The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement Reviews

• 
  Kevin

  Social Imagination 101: we need more accessible works that do not solely critique the status quo but also build social imagination for alternatives; how do we change the world if we cannot even imagine it?
  
  The Good:
  1) Revolutions as Transformations in Collective Common Sense:
  --Nuanced analysis of history reveals the ebbs and flows of history instead of listing singular events. Thus, we should appreciate that revolutions begin not on the fateful day(s) of uprising but much earlier as organizing in response to the historical context.
  --In this spirit, Graeber cites
  Immanuel Wallerstein in considering revolutions as transformations in collective common sense. For example, the common sense of the "French Revolution", or (to be more nuanced) the trend towards a single world market and world politics of colonial empires, involved a switch in common sense to:
  i) Change is good ("progress"),
  ii) Government policy should manage this change,
  iii) Government power/legitimacy comes from “the people”,
  --Graeber makes the compelling point that modern capitalism (particularly post-60s neoliberalism), when given the option, seems more determined to crush social imagination for alternatives rather than actually making itself (capitalism) more sustainable. This is quite the gamble if social imagination can be revived to challenge the pillars of ideological control.
  --Interesting point regarding the corporate media’s united role in convincing the public that everyone else is a sheep. We all know the faux news of the Right and Center, but when you stop and think about it, it is rather concerning that even the satirical Center-Left media (ex. Comedy Central's The Daily Show) perpetuates this. The Revolution will not be televised.
  
  2) “Democracy”:
  --“Democracy” is so packed with assumptions. On the global scale, the West is supposed to be a beacon of freedom and democracy. On the local scale (particularly in a work setting), we are frequently reminded: “that cannot work, that would be democracy/communism”.
  --Thus, the chapter “The Mob Begins to Think and Reason – the Covert History of Democracy” details the real-world origins and transformations of “democracy” to untangle the confusion.
  --We start with what should be common sense: elites throughout history despised democracy, as the threat of redistribution was clearly against their class interests. This is why Republics have Senates where aristocracy (“rule of the best”) protects established privileges. Ironically, Western Europe of the 16-18th centuries were kingdoms moving further into central absolutism.
  --Are elections the end-all-be-all of democracy? It is startling how fast this assumption collapses if only we stop to unpack it. Elections are public contests where there are clear winners (majority) and losers; this is inherently divisive and relies on coercion by the majority. This makes sense in Ancient Greece with its public competitive spectacles, and in armies where everyone is armed and a majority would rule by force.
  --Alternatives such as public assemblies relying on negotiations to form a synthesis/consensus are scrubbed from our common sense until we stop and think about it. Graeber details principles for this process at length.
  --Graeber also critiques the low standard that is liberal “rationality” (think of all the "logic bros") and makes the case that the liberal’s focus is on the privilege of issuing commands (thus the appeal of reducing complex social issues to reductionist, apolitical "rational" formulas, conveniently without the need for social engagement). Graeber contrasts this with feminism, and the higher standard of reasonableness, which requires dialogue and compromise.
  
  3) Analysis of the Occupy Movement:
  i) Why did it spread so quickly? Debt peonage united both students (student loan debt) and the working class (credit card debt, payday loans, subprime mortgage, squeeze on care work); also, the boundary is blurred with many students entering the work force.
  ii) Role of media? Coverage by the International Press (Guardian, Al Jazeera) pressured corporate US media to not completely censor the movements, while viral social media added slight pressures as well. More important seems to be the early assumption by Liberals that the Occupy Movement could be co-opted into electoral support for the Democrats, similar to how the Tea Party movement was used by Republicans. However, as soon as this did not work, corporate media slandering and then blackout was imposed.
  iii) Why did it collapse? The coordinated effort to neutralize the movement is worth unpacking. Key were:
  a) Militarized police brutality, with the interesting point of how much of this became practical due to the new common sense of the post-911 “War on Terror”.
  b) Media blackout + Liberals look away once the movement could not be forced into electoral politics. Calculated concessions + scares were also used to peel away liberal/middle class support.
  
  4) Morality of Debt and Work:
  --Debt is Graeber at his anthropological best, and his most well-known book dives into this:
  Debt: The First 5,000 Years
  --"Bullshit Jobs" (great meme) unpacks the morality of work:
  Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
  --Graeber’s colleague
  Michael Hudson has done vital work on Finance Capitalism’s central role in American Imperialism:
  Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
  --Back to the book being reviewed, there is a good bit on public banking/credit as a public utility in the context of American history (US Revolution’s war debt): The populist approach wanted to let it inflate away into nothing and base the currency on paper money issued by local land banks under public control. This was to depreciate over time to relieve debtors and thwart speculation (need to read up on public banking:
  The Public Bank Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity; for big picture visions, see:
  Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present).
  ...However, the elites implemented a pro-speculator strategy (not a surprise, as the Founding Fathers were the richest Americans and speculators/bondholders). Speculators who bought debt in depreciated prices must be paid back in full. A central bank (like Bank of England) was created to circulate debt as currency. More from Hudson:
  The Bubble and Beyond
  
  
  The Questionable:
  The “-isms” and schisms of the Left:
  --I first read this book early on in my self-learning of global issues; it is interesting how in North America the first radical critiques of American imperialism that slips into the periphery of the mainstream press are by small-‘A’ anarchists/“democratic socialists” like
  Chomsky, Graeber,
  Zinn,
  Hedges, etc. It seems this is a palatable entry point to leftism/radicalism for Western liberals/progressives who finally encounter the systemic contradictions of capitalism/imperialism but are still inundated with the Red Scare and lack the context of Global South's decolonization.
  --It is important to recognize the space for healthy debate before it devolves into sectarianism vulnerable to imperialism’s divide-and-conquer. From the debates between the various factions of Marxism/anarchism/anti-imperialism in various contexts (Western, Global South), clearly we can find crude versions of each “camp”. However, I cannot help finding synthesis in the nuanced views beneath the labels, especially given the messy contradictions of the real world.
  --Graeber, for the most part, sticks to general principles of anarchism/anarchist processes. His analysis on the history of anarchism, Marxism and certain historical events are certainly up for debate, and I would love to hear him engage with someone like communist/Marxist/Global South historian
  Vijay Prashad on these topics:
  Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism.
  --The major obstacles seem to stem from tactics, in particular how to protect from violence (both external and internal). Graeber ends with revisiting “communism” by focusing on “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Graeber then proposes that social relations are indeed predicated on this supposedly-utopia vision (which Graeber normalizes as "baseline communism”), where “capitalism is just a really bad way of organizing communism.”
• 
  Riku Sayuj

  
  This is an important work and I will review it over the weekend. In the meantime, I will leave this twitter conversation with David Graeber here. Should be useful.
  
  Link to Conversation:
  https://twitter.com/RenegadeTramP/sta...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Mike Dillon

  I really enjoyed this book. It's almost like two books in one.
  
  First, you get a fascinating inside account of the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, along with David's insights as to why the movement happened when it did, why it happened on the scale that it did, why the major public occupations ended when they did, and what the future may hold.
  
  Along with that, you get a history and radical analysis of the roots of democracy that serves to shed light on some of the vexing questions about American politics, such as why poor Southern whites vote "against their self-interest" by supporting Republicans.
  
  I bought a copy of the book as soon as I read
  this excerpt in The Baffler. I was not disappointed.
• 
  Mehrsa

  I asked my friends for a recommendation for a book with big and smart ideas. This is what someone sent me and boy were there some big and smart ideas in here. At first, it reads like a history of the OWS movement so I almost gave up on it, but I am so glad I made it to the end. Just like his first book, Debt, this is a big idea rethinking of how the world works. Or more accurately, Debt is a rethinking of how the world has been run and this book rethinks how it could or should be run. He throws out big and scary words like anarchy and communism, but he denudes them of their cultural context. For the closed-minded, there is a lot in here that will make their minds shut upon hearing. However, for those who are not attached to labels and dogmas, there is a lot to chew on.
  
  I have to say that I am skeptical that state control is not in the end a good--not because it forces individuals to follow arbitrary rules, but because it forces individuals to stick to their own private ordering. It each contracts and I think some sort of state enforcement of contracts is necessary to induce trust. How can there be trust without some centralized control? I suppose Graeber would say that this could be creatively worked out? I had lots of other questions along these lines and other criticisms--there is a whole body of literature out there (see Pinker and Robert Wright and Fukuyama) who had shown that capitalism can diminish violence. I would love for Graeber to at least grapple with those theories. Anyway, these ideas are well worth talking about. Because as Graeber says (rather presciently), it's the racist right wing that has actually picked up on economic inequality as a theme and the liberals have not touched it. It's time for liberals to grapple with what it means to work toward democracy with a lowercase d.
• 
  muthuvel

  Before delving into the work a little about the writer himself as David Graeber is a professor of anthropology in London School of Economics. He has done extensive works focusing upon the simple societies of Madagascar, Europe and North America, and has many relevant anthropological theories of value, money, magic, debt, political and social movements. Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In my amateur opinion, It is imperative to get to know this guy and his ideas especially when it comes to understanding political perspectives at the "anthropological" level (let me tell why, of course I'm not trying to boast the field which I'm in {at least I'm not trying to do that intentionally}). Another important note that he's also an Anarchist. I read a work of his earlier this month, "Fragments of Anarchist Anthropology" which pretty much pulled me in trying this work. I do have his other works "Bullshit Jobs" and "Debt: The first 5000 years" to try and suffer more from the burden.
  
  Myself getting to read Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin during mid year of 2019, I got pretty much interested and astounded by the possibilities a society could function free of social stratification, money, property, government or any other form of authority and external forces. After reading her work, my whole idea of "Anarchism" has been shattered. I was also at the verge of my conundrum to choose my masters and career path whether to go through the lane of Sociology or Anthropology. A very important distinction about Anthropology from other fields of social sciences is that people ought to look at the the individual level considering mainly the cultural patterns and behavior. More or less same could be said about Sociology but it is more or less interested in studying analysing society - people and institutions at large. I'm very much of a naivete to have made such broad generalization but what would people expect from a budding learner just after a semester. Sociology also uses to address certain problems through the lens and methodology also known as Ethnomethodology which gets its way from Ethnology (An original precursor to contemporary Anthropology and now a part of Anthropology).
  
  In studying societies and structures, the distinction it makes is that the study is performed from the bottom to top hierarchy i.e., all the way from the people at the base level in all sense historical, biological, social and cultural. Here Culture is the complex whole that encapsulates everything that humans learn and acquire as skill, action and behavior as a result of accumulated knowledge and experience. Learning through the lens of anthropology would help question the basis of the nature and the legitimacy of the system itself and also helps or better middle up what it means to have proper notions of so called 'progress', 'improvement' and other enlightenment ideals from which most of our contemporary mainstream societies run upon. As far as my knowledge, most familiar anthropologists that I know are/ were basically controversial for their views and critiques of current economic system, bureaucracy, political views and especially when it comes to the taboo topics of promiscuous practices and social order. Some of them made themselves to be known as 'Primtivists.' They ought to be highly ideal and resistive when it comes to labeling a particular culture or practice superior or inferior to other forms. Its almost like anthropologists (atleast social/cultural) are philosophers who do their work with people in their natural settings out of respect for the some practicality.
  
  I don't know if it all makes sense but I used all these redundant stuffs to make the readers feel the content is free of biased opinions and hatred towards a particular system or any practice. Here we go.
  
  Democracy is good as it's people. If the people are silent so does the system. The Democracy Project as the title indicates the movement and protest made by people to make sure Democracy still works out for the most of us. Here contextually the title refers to OWS movement. The book draws mainly two important things, the campaign strategy of Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011) - its efforts, motives, aftermath and ideology behind it and the other one - trying to unveil the covert history of democracy from the historical narratives and provides contradictory perspectives about our contemporary understanding of the same. Basic differences between voting system, lottery system and consensus making process draws the key differences in enabling certain ways of governing a particular aggregation. For instance, voting system was initially used among armies and pirates thus if in case the majoritarian hegemony was not favorable they always have this option to fight out it against the interest of the others. Modern democracy as we call it is totally majoritarian and dehumanizing in many ways especially when dealing in maintaining the existing political power through a set of emergent strategies, lobbying from corporate interests, and bureaucratic administration where the system is more interested in maintaining documents and filled up forms than really trying to help out the people directly. The author in one of his other works briefly go through the same that this present period of human condition marks the most amount of time spent by average human being to fill out forms and applying for obtaining services (which has its own justifications, thanks to Sociologist Max Weber).
  
  The whole idea of Democracy practised in the ancient Greece is more or less blurred by the ambiguous understanding, usage and practices of aristocracy, Mr. Graeber also tries to shower contradictory views on democracy via historical narratives from the enlightenment eras and also from the founding fathers of American Colonies.
  The word Democracy during the initial revolutionary french times were considered scornful and more or less associated with Anarchy.
  
  Coming back to the main part of the work i.e., Occupy Wall Street movement gives an astounding perspective of how an anarchist inspired movement where masses in thousands sustained and practised civil disobedience for almost 2 months in the field before things become plural with people of different ideologies and cultural backgrounds. The background work and campaign workshops pretty much give a perspective or even a sort of blueprint on how a political campaign from the grassroots movement could be organised and efficiently executed.
  
  Another important discussion is that the author's elaboration on Democracy and it's affinity with Anarchism especially when any kind of practice that necessitates the use of power and authority to make sure free market works efficiently over people across the globe wouldn't be clearly accepted as democracy.
  
  At the end of the review, nothing much is going to change anyone's perspective but most of us never try to understand the perspectives and narratives even when we have the luxury to do so while most of us lying in the lower gutters don't. Without historical contextual understanding we pretty much keep saying a particular system is the best and it has been proven by history which is pretty much discouraging and contradictory to the notion that humans are innovative and have creative potentials with decent ethics and morality to take care of themselves. All this practicality that we emphasize so much in everyday trivialities have pretty much susceptibility to get crumbled overnight. As they say, the human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.
• 
  Adam Ross

  This might be my favorite popular work on direct democracy. Graeber is a scholar-activist who was one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street. The book uses the Occupy movement, during the time it had camps all over the country, as a springboard for discussions about democracy itself. I wish I could underline everything in this book. Every page is replete with insights. The third chapter alone is worth the price of the book, which establishes the Founding Fathers as anti-democratic elitsts. Washington was the richest man in America at the time. They were terrified of democracy, and while they used the rhetoric of "all men are created equal" and "power to the people," they were really interested in freeing themselves from Britain so they could be the powerful in America. After the war, there were a number of democratic movements among the masses that were gathering strength (we call them "Shay's Rebellion," or more derogatorily, the Whiskey Rebellion). The Constitution was written as an explicit response to these mass movements to preserve the power and wealth structure that was already in place. Governor Mouris wrote after one encounter between the tradesmen and the Founders on the merits of a republic vs. the merits of a democracy, "the mob begins to think and to reason."
  
  The final two chapters are also great, as they explore the philosophy behind, and the practical issues of, direct democracy. If you've ever thought this couldn't possibly work, this is a pretty stark challenge to that notion. Not only can they work just fine, they are not utopian. They already exist, and they do work fine. One of his most challenging and profound insights is that humans by default are democratic, egalitarian, and socialist in outlook, over top of which we overlay competition and hierarchy. After droughts and floods people spontaneously order themselves as direct, egalitarian democracies. People are happily socialist when it comes to their family members, friends, and loved ones. Pretty much all of the social and psychological research shows that people instinctively prefer cooperation and horizontal structures to competitive and vertical ones.
  
  A fantastic book.
• 
  Philip Cherny

  This book was not at all what I expected it to be, judging from its title and description. Based on what little I’ve heard from him in radio interviews and podcasts, David Graeber struck me as an intelligent scholar who challenges and proposes alternatives to our dysfunctional political system. Having grown disillusioned with the status quo (like most Americans), I hoped this book might offer pointed but thorough critiques of the American political system from an anthropologist’s perspective and present insights into different ways we could reformulate democracy. While Graeber technically does deliver on both of those fronts (and not altogether unintelligently, I might add), he somehow manages to dilute his argument into a proselytizing message that feels like all spirit with little substance. I need more than spirit, admirable as it is, to become convinced. To cut to the chase, my three biggest frustrations with this book are as follows: 1. this book is poorly organized, 2. it seems to be guilty of preaching to the choir or at least not knowing who its target audience is, 3. it lacks the intellectual rigor of an academic book, and it does this especially by not CITING its f***ing sources!
  
  I was hoping Graeber’s thesis would resemble something more along the lines of an anthropological take on philosopher Jason Brennan’s “The Ethics of Voting,” which outlines the reasons why voting does not prove in the least effective at promoting and implementing the best policies to benefit the populace, as well as proposes a few theoretical alternatives to our current outdated model. Graeber could have turned to any number of social scientists, such as psychologists Drew Westen, Michael Spezio, and Brian Nosek on the cognitive dissonance involved in the decision making process in voting. Instead, we begin with a gratuitously lengthy (albeit somewhat entertaining) introductory narrative of Graeber’s experience in the Occupy Wall Street protests, which somehow feels tacitly self-congratulatory, especially when he emphasizes his own role in the formation of the movement while dismissive of the other left-wing occupiers. This unnecessary anecdote is proceeded by some sprawling history lesson about how America never really was a democracy to begin with (in fact he claims the only true direct democracies were Native Americans and 18th century pirates), up to our present day problems from economics to public policy—all of this we have to take his word for since he never cites where he’s getting his findings from. Finally he concludes with his ethos-laden appeal to persuade readers why anarchism is superior to any other radical or moderate left-wing alternative, by which point it begins to feel less like a cogent argument and more like a leaflet for a revolutionary cause. I shall elaborate on each of these sections later, but for now I’m simply listing them to demonstrate how unfocused this book feels in its overall organization. Is this lack of cohesion supposed to be part of Graeber’s anarchist aesthetic?
  
  In the first section, Graeber appeals to the just cause of “direct democracy” frequently enough for this to be merited as the central theme (it is in fact one of the key ideas of Graeber’s argument), but he fails to explain exactly what he means by “direct democracy,” what it might look like or entail, whether it is remotely feasible or under what conditions it might occur. Not until around the last quarter or so of the book do we learn that his ideal of direct participatory democracy takes the form of a “horizontal” (leaderless) consensus. Here, he goes into boring detail about the best way to conduct a consensus and its potential shortcomings and how to avoid such shortfalls, etc. Yet despite all this agonizing detail, he still neglects to take into account much of the problems with this form of democracy that social scientists would be quick to point out, among them: issues of group think (although he does emphasize the importance of diversity), factionalism when carried out on the broader scale (although he does address the problem of cliques), and the possible peer pressure effect of non-anonymous in-person consensus meetings, which is partly why caucuses have proved so controversial. He deliberately avoids the pitfall of asking more practical questions about how this anarchist consensus vote would operate on the large scale because such an undertaking would be worth several volumes of material in itself. Obvious questions still arise, such as how would such a system of direct democracy be possible in an age of mass media consumption? Or perhaps this would obviate the dominant forms of “vertical” (centralized) mass media, and American society atomize into regional communities with their own local policy procedures and micro-politics? In the latter case, I believe that kind of democracy is called regionalism or tribalism which we typically associate with the bloody conflicts in Afghanistan, but perhaps I’m being a bit unfair and too broad-brushed here. My point being that the needs of society seem far too vast and complex for me to accept consensus as the ultimate panacea to all policy procedures.
  
  As I mentioned above, Graeber’s narrative in the first section seems outright dismissive of the marxists, socialists, the liberal moderates (represented by the MoveOn activist organization), and even the international labor movements who all clearly participated in OWS as much as his strand of anarchists. I do not fault Graeber for staking out a position and defending it; in fact, I think he did a pretty decent job justifying his political philosophy. However, I find his narrative of the OWS protests suspect, as if he’s hijacking OWS to his own anarchist agenda, when in fact the OWS protesters appeared disorganized and disparate, with their disgruntled feelings towards their collective disenfranchisement to unite them. While I’ve seen scholars like law professor Bernard Harcourt make cases for how it was precisely the OWS protesters’ lack of demands that made them so radical and “resistant to discourse,” I feel there’s a good argument to made that it was simply a sign of the kind of protest that emerged (the rabbling scream of a mob that felt voiceless), and that discourse and a set of demands is precisely what they would have needed to unite it into a revolutionary cause. It appeared to me that the vast majority of these protestors were students who couldn’t pay off their loan debt—that is, a privileged status that is losing its status (I myself fall in this category.) To quote Slavoj Žižek in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously: “They are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to a proletarian status…This also accounts for the new wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus-wage in later life.” I’m not attempting here to dismiss the occupiers as mere petty complaints of the salaried bourgeoisie, but on the scale of global capital, the American crisis (which suffered the least from the fallout) appears dwarfed in comparison to (e.g.) the Indonesian prawn farmers earning the equivalent of 12 cents an hour in a job that is far below acceptable labor standards. Perhaps I’m making a red herring argument here, but I fail to see how we can talk about the decline in our standard of living without also addressing the labor standards in developing countries that have made our way of life possible. Graeber fails to mention this elephant in the room in the context of the OWS protests and instead spins it as an opportunity to push his political agenda.
  
  In the second section, while I found myself fascinated by his refreshing take on the American Revolution as ultimately an anti-democratic enterprise, I would have liked to go to the sources and see whom he borrowed this revisionist interpretation from. And when he moved on to the present day, his description of the woes of capitalism and American “democracy” appeared merely to preach to the liberal choir rather than persuade any moderates or conservatives of his view. He would have been more effective had he cited his freakin sources! Some facts he mentioned in passing were more nuanced than he admitted. For instance, I recall him referring to the recent repeal of usury laws to hike interest rates as high as 300%. What he failed to mention was that these ridiculously high interest rates apply specifically to the politically fraught “payday loans,” whose nefariousness is in all likelihood overblown (for those interested, there’s an informative Freakonomics Radio episode that goes into detail about the murkiness of these loans.)
  
  While I have mostly been trashing this book, I will say I found it entertaining and perhaps even thought provoking. Informative? I wouldn’t go that far, but I will give this point in Graeber’s favor: because of the last section of his book, where he outlines some reasonable, common sense demands, I am now less quick to outright dismiss radical left-wing anarchism as an inconceivable, utopian pipe dream. While still very much a skeptic, I’d love to delve more into anarchism and see how they address issues such as: how would they propose we should take care of the elderly, the mentally disabled, etc.? I want to end with my final skepticism of the anarchist left-wing appeal, again by turning to Žižek and his critique of Deleuzian collectivist participatory politics: “The vast majority of people want to be passive and just rely on an efficient state apparatus…I wouldn’t like to live in a state where some kind of permanent participation engagement is going on and so on…I much prefer to be a passive citizen” (“A Reply to My Critics” (2013)) Even if we cast aside serious (and legitimate) concerns about the possible Hobbesian selfish, brutishness of human nature when devoid of the State, and how this brutish nature may be propelled when people unfortunately have relatively easy access to weapons, we still are left with people who are too tired, ignorant, and concerned with their own domestic issues to consider the best way to care for a remote population of people who have no access to clean drinking water. Perhaps those are tasks best suited for the smooth machinery of bureaucracy. Perhaps we might be able to envision some kind of compromise between the two, should we sort out which issues best fit the community, and which pertain to bureaucracy.
• 
  Edward Rathke

  A fascinating account of Occupy Wall Street from someone who was often incorrectly labeled its leader. David Graeber takes us from the early meetings that would eventually lead to direct actions that would, somewhat unintentionally, begin the Occupy Wall Street movement. He then theorises on why this social anarchist movement became so widespread and popular, whereas so many previous ones failed. His answers there are surprising in that, in many ways, he sort of shrugs, though he does point to several things that made US media and international media ready to broadcast this kind of movement.
  
  He then theorises why it collapsed upon the forced eviction of the people occupying Wall Street. He points primarily to OWS' unwillingness to become a traditional political body that the vaguely left media of america wanted it to be. And even how, when places like MSNBC realized that OWS was not going to be the leftwing version of the Tea Party (a grassroots movement that evolved into a political party with candidates and so on), they almost immediately stopped paying attention to the movement. Of course, he also discusses how popular media smeared OWS and accused them of all kinds of violence and sexual assault, when the evidence shows that OWS actually led to fewer crimes in cities with encampments.
  
  And so the first half of the book is a discussion of OWS specifically. Why it succeeded, how it grew out of previous movements, how it was perceived, and how it was terrorized, and eventually broken down. He also points to some of its longlasting achievements. The book came out before the 2016 election, but it's almost unthinkable that Bernie Sanders would have had the support he did without OWS spearheading many of these discussions and bringing these topics to the forefront of american discourse.
  
  From there, the book become more a discussion of anarchist tactics and strategies, which is equally interesting, assuming you're interested in such things. If you're not, it's probably strange for you to be reading this at all, yes? But Graeber discusses anarchism and democracy, tracing their historical contexts, and how the definition of democracy developed over time, from something undesirable in 1776 to a slogan for anything anti-communist in the 1980s.
  
  But, yes, it's a very interesting book that I'd highly recommend if you've even passing curiosity about anarchism or state tyranny.
• 
  Kate

  David Graeber has written an extremely accessible book about, not only the origins and inner workings of the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy movement, but about the issues it brought to the fore. What exactly is democracy and what are the origins of the concept? What myths have we held about "freedoms"? What is equality? What are alternatives to our current repressive debacle of a political/economic system? The book also delineates strategies used by protest movements around the world.
  
  This book affirmed so many of the random thoughts I've had swirling through my head for the past 25 years or so, like, "If this corporate economic environment keeps it up, this is eventually gonna an awful lot like feudalism." And, "You know, not every governmental regulation is such a great regulation." It also clarified many concepts and terms that I had never understood before. Until I read this book, I never actually knew what an anarchist was. I just assumed they were the scary people who threw Molotov cocktails. The hand gestures used by Occupy General Assemblies just seemed sort of silly to me. Now I understand their purpose. In fact, Graeber has an entire section on the most common questions he is asked about Occupy. While I always thought of myself as liberal, I have never truly explored the variations or differences of my fellow left wingers. I never thought about the planning, the drawing on experience, the strategy involved in creating the sorts of changes we want to see in the world. Graeber lays a lot of that out in a way that a reasonably intelligent person with a passing interest can understand. He has the academic credentials to lay out cogent arguments, and the boots-on-the-ground experience to show how theory impacts action and every day activity.
  
  At the end of the book, almost parenthetically, he makes the argument for working less, not more, and for a truly horizontal, anarchic society. I'm not sure, economically, how that would all come out in the wash, and he is frank to state that nobody knows how a new economic system would work, just as the inventors of capitalism didn't know how that would look in the ensuing years. But clearly, capitalism isn't working, it is a moral and social disaster for 99% of us, and environmental disaster for 100% of the planet. Graeber enthusiastically endorses alternatives. Very thought provoking work.
• 
  Bookish Dervish

  مشروع الديمقراطية.
  في كتابه، proposed roads to freedom, يقول برتراند راسل- يغتني الكثير من الناس بطرق تضر بالمجتمع بشكل أكبر بكثير من الجرائم التي يرتكبها الفقراء، و رغم ذلك، لا يمسهم أي عقاب لأنهم لا يضرون بمصالح النظام القائم-
  يجادل هذا الكتاب الذي بين أيدينا بشأن نفس الفكرة، غير أنه لا يكتفي بتوضيحها بل يتخذ موقفا معتبرا للوقوف بوجه المتنفذين الذين يتربحون باستمرار الوضع دون تغيير.
  هذا الكتاب هو ثورة. يناقش الفكرة وراء ضهور حركة احتلوا وولستريت. Occupywallstreet#الحركة التي تناهض البنى المؤسسة و الأفكار الداعمة لهيمنة ال١٪ على مقدرات العالم.
  سلاحهم الحرية التامة في تكوين الرأي و الدفاع عنه و الديموقراطية في اتخاذ القرار. الفوضويون يجابهون الترسانة الأمنية و المالية و الإعلامية لفئة متنفذة زاوجت بين المال و السلطة و السلاح.
  جذور الحركة قديمة قدم التسلط ذاته وفي العصر الحديث تجد بداياتها في ثورات الطلاب المناهضة للعولمة و المدافعة عن البيئة. يبدو الأمر كأنه متعلق بعصابة من المثاليين و الحالمين الطامحين إلى إزالة كل مظاهر الفوقية و المركزية. فالديمقراطية تُمارس بشكل مباشر كتلك التي عرفتها الساحة الأثينية Agora كنقيض للشكل الحالي الممارس في الولايات المتحدة و الذي لا يعدوا كونه إختيار ممثلين لا يدافعون إلا على مصالح طغمة ال١٪.
  مقاومة سلمية لكنها شرسة للمؤسسات التي تغتني فقط لأنها تقرر ما المال باستصدار سندات خزينة و بقروض و ديون يُرتهن بها الطامحون إلى تسلق السلم الإجتماعي. الدول أيضا مستعبدة في هذا الشأن. فهي تدفع جزية و إن سميت غير ذلك.
  يعرّي الكتاب أيضا حماية الآلة العسكرية الأمريكية للإمبراطورية المالية. الأمر الذي ينظر إليه بشكل بدهيٍّ.
  كتاب رائع و مفيد. إلا أنه يتطلب خلفية إقتصادية لفهم بعض المقاطع.
  هل لي أن أستغرب من عنوان الكتاب؟ فهو يالأحرى عن حركة احتلوا وولستريت و حركات مناهضة العولمة التي تتغيى الحرية كقيمة عليا و مثلى لا محيد عنها لتنضيم التدافع البشري ثم بعد ذلك عن ترسيخ ديمقراطية حقيقية مباشرة باتجاه أفقي بحيث لا تمارس الأكثرية تسلطا على الأقلية.
• 
  my name is corey irl

  *airhorn* david gruber: WELCOME to democrarcy RELOADED (people's mic: reloaded... reloaded... reloaded...) *suddenly youre mind is blown by the sickest and most unexpeceted dubstep drop ever*
• 
  Emma Sea

  Quick frame of reference: this is the guy who came up with the "99 percent" bit of the "We are the 99 percent". ¹
  
  Unexpectedly enthralling. I nearly quit in the first chapter, when Graeber was all:
  
  I'd begun reengaging with the New York activist scene when I'd visited the city during my spring break in late April. My old friend Priya Reddy, a onetime tree sitter and veteran eco-activist, invited me to see two of the founders of the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement . . . the most important thing that came out of that evening with the Egyptians was that I met Marisa . . . Marisa told me about a meeting the next day at Earth Matters in the East Village for a new group she was working with called US Uncut . . . At the time I was working with a different group, Arts Against Cuts . . . Later that month my friend Colleen Asper talked me into attending an event . . . as I walked in an even older friend, Sabu Kohso, who . . .
  
  Aaaagggghhh!
  
  It goes on and on for 54 pages! There's endless friends, and in-group sneering. ² At times I felt like I was reading Jory Does Social Activism (Sam working undercover as an agent provocateur??) but above all there was an overwhelming sense that Graeber's activism is an insider clique that has little to do with the lives of actual humans.
  
  However, as we entered chapter two I could see the point of all this name/group dropping, because it was clear that the Occupy movement was the product of many people with decades of experience with grass roots activism and deep personal commitments to collective action.
  
  It was actually half way through the book, with the history of "democracy" as a system of government, that the book began to shine. Graeber describes himself as an anarchist with a small a. ³ What this means to him is a committment to consensus decision-making with a horizontal base. And Graeber is of course right: anything short of consensus decision-making relies on the wielding of force: violence, or the threat of violence, to maintain order.
  
  Graeber provides some ideas for how consensus decision-making might work, with a discussion of the problems and criticisms. It is a testament to his clarity of writing that for once I could actually see how this might be a viable means of self-government, and also that I could see how my own frustrations with the Occupy movement (for pete's sake, why don't you come up with with a list of what you want??!) came from looking at the situation completely backwards. I had failed to see there is more than one frame of reference.
  
  Graeber melds political history, economics, the fourth estate, pirates (pirates!), and civil disobedience into a fascinating global story.
  
  One of the best books I've read in 2013.
  
  
  ¹ In true participatory action, other people came up with the "we" and the "are the"
  ² "Great," I muttered to Georgia. "It's the International Socialist Organisation."
  ³ Best line of the book: "They held a vote and the anarchists won."
• 
  Vamsi Krishna KV

  Henry Ford famously remarked that if the American people were ever to figure out how banking really works, “there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The same can be said about the works of David Graeber.
  
  This book weaves together the history of American democracy with the first person account of Occupy movement and his retrospect insights. And most of it is loosely organized which makes it both rewarding and mildly exasperating. Rewarding because one gets to know a whole new line of unorthodox thought process thrown at you unexpectedly. Exasperating because he will switch gears just when you are hooked to hear more. He writes in the tradition of Chomsky however I felt his approach much more grounded, probably due to his extensive involvement in grassroots organizing. Another aspect which reminded me of Chomsky is his critique that solipsistic Left academia had been as much as obstructive as conservative groups in championing radical change.
  
  The most enlightening discussion of the entire book for me is the early history of American constitution. Not only does the declaration of independence doesn't say anything about democracy, and that the founding fathers were skeptical of the very idea of it. And also the fact that Bill of the Rights was only introduced as an amendment later after all the hullabaloo raised by Anti-federalists. The whole speculation about unorthodox origins of democratic thought was quite amusing and insightful. It all sums up how farcical the notion that democracy was invented in Ancient Greece and the myth that American system lies at the end of unbroken chain of traditions called 'Western Civilization' (which in itself is an equally farcical concept)
  
  The last chapter offers some guidance on strategies of horizantal organizing, consensus making, tactics to deal with police etc along with the lessons learnt from the history. It ends on a note of hope synthesizing the ideas from all his other books suggesting that not knowing the exact details of how our future might look like shouldn't be a deterrent to dream about better ways of organizing the world. The excitement of the dizzying possibilities in the direction of freedom should alone be sufficient catalyst for our voyage to new horizons.
  
  I would say that you can't get disappointed by reading Graeber irrespective of your background and in fact it is incredibly rewarding, if you are free-spirited and willing to question everything under the sun.
• 
  Mila

  Ok, so I was deliberating between 2 or 3 stars and ultimately settled on 3. Mostly because a lot of the issues I had with this book was simply disagreeing with Graeber’s arguments rather than having an issue with how the argument is laid out. That is, Graeber is a very effective writer.
  
  Graeber is at his strongest when he talks about economics and global finance. His discussions, while brief, about organizations like the IMF, as well as the role of Wall Street and finance in politics, is fairly strong.
  
  However, when he starts talking about organizing, he begins to lose me. The obsession with horizontalism, in particular, is something I empathize with and felt in the past, but found Occupy to be the nail in its coffin. Graeber doesn’t really address the failures of horizontalism in political revolution, particularly its failure to adequately disperse ideology and class consciousness. He talks about times the right briefly has outdone the left when speaking to peoples’ grievances, but doesn’t address popular leftist contentions about why that’s often the case (namely, having a lack of leadership). He brings up Egypt which is a great example, but doesn’t tell us about the conclusion of 2011 as a leaderless movement. Ultimately, its lack of progressive leadership harnessing popular sentiment left a gaping hole for Islamists to take over, making Egypt a point against his argument rather than for it.
  
  I also found some examples to be a bit quick, sloppy, and unnecessary. Briefly bringing up Lebanon and Hezbollah which is a complex topic in a complex political environment as a case for horizontalism doesn’t really transfer very well to other political landscapes.
  
  I learned some cool things in here and think Graeber has a unique talent of being academically inclined while also being able to reach a lot of different kinds of people- his writing is accessible and clear. It doesn’t quite do it for me in some areas, but it’s not a book I regret reading either. I would be more interested in reading his work on debt given what I read here.
  
  
• 
  Mothwing

  Back in the day I half followed the Occupy movement, and then it suddenly just... disappeared from news coverage. There one day, gone the next. This book helps explain why.
  
  It also looks at the development of democracy in the West and different forms of democracy. A lot of it is reassuringly common-sensical. The most interesting thing I took away from this is that elections/voting are essentially a public contest/spectacle and ought to be avoided in situations which require earnest cooperation afterwards, unless it's like, a straw poll. I find this to be very true in my experience and makes so much sense.
• 
  Antonio

  Una introducción que funciona perfectamente como llave para obtener muchas más preguntas. Aún así, explica conceptos básicos de forma sencilla con términos comprensibles para cualquier profano en la materia.
• 
  Grant

  Finally a book that deals with the history and broader reach of the occupy movement the deconstruction of misconceptions surrounding occupy and the idea of democracy. RIP David.
• 
  Clay Zdobylak

  An enthralling book. The occupy movement was given more clarity, direct democracy and consensus assemblies were made tangible and replicable, and my desire to be a part of the American experiment has been intensely invigorated.
  A must read if you feel confused and startled by our present political situation.
• 
  William

  Brilliant stuff as always. This is a more personal account of David Graeber's politics than Debt and his recent collection. It's great to hear so many thoughts kind of synthesized in a more personal way. I recommended this to a few radically minded students of mine, and I'm thinking about using some of these principles in my 5th block Oral Communications class (which has turned into something of an activist's course). I want to experiment and introduce the kids to horizontal organizational structures. Actually, considering David has read my reviews before, I'm going to look him up and see if he knows of any radical groups geared towards radical thought. If you read this before I get in touch, ol' Davey, hit me up.
• 
  Matt

  I had to give this five stars for being one of the most engrossing, informational, deeply-analytic books I've ever read. Graeber is incredibly intelligible and completely reconstructed my viewpoint on several rudimentary principles regarding government. As both an iconoclastic personal account and a history of democracy and the state, this succeeds inexorably. There were some sentences that felt a bit long-winded and took a couple re-reads to fully comprehend, but that's just a cavil that never managed to detract from the book as a whole.
  
  If I wasn't currently pressed for time, I'd give this the review it deserves but I hope to come back and do just that when I get the opportunity.
• 
  Kübra Sümer

  Her olayın birbirine bağlı olduğunu şimdi anlıyorum.
  Nasıl elimiz kolumuz bağlı oturduğumuzu ve demokraside aslında herkesin içten içe sorduğu o tersliği, tarihin içinden çekip çıkardığı örneklerle bize teker teker anlatıyor Graeber. Aynı zamanda Arap Baharı'yla başlayan küresel isyan hareketinin bir parçası olan #occupywallstreet olayının neden ve sonuçları üzerinde açıklayıcı bir şekilde durmuş. Ve buradan da işgalin dayanağı olan fikre...
  Ufuk açıcı bir kitap.
• 
  Gavin

  What is democracy anyway, and what does it have to do with the United States of America, and with modern politics? This book is a fantastic, well-reasoned and well-researched answer. Highly recommended to anyone ever.
• 
  Alex Johnston

  Me to my partner every 2 minutes watching the election coverage last night - "did you know we don't really live in a democracy? Traditionally elections were considered to be the aristocratic mode of-"
• 
  Holly Wood

  It's like what making out with justice feels like.
• 
  John Chrysostom

  David Graeber goes from being a stereotypical jewish revolutionary to a very interesting writer almost solely because of his take on debt.
  
  If you have not read it, Debt; A 5,000 Year History, is easily his best book and crucial in my opinion to understanding why David Graeber is really any different then the long list of Jewish revolutionaries from Karl Marx to Betty Friedan.
  
  
  This book is about the occupy wall street movement, and largely about the strategies that were used to organize a group that was ideologically against hierarchy, many such strategies being sourced from the Quakers.
  
  David himself acknowledges the jewish flavor of this particular revolutionary movement with an amusing short example about one of the long meetings he was a part of. It was brought up to the group that it would be anti semetic to have a meeting on a paritcular jewish holiday, and when a black women protested, it had to be poplitely explained to her that she was the only non-jewish person left in the group of about 6-10 people.
  
  As always Davids arguments are often unique and quite funny, there has been no book of his that I had not enjoyed and always leave feeling that his jewish revolutionary heart is often in the right place.
  
  
• 
  Karky

  I truly enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit. I appreciated a perspective that was a little different than my own even if our morals seem to be fairly aligned. My one let down was that while I appreciate their goals and don’t necessarily disagree with them, I did find some aspects of the situation missing.
  
  Like, I get how anarchists reject any authority of the government or police. That’s cool. It’s great to want to keep the moral authority, but as he says in later chapters… what do you mean by revolution? A revolution of ideas? Great. You might lose the battle, but getting the idea out there… no one can kill an idea. But you also have to consider that the things you are fighting impact lives in the immediacy, and likely of the already marginalized. So sure, fight the long fight, but who is losing in the meantime? Will they even care about your revolution if they’re dying now?
  
  It also failed to talk about how white supremacy fits into the narratives.
• 
  Rasmus Tillander

  Taattua Graeber-laatua.
  
  The Democracy Project on tietynlainen aktivistiantropologian ABC. Graeber käy siinä läpi omia havaintojaan Occupy Wall Street -liikkeen toiminnasta höystettynä demokratian ja anarkismin teorialla ja suoraan toimintaan liittyvillä käytännöillä.
  
  Itse kun olen enemmän teoreetikko kuin aktivisti, nautin hieman enemmän nimenomaan deliberaation/äänestämisen eroihin ja aktivismi historiaan liittyvistä osioista. Mutta praktiikkaa käsittelevät osat tarjosivat myös uutta näkökulmaa esimerkiksi Elokapinasta keskusteluun. Lisäksi Graeberin oma kanta, "anarkia pienellä a:lla" tuntuu joltain mitä voisin aidosti kannattaa.
  
  Ennen kaikkea teos on kuitenkin innostava puheenvuoro vallankumouksellisuuden mahdollisuudesta jopa kaikkein valtavimpien systeemien sisällä. Tuntuu taas hetken siltä, että muutos parempaan on mahdollinen.