementsso elaborate that they came very close to shuing down the meetings themselves;



85

ensuring that many events were cancelled, the ceremonies were ruined, and

nobody really had a chance to talk to each other. But the point was not whethertrade officials got to meet or not. e point was that the protestors could not beseen to win.

Here, too, the medium term goals were achieved so quickly that it actually madethe longer-term goals more difficult. NGOs, labor unions, authoritarian Marxists,and similar allies jumped ship almost immediately; strategic debates ensued, butthey were carried out, as always, indirectly, as arguments about race, privilege,tactics, almost anything but as actual strategic debates. Here, too, everything wasmade infinitely more difficult by the state’s recourse to war.

It is hard, as I mentioned, for anarchists to take much direct responsibility forthe inevitable end of the war in Iraq, or even to the very bloody nose the empirehas already acquired there. But a case could well be made for indirect respon-

sibility. Since the ‘60s, and the catastrophe of Vietnam, the US government hasnot abandoned its policy of answering any threat of democratic mass mobilizingby a return to war. But it has to be much more careful. Essentially, they haveto design wars to be protest-proof. ere is very good reason to believe that thefirst Gulf War was explicitly designed with this in mind. e approach taken tothe invasion of Iraq — the insistence on a smaller, high-tech army, the extremereliance on indiscriminate firepower, even against civilians, to protect against anyVietnam-like levels of American casualties — appears to have been developed,again, more with a mind to heading off any potential peace movement at homethan one focused on military effectiveness. is, anyway, would help explain whythe most powerful army in the world has ended up being tied down and even

defeated by an almost unimaginably ragtag group of guerillas with negligibleaccess to outside safe-areas, funding, or military support. As in the trade summits,they are so obsessed with ensuring forces of civil resistance cannot be seen towin the bale at home that they would prefer to lose the actual war.

Perspectives (with a brief return to ’30s Spain)

How, then, to cope with the perils of victory? I can’t claim to have any simpleanswers. Really I wrote this essay more to start a conversation, to put the problemon the table — to inspire a strategic debate.

Still, some implications are prey obvious. e next time we plan a major action

campaign, I think we would do well to at least take into account the possibilitythat we might obtain our mid-range strategic goals very quickly, and that whenthat happens, many of our allies will fall away. We have to recognize strategicdebates for what they are, even when they seem to be about something else. Take



86

one famous example: arguments about property destruction aer Seale. Most of

these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. ose who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumersto move towards global-exchange style green consumerism, to ally with laborbureaucracies and social democrats abroad. is was not a path designed to createa direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to takethis route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could everreally be defeated at all. ose who did break windows didn’t care if they wereoffending suburban homeowners, because they didn’t see them as a potentialelement in a revolutionary anti-capitalist coalition. ey were trying, in effect, tohijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable — hoping toinspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might consideringentering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people

of color, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless,the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anti-capitalist movementwas to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people whodon’t need to be convinced that the system is roen, only, that there’s somethingthey can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anti-capitalist revolution without gun-bales in the streets — which most of us arehoping it is, since let’s f ace it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose —there’s no possible way we could have an anti-capitalist revolution while at thesame time scrupulously respecting property rights.

e laer actually leads to an interesting question. What would it mean towin, not just our medium-term goals, but our long term ones? At the moment

no one is even clear how that would come about, for the very reason none of us have much faith remaining in “the” revolution in the old 19th or 20th centurysense of the term. Aer all, the total view of revolution, that there will be a singlemass insurrection or general strike and then all walls will come tumbling down,is entirely premised on the old fantasy of capturing the state. at’s the only wayvictory could possibly be that absolute and complete — at least, if we are speakingof a whole country or meaningful territory.

In way of illustration, consider this: what would it have actually meant for theSpanish anarchists to have actually “won” 1937? It’s amazing how rarely we askourselves such questions. We just imagine it would have been something like theRussian Revolution, which began in a similar way, with the melting away of theold army, the spontaneous creation of workers’ soviets. But that was in the major

cities. e Russian Revolution was followed by years of civil war in which the RedArmy gradually imposed the new state’s control on every part of the old RussianEmpire, whether the communities in question wanted it or not. Let us imaginethat anarchist militias in Spain had routed the fascist army, which then completely



87

dissolved, and kicked the socialist Republican Government out of its offices in

Barcelona and Madrid. at would certainly have been victory by anybody’sstandards. But what would have happened next? Would they have establishedSpain as a non-Republic, an anti-state existing within the exact same internationalborders? Would they have imposed a regime of popular councils in every singevillage and municipality in the territory of what had formerly been Spain? Howexactly? We have to bear in mind here that were there many villages towns, evenregions of Spain where anarchists were almost non-existent. In some just aboutthe entire population was made up of conservative Catholics or monarchists; inothers (say, the Basque country) there was a militant and well-organized workingclass, but one that was overwhelmingly socialist or communist. Even at the heightof revolutionary fervor, most of these would stay true to their old values and ideas.If the victorious FAI aempted to exterminate them all — a task which would have

required killing millions of people — or chase them out of the country, or forciblyrelocate them into anarchist communities, or send them off to reeducation camps— they would not only have been guilty of world-class atrocities, they wouldhave had to give up on being anarchists. Democratic organizations simply cannotcommit atrocities on that systematic scale: for that, you’d need Communist orFascist-style top-down organization, since you can’t actually get thousands of human beings to systematically massacre helpless women and children and oldpeople, destroy communities, or chase families from their ancestral homes unlessthey can at least say they were only following orders. ere appear to have beenonly two possible solutions to the problem.

1. Let the Republic continue as de facto government, controlled by the socialists,let them impose government control the right-wing ma jority areas, and getsome kind of deal out of them that they would leave the anarchist-ma joritycities, towns, and villages alone to organize themselves as they wish to, andhope that they kept the deal (this might be considered the “good luck” option)

2. Declare that everyone was to form their own local popular assemblies, andlet them decide on their own mode of self-organization.

e laer seems the more fiing with anarchist principles, but the resultswouldn’t have likely been too much different. Aer all, if the inhabitants of,say, Bilbao overwhelmingly desired to create a local government, how exactly

would one have stopped them? Municipalities where the church or landlordsstill commanded popular support would presumably put the same old right-wingauthorities in charge; socialist or communist municipalities would put socialistor communist party bureaucrats in charge; Right and Le statists would theneach form rival confederations that, even though they controlled only a fraction



88

of the former Spanish territory, would each declare themselves the legitimate

government of Spain. Foreign governments would recognize one or the other —since none would be willing to exchange ambassadors with a non-governmentlike the FAI, even assuming the FAI wished to exchange ambassadors with them,which it wouldn’t. In other words the actual shooting war might end, but thepolitical struggle would continue, and large parts of Spain would presumably endup looking like contemporary Chiapas, with each district or community dividedbetween anarchist and anti-anarchist factions. Ultimate victory would have to bea long and arduous process. e only way to really win over the statist enclaveswould be win over their children, which could be accomplished by creating anobviously freer, more pleasurable, more beautiful, secure, relaxed, fulfilling life inthe stateless sections. Foreign capitalist powers, on the other hand, even if theydid not intervene militarily, would do everything possible to head off the notorious

“threat of a good example” by economic boycos and subversion, and pouringresources into the statist zones. In the end, everything would probably dependon the degree to which anarchist victories in Spain inspired similar insurrectionselsewhere.

e real point of the imaginative exercise is just to point out that there are noclean breaks in history. e flip-side of the old idea of the clean break, the onemoment when the state falls and capitalism is defeated, is that anything shortof that is not really a victory at all. If capitalism is le standing, if it beginsto market your once-subversive ideas, it shows that the capitalists really won.You’ve lost; you’ve been coopted. To me this is absurd. Can we say that feminismlost, that it achieved nothing, just because corporate culture felt obliged to pay

lip service to condemning sexism and capitalist firms began marketing feministbooks, movies, and other products? Of course not: unless you’ve managed todestroy capitalism and patriarchy in one fell blow, this is one of the clearest signsthat you’ve goen somewhere. Presumably any effective road to revolution willinvolve endless moments of cooptation, endless victorious campaigns, endlesslile insurrectionary moments or moments of flight and covert autonomy. Ihesitate to even speculate what it might really be like. But to start in that direction,the first thing we need to do is to recognize that we do, in fact, win some. Actually,recently, we’ve been winning quite a lot. e question is how to break the cycleof exaltation and despair and come up with some strategic visions (the morethe merrier) about these victories build on each other, to create a cumulativemovement towards a new society.

Also published in “Rolling under: an anarchist journal of dangerous living”, number 5 by the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective.

Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 fromhttp://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-victory

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-victory

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-victory



e Anarchist Library

Anti-CopyrightFebruary 5, 2012

graeber collection of essays

Documents