The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  Their attitude toward the political class was summed up by the famous slogan “que se vayan todos,” roughly translated, “they can all go to hell.” Legend has it that by early 2002, it had reached the point where politicians—of any political party—could not even eat out at restaurants without wearing phony mustaches or similar disguises, since if recognized they would be mobbed by angry diners, or pelted with food. The end result was that a Social Democratic government came to power led by a president (Néstor Kirchner) who previously had been the mildest reformist possible, but who recognized that in order to restore any public sense that government could be a legitimate institution, he had to take some sort of radical action. He decided to default on a large part of Argentina’s international debt. His doing so set off a cascade of events that nearly destroyed international enforcement agencies like the International Monetary Fund, and effectively ended the Third World debt crisis. The ultimate effects were of untold benefit to billions of the world’s poor, and led to the strong rebound of the Argentine economy, but none of it would have happened were it not for the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of Argentina’s political class. What’s more, the strategy adopted ensured that, even when the government did manage to reassert itself, many of the self-governing institutions created during the initial upheaval have been preserved.

  Assuming that an actual insurrectionary situation is for the moment unlikely (granted, insurrectionary situations always seem unlikely until the moment they actually happen; but it seems reasonable to imagine that at the very least, economic conditions would have to get considerably worse), we are probably faced with some homegrown combination of these options, or something broadly like them. At least the list might provide a way to start thinking about further possibilities.

  It also helps clarify that up till now Occupy Wall Street has effectively been pursuing the last option: a strategy of delegitimation. Considering political attitudes in the contemporary United States, this was probably inevitable. After all, before we even started, we were already halfway there. The overwhelming majority of Americans already saw their political system as corrupt and useless. In fact, the summer when the occupation was first being planned had been marked by an unusually bizarre, childish, and pointless display of political histrionics over the national debt ceiling that had left congressional approval ratings in the single digits (9 percent)—the lowest they had ever been. As most Americans languished in the midst of a crippling recession, millions in desperate situations that the political system had essentially declared itself unwilling or unable to address, congressional Republicans were threatening to cause the U.S. government to default in order to force massive cuts in social services intended to head off a largely imaginary debt crisis that would, in a worst-case scenario, cause the U.S. government to default some years further down the line. President Obama, in turn, had decided the way to appear reasonable in comparison, and thus seem as his advisors liked to put it “the only adult in the room,” was not to point out that the entire debate was founded on false economic premises, but to prepare a milder, “compromise” version of the exact same program—as if the best way to expose a lunatic is to pretend that 50 percent of their delusions are actually true. In this context, the only really reasonable thing to do is to point out exactly that the entire debate was meaningless, and that the political order had succeeded only in delegitimizing itself. This is how a ragtag group of anarchists, hippies, unemployed college students, pagan tree sitters, and peace activists suddenly managed to establish themselves, by default, as America’s adults in the first place. There are times when staking out a radical position is the only reasonable thing to do.

  As I say, I don’t want to make specific suggestions about long-term strategy, but I think it is important not to forget that American politics has become a game played between players who have given up on the idea that politics even could be about anything other than collective delusions, realities that are, in effect, created by power. And “power” here usually turns out, in the end, to be a euphemism for organized violence. This is why it’s so crucial, whatever we do, to both continue to create spaces where we can genuinely operate through reasonableness and compromise, even at the same time as we lay bare the apparatus of the sheer stupid brute force that lies behind the politicians’ claims to be able to “create realities” out of nothing. This must, necessarily, mean facing that brute, stupid power not with any sort of “reasonable” compromise, but with a form of flexible, intelligent counterpower that develops a radical alternative while constantly reminding everyone in no uncertain terms exactly what the basis of that power really is.

  * I should note that the usual language in Occupy Wall Street is that a block has to be based on a “moral, ethical, or safety concern that’s so strong you’d consider leaving the movement were the proposal to go forward.”

  † As the reader might suspect this refers to a specific incident: an Orthodox Jewish newcomer to a Direct Action Network meeting objected to our plan to meet on several proposed dates on the grounds they were Jewish holidays, to the exasperation of several others—there were only twelve of us left after a very long meeting—and one African-American activist indicated she was inclined to block on the grounds holding the meeting on that date would be discriminating on the basis of religion. Someone finally had to explain, quietly, that she was actually the only non-Jewish person remaining in the room.

  ‡ In fact, the reasons hark back to a widespread prejudice, born of liberal political theory, against anything that might look like “arbitrary power.” For at least a century, the predominant justification for government use of force against its own citizens is that this is only abusive if it doesn’t follow explicit, well-publicized rules. The implication is that any way of exercising power, even by influence, is objectionable if it isn’t formally recognized and the powers explicitly spelled out. As a result, informal power (even if nonviolent) is somehow considered more of a threat to human freedom even than violence itself. Ultimately, of course, this is a kind of utopianism: it’s quite impossible for there to really be clear and explicit rules covering all political action.

  § Within the European Union, this principle is referred to by the atrocious jargon-term “subsidiarity.” As far as I know there’s no better word for it but I couldn’t bring myself to use that one.

  ‖ Particularly since the Constitution contains no corresponding rights to freedom of traffic flow, or freedom from nuisance, which are the principles usually held to justify abridgements on freedom of assembly: the famous “time, place, and manner” qualifications used by the courts to justify police restriction on freedom of assembly. The text of the First Amendment refers to Congress, but it has been held since Gitlow v. New York in 1925 to apply to all legislative bodies in the United States, as well as to municipal ordinances.

  a In much the way, one might even say, that those with the courage to block a proposal clearly favored by a majority in a consensus meeting take on a special constitutional role as well.

  b I was once at an activist roundtable on violence and nonviolence in Quebec, and one ultra-militant began his intervention by asking “Why do we assume nonviolence is always better than violence if there’s a choice?” I replied, “Because it’s really difficult to have to spend your life trying to get around with no legs.” Which is the almost inevitable consequence if bombs start going off.

  FIVE

  BREAKING THE SPELL

  In the fall of 2011, most of us felt we were standing in the middle of a global revolution. Everything was happening almost unimaginably rapidly, with a wave of unrest that began in Tunisia suddenly engulfing the world, threatening everywhere. We were seeing sympathy demonstrations in China and almost daily new occupations in places like Nigeria and Pakistan. In retrospect, of course, there was no way things could really continue at such a pace. It was as if just as all the international security structures designed to head off such mass resistance—and which, since the crash of 2008, h
ad been churning out endless studies and working papers on the likelihood of food riots and global unrest—had finally convinced themselves, rather incredulously, that nothing significant was really going to happen, it did; and now that it had they were standing there gaping just as incredulously.

  Still, when the inevitable wave of repression came, it left many of us in temporary confusion. We had expected to see the truncheons come out eventually. What surprised many of us was the reaction of our liberal allies. America, after all, sees itself not as a nation united by any particular ethnic origin, but as a people united by their freedoms; and these were the very people who ordinarily put themselves forth as those freedoms’ most stalwart defenders. The fact that they proved happy instead to see civil liberties as so many bargaining chips, to be defended only if strategically convenient, was sobering—even to many anarchists like me who have come to expect almost nothing else from the liberal establishment. The effect was all the more distressing because so many of those left in the lurch had just directly experienced the violence. These were young men and women who’d been first drawn into a euphoric sense of almost unlimited possibility, but who now had to deal with vivid memories of watching their library, so lovingly assembled, trashed and sent off to the incinerators by laughing patrolmen, of seeing their dearest friends beaten with sticks and shackled as the mainstream media dutifully refused to enter the perimeter, unable to do anything to help them, of seeing friends Maced in the face having to face the prospect of lifelong respiratory problems, of having to scramble to find housing for people whose life possessions, however modest, had been destroyed by agents of the state—led to a bubbling up of every conceivable tension and ill-feeling that had been repressed or ignored in the weeks previous when organizing and defending the camps had given us such obvious common purpose. For a month or so, the New York General Assembly and Spokescouncil fell into almost complete dysfunction. There were near fistfights at some meetings; screaming fits; ringing cries of racism; an endless tangle of overlapping crises over tactics, organization, and money; and accusations on everything from police infiltration to narcissistic personality disorder. At moments like this, even professional optimists like myself are tempted to feel cynical. But periodically—with striking regularity, actually—I found myself confronted with reminders of just how much I’ve already taken for granted.

  A few months after the evictions, after one typically fretful hallway conference, I met a solemn, bearded man, perhaps thirty-five years old, conservatively dressed, who remarked, “You know, it doesn’t really matter if the May Day actions come off at all—I mean, like anyone I’m hoping they will. But even if it does, even if we never reoccupy, even it all were to end today, as far as I’m concerned, you guys have already changed everything. For me anyway. I think we’re looking at the beginning of a transformation of American culture.”

  “Really? But how many people has it really reached?”

  “Well, the thing is for anyone who has, you can’t really go back to thinking about things the way you did before. I notice it in my job. Here we might spend all our time complaining about meetings, but just try to go back to the real world again if you’d never experienced a democratic meeting before; you go back to work and suddenly it’s, like, wait a minute! This is just completely ridiculous. And you talk to your friends, your sister, your parents, and saying, well, what else is there we’ve just assumed is the only way you can do something that might seem just as stupid if we didn’t just take it for granted? You might be surprised. A lot of people are asking that sort of thing.”

  And I thought: could it be that’s all a revolution really is? When that starts to happen? That is, if it really has …

  It’s a much vexed question: What is a revolution?

  We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by some kind of popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

  At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask, Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has done this the most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

  Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt, just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which much like 1848 broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political liberation, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism.

  Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the idea that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: where it’s necessary to lay the terms out, as I just did, for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.

  Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: widening the franchise, introducing universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast, whether it took the form it did in China—of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution—or Berkeley and New York, where it marked an alliance of students, dropouts, and cultural rebels, or even Paris, where it was an alliance of students and workers, it was in the same initial spirit: a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, of anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing not just of political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.

  It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late 1960s as an embarrassing failure. A case can surely be made for that view. It’s certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any wides
pread change in political common sense—a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire, a hatred of bureaucracy, and suspicions over the role of government—was the political right. Above all, the movements of the 1960s allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the 1980s, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism.

  The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, the trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and allowed the opening of the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempts to re-create a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.