Contents

David Graeber Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! Andrej Grubacic & David Graeber Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-rst Century David Graeber Hope in Common David Graeber The New Anarchists
A globalization movement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Billionaires and clowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anarchy and peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practising direct democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pregurative politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 18 25
27 30 32 33 35

David Graeber Revolution in Reverse Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conict between political ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination) Part I. Be realistic . . . Part II. On violence and imaginative displacement
Excursus on transcendent versus immanent imagination .............

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38 41 46
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Part III. On alienation Part IV. On Revolution

Revolution in Reverse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 56
60 62

David Graeber The Twilight of Vanguardism

Why So Few Anarchists in the Academy? 1 .........................

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History of the Idea of Vanguardism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-alienated Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 72

David Graeber The Shock of Victory

I: The Anti-Nuclear Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II: The Global Justice Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perspectives (with a brief return to 30s Spain) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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David Graeber

Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!

Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But its one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous. At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The rst is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist you just dont realize it. Lets start by taking a few examples from everyday life. If theres a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?

If you answered yes, then you are used to acting like an anarchist! The most basic anarchist principle is self-organization: the assumption that human beings do 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 dignity and respect. Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they dont believe that other people are. But if you think about it, dont those people all feel exactly the same way about you? Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think its necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible. Its all a vicious circle. If people are used to being treated like their opinions do not matter, they are 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 matter. Once they understand that their opinions really do matter just as much as anyone elses, they tend to become remarkably understanding. To cut a long story short: anarchists believe that for the most part it is power itself, and the eects of power, that make people stupid and irresponsible. 4

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 general consent?

If you answered yes, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles! Another basic anarchist principle is voluntary association. This is simply a matter of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. The only dierence is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a society in which everything could be organized along these lines, all groups based on the free consent of their members, and therefore, that all top-down, military styles of organization like armies or bureaucracies or large corporations, based on chains of command, would no longer be necessary. Perhaps you dont believe that would be possible. Perhaps you do. But every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other persons particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist even if you dont 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. This leads to another crucial point: that while 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 over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another. Do you believe that most politicians are selsh, egotistical swine who dont really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?

If you answered yes, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of todays society at least, in its broadest outlines. Anarchists believe that power corrupts and those who spend their entire lives seeking power are the very last people who should have it. Anarchists believe that our present economic system is more likely to reward people for selsh and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent, caring human beings. Most people feel that way. The only dierence is that most people dont think theres 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 wont end up making things even worse. But what if that werent 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 5

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 the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on 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 can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshaled to t human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, nancial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientic minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanizing away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? 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 parents told you)?

It doesnt matter who started it. Two wrongs dont make a right. Clean up your own mess. Do unto others . . . Dont be mean to people just because theyre dierent. Perhaps we should decide whether were lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether were willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism. Take the principle that two wrongs dont make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system. The same goes for sharing: were always telling children that they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each others needs, to help each other; then we go o into the real world where we assume that everyone is naturally selsh and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, what we say to our children is right. Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history, every discovery or accomplishment thats improved our lives, has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend more of our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, theres no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making people compete over the basic necessities of life. That only serves the interests of people in power, who want us to live in fear of one another. Thats why anarchists call for a society based not only on free association but mutual aid. The fact is that 6

most children grow up believing in anarchist morality, and then gradually have to realize that the adult world doesnt really work that way. Thats why so many become rebellious, or alienated, even suicidal as adolescents, and nally, resigned and bitter as adults; their only solace, often, being the ability to raise children of their own and pretend to them that the world is fair. But what if we really could start to build a world which really was at least founded on principles of justice? Wouldnt that be the greatest gift to ones children one could possibly give? Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?

If you answered yes, then, well, it looks like you arent an anarchist after all. 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 with them. Every time you treat another human with consideration and respect, you are being an anarchist. Every time you work out your dierences with others by coming to reasonable compromise, listening to what everyone has to say rather than letting one person decide for everyone else, you are being an anarchist. Every time you have the opportunity to force someone to do something, but decide to appeal to their sense of reason or justice instead, you are being an anarchist. The same goes for every time you share something with a friend, or decide who is going 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 an entirely dierent matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something 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 dierent ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suce it to say, rst of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably cant even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, were condent that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic 7

principles which are, in the nal analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.

http://nymaa.org/surprise_anarchist

Andrej Grubacic & David Graeber

Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-rst Century

2004

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. Its becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty rst century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly dened, but of anarchism. Everywhere from Eastern Europe to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves anarchists. There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy . . . Still, everywhere one nds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing ones vision at 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 basic inspiration 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-larger spaces of autonomy and participatory management within it. There are some obvious reasons for the appeal of anarchist ideas at the beginning of the 21 st century: most obviously, the failures and catastrophes resulting from so many eorts to overcome capitalism by seizing control of the apparatus of government in the 20 th. Increasing numbers of revolutionaries have begun to recognize that the revolution is not going to come as some great apocalyptic moment, 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 like most things come to accelerate of late) full of strategies of ight and evasion as much as dramatic confrontations, and which will never indeed, most anarchists feel, should never come to a denitive conclusion. Its a little disconcerting, but it oers one enormous consolation: we do not have to wait until after the revolution to begin to get a glimpse of what genuine freedom might be like. As the Crimethinc Collective, the greatest propagandists of contemporary American anarchism, put it: Freedom only exists in the moment of 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 ethical imperative; only by making ones form of organization in the present at least a rough 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 back into disaster. Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrice all pleasure to the cause can only produce grim joyless societies.

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These changes have been dicult to document because so far anarchist ideas have received almost no attention in the academy. There are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists. This lag is somewhat dicult to interpret. In part, no doubt, its because Marxism has always had a certain anity with the academy which anarchism obviously lacked: Marxism was, after all, 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 is presented as the brainchild of certain 19 th century thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin . . . ) that then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects . . . Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxisms poorer cousin, theoretically a bit at-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity. Really the analogy is strained. The founders of anarchism did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The saw its basic principles mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decisionmaking as as old as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms 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. None of it was seen as some startling new doctrine, but a longstanding tendency in the history human thought, and one that cannot 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 that seem to make power necessary are in fact the eects of power itself. In practice though it is a constant questioning, an eort to identify every compulsory or hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves, and if they cannot which usually turns out to be the case an eort to limit their power and thus widen the scope of human liberty. Just as a Su might say that Susm is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue that anarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.
1

This doesnt mean anarchists have to be against theory. It might not need High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly it will not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. That would be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better, we think, something more in the spirit of anarchist decision-making processes: applied to theory, this would mean accepting the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain shared commitments and understandings. Rather than based on the need to prove others fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to nd particular projects on which they reinforce each other. Just because theories are incommensurable in certain respects does not mean they cannot exist or even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that individuals have unique and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot become friends, or lovers, or work on common projects. Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called low theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.

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Schools of Marxism always have founders. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Althusserians . . . (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors who, in turn, can spawn their own sects: Lacanians, Foucauldians . . . ) Schools of anarchism, in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on. Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is leadership necessarily a bad thing? 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 okay to throw a brick? Marxism, then, has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. As a result, where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of praxis, its mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself. At the moment, theres something of a rupture between generations of anarchism: between those whose political formation took place in the 60s and 70s and who often still have not shaken the sectarian habits of the last century or simply still operate in those terms, and younger activists much more informed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-critical ideas. The former organize mainly through highly visible Anarchist Federations like the IWA, NEFAC or IWW. The latter work most prominently in the networks of the global social movement, networks like Peoples Global Action, which unites anarchist collectives in Europe and elsewhere with groups ranging from Maori activists in New Zealand, sherfolk in Indonesia, or the Canadian postal workers union 2. The latter 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 anities very loudly. There are many, in fact, who
2

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

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take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they refuse to refer to themselves as anarchists for that very reason 3. But the three essentials that run throughout all manifestations of anarchist ideology are denitely there anti-statism, anti-capitalism and pregurative politics (i.e. modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you want to create. Or, as an anarchist historian of the revolution in Spain has formulated an eort to think of not only the ideas but the facts of the future itself. 4 This is present in anything from jamming collectives and on to Indy media, all of which can be called anarchist in the newer sense. 5 In some countries, there is only a very limited degree of conuence between the two coexisting generations, mostly taking 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 developing new forms of practice than arguing about the ner points of ideology. The most dramatic among these have been the development of new forms of decisionmaking process, the beginnings, at least, of an alternate culture of democracy. The famous North American spokescouncils, where thousands of activists coordinate large-scale events by consensus, with no formal leadership structure, are only the most spectacular. Actually, even calling these forms new is a little bit deceptive. One of the main inspirations for the new generation of anarchists are the Zapatista autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, based in Tzeltal or Tojolobal speaking communities who have been using consensus process for thousands of years only now adopted by revolutionaries to ensure that women and younger people have an equal voice. In North America, consensus process emerged more than anything else from the feminist movement in the 70s, as part of a broad backlash against the macho style of leadership typical of the 60s New Left. The idea of consensus itself was borrowed from the Quakers, who again, claim to have been inspired by the Six Nations and other Native American practices. Consensus is often misunderstood. One often hears critics claim it would cause stiing conformity but almost never by anyone who has actually observed consensus in action, at least, as guided by trained, experienced facilitators (some recent experiments in Europe, where there is little tradition of such things, have been somewhat crude). In fact, the operating assumption is that no one could really 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 common course 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 4 5

Cf. David Graeber, New Anarchists, New left Review 13, January February 2002 See Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, New York: Greenberg Publishers 1937 For more information on global indymedia project go to: http://www.indymedia.org

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synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the nal stage, actually nding consensus, there are two levels of possible objection: one can stand aside, which is to say I dont like this and wont participate but I wouldnt stop anyone else from doing it, or block, which has the eect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group. One might say that the function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of striking down legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegated with anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined will of the group (though of course there are also ways of challenging unprincipled blocks). One could go on at length about the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated methods that have been developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modied consensus required for very large groups; of the way consensus itself reinforces the principle of decentralization by ensuring one doesnt really want to bring proposals before very large groups unless one has to, of means of ensuring gender equity and resolving conict . . . The point is this is a form of direct democracy which is very dierent than the kind we usually associate with the term or, for that matter, with the kind of majority-vote system usually employed by European or North American anarchists of earlier generations, or still employed, say, in middle class urban Argentine asambleas (though not, signicantly, among the more radical piqueteros, the organized unemployed, who tend to operate by consensus.) With increasing contact between dierent movements internationally, the inclusion of indigenous groups and movements from Africa, Asia, and Oceania with radically dierent traditions, we are seeing the beginnings of a new global reconception of what democracy should even mean, one as far as possible from the neoliberal parlaimentarianism currently promoted by the existing powers of the world. Again, it is dicult to follow this new spirit of synthesis by reading most existing anarchist literature, because those who spend most of their energy on questions of theory, rather than emerging forms of practice, are the most likely to maintain the old sectarian dichotomizing logic. Modern anarchism is imbued with countless contradictions. While small-a anarchists are slowly incorporating ideas and practices learned from indigenous allies into their modes of organizing or alternative communities, the main trace in the written literature has been the emergence 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 McQuinn, Why I am not a Primitivist, Anarchy: a journal of desire armed, printemps/t 2001.Cf. le site anarchiste http://www.anarchymag.org . Cf. John Zerzan, Future Primitive & Other Essays, Autonomedia, 1994.

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Still, it is only a matter 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 the focus of anti-authoritarianism, moving away from class reductionism by trying to grasp the totality of domination, that is, to highlight not only the state but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts. This approach does not call for an endless expansion of material production, or hold that technologies are neutral, but it also doesnt decry technology per se. Instead, it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesnt decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for 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 revitalized anity groups and spokes structures. And it not only doesnt decry reforms per se, but struggles to dene and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to peoples immediate needs and bettering their lives in the here-and-now at the same time as moving toward further gains, and eventually, wholesale transformation. 7 And of course theory will have to catch up with practice. To be fully eective, modern anarchism will have to include at least three levels: activists, peoples organizations, and researchers. The problem at the moment is that anarchist intellectuals who want to get past old-fashioned, vanguardist habits the Marxist sectarian 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 become reexive. But how? On one level the answer seems obvious. One should not lecture, not dictate, not even necessarily think of oneself as a teacher, but must listen, explore and discover. To tease out and make explicit the tacit logic already underlying new forms of radical practice. To put oneself at the service of activists by providing information, or exposing the interests of the dominant elite carefully hidden behind supposedly objective, authoritative discourses, rather than trying to impose a new version of the same thing. But at the same time most recognize that intellectual struggle needs to rearm its place. Many are beginning to point out 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

Cf. Andrej Grubacic, Towards an Another Anarchism, in: Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman, The World Social Forum: Against all Empires, New Delhi: Viveka 2004.

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neglecting of the symbolic, the visionary, and overlooking of the eectiveness of theory. How to move from ethnography to utopian visions ideally, as many utopian visions as possible? It is hardly a coincidence that some of the greatest recruiters for anarchism in countries like the United States have been feminist science ction writers like Starhawk or Ursula K. LeGuin 8. One way this is beginning to happen is as anarchists begin to recuperate the experience of other social movements with a more developed body of theory, ideas that come from circles close to, indeed inspired by anarchism. Lets take for example the idea of participatory economy, which represents an anarchist economist vision par excellence and which supplements and recties anarchist economic tradition. Parecon theorists argue for the existence of not just two, but three major classes in advanced capitalism: not only a proletariat and bourgeoisie but a coordinator class whose role is to manage and control the labor of the working class. This is the class that includes the management hierarchy and the professional consultants and advisors central to their system of control as lawyers, key engineers and accountants, and so on. They maintain their class position because of their relative monopolization over knowledge, skills, and connections. As a result, economists and others working in this tradition have been trying to create models of an economy which would systematically eliminate divisions between physical and intellectual labor. Now that anarchism has so clearly become the center of revolutionary creativity, proponents of such models have increasingly been, if not rallying to the ag, exactly, then at least, emphasizing the degree to which their ideas are compatible with an anarchist vision. 9 Similar things are starting to happen with the development of anarchist political visions. Now, this is an area where classical anarchism already had a leg up over classical Marxism, which never developed a theory of political organization at all. Dierent schools of anarchism have often advocated very specic forms of social organization, albeit often markedly at variance with one another. Still, anarchism as a whole has tended to advance what liberals like to call negative freedoms, freedoms from, rather than substantive freedoms to. Often it has celebrated this very commitment as evidence of anarchisms pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity. But as a result, there has been a reluctance to go beyond developing small-scale forms of organization, and a faith that larger, more complicated structures can be improvised later in the same spirit. There have been exceptions. Pierre Joseph Proudhon tried to come up with a total vision of how a libertarian society might operate. 10 Its generally considered
8 9

Cf. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from Global Uprising, San Francisco 2002. See also: http://www .starhawk.org Albert, Michael, Participatory Economics, Verso, 2003. See also: http://www.parecon.org

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to have been a failure, but it pointed the way to more developed visions, such as the North American Social Ecologistss libertarian municipalism. Theres a lively developing, for instance, on how to balance principles of workers control emphasized by the Parecon folk and direct democracy, emphasized by the Social Ecologists. 11 Still, there are a lot of details still to be lled in: what are the anarchists full sets of positive institutional alternatives to contemporary legislatures, courts, police, and diverse executive agencies? How to oer a political vision that encompasses legislation, implementation, adjudication, and enforcement and that shows how each would be eectively accomplished in a non-authoritarian way not only provide long-term hope, but to inform immediate responses to todays 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 well need many concrete visions. Still, between actual social experiments within expanding self-managing communities in places like Chiapas and Argentina, and eorts by anarchist scholar/activists like the newly formed Planetary Alternatives Network or the Life After Capitalism forums to begin locating and compiling successful examples of economic and political forms, the work is beginning 12. It is clearly a long-term process. But then, 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. They are involved in Planetary Alternatives Network (PAN). Retrieved on May 14 th, 2009 from http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/9258
10 11 12

Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968 See The Murray Bookchin Reader, edited by Janet Biehl, London: Cassell 1997. See also the web site of the Institute for Social Ecology: http://www.social-ecology.org For more information on Life After Capitalism forums go to : http://www.zmag.org/lacsite.htm

17

David Graeber

Hope in Common

2008

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as nancial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that its impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a nite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction even of progressives is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply cant imagine an alternative that wouldnt be even worse. The rst question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like? Hopelessness isnt natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, rst and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to ourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security rms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the free market, even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, its dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself. The spirals of nancialization and endless string of economic bubbles weve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. Its no coincidence that the United States has become both the worlds major military (security) power and

19

the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future prots, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future prots; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future prots, even if these prots are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of ones 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 left. The eect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything its that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what eectively happened in the late 90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late 50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late 70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily eective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to icker in and 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 Seattle in 1999 or 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 be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the worlds population, eectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling o 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 so eectively that the reigning institutions were rst discredited, and ultimately, that 20

those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the blu of the international nancial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win. But of course theres another reason. Nothing terries the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (ne, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement 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 ailing and obviously doomed eort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative nancial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene. Of course it hasnt really. We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldnt be that dicult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term communism. Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply doesnt work. Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are xing a pipe and one says hand me the wrench, the other doesnt say, and what do I get for it?(That is, if they actually want it to be xed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because its the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism 21

in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they cant aord.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: thats why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. Its only when work becomes standardized and boring as on production lines that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically. Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. 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 be thinking about a better 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 is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who prot from it have to convince everyone and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system dont even like it very much, and all have at least the 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 little less stupid and unfair. This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausibleseeming alternative even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis. Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and sheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the others 22

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 dierent countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization. Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when thats not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize were all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new. One might object: a revolution cannot conne itself to this. Thats true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. Ill oer one suggestion though. For at least ve thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most ecient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyones control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtors strike, or debtors 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 are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very ber of capitalism its moral foundation now revealed to be a collection of broken promises but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own aairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise oered by capitalism that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own 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. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world? 23

This also appeared in Adbusters, #82, volume 17, number 2. March/April 2009. Under the title of Tactical Brieng Retrieved on May 16 th, 2009 from http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11569

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David Graeber

The New Anarchists

2002

Its 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 papers for vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are everywhere emerging. Its particularly scandalous in the case of whats still, for no particularly good reason, referred to as the anti-globalization movement, one that has in a mere two or three years managed to transform completely the sense of historical possibilities for millions across the planet. This may be the result of sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might be gleaned from such overtly hostile sources as the New York Times; then again, most of whats written even in progressive outlets seems largely to miss the point or at least, rarely focuses on what participants in the movement 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 common points of misunderstanding; but the news may not be gratefully received. Much of the hesitation, I suspect, lies in the reluctance of those who have long fancied themselves radicals of some sort to come to terms with the fact that they are really liberals: interested in expanding individual freedoms and pursuing social justice, but not in ways that would seriously challenge the existence of reigning institutions like capital or state. And even many of those who would like to see revolutionary change might not feel entirely happy about having to accept that most 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 involved in the movement actually call themselves anarchists, and in what contexts, is a bit beside the point. 1 The very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself pregures an alternative all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition. Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of whats new and hopeful about it. In what follows, then, I will try to clear up what seem to be the three most common misconceptions about the movement our supposed opposition to something called globalization, our supposed violence, and our supposed lack 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.

There 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.

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A globalization movement?
The phrase anti-globalization movement is a coinage of the US media and activists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a movement against anything, its against neoliberalism, which can be dened as a kind of market fundamentalism or, better, market Stalinism that holds there is only one possible direction for human historical development. The map is held by an elite of economists and corporate acks, to whom must be ceded all power once held by institutions with any shred of democratic accountability; from now on it will be wielded largely through unelected treaty organizations like the IMF, WTO or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be possible to say this straight out: We are a movement against neoliberalism. But in the US, language is always a problem. The corporate media here is probably the most politically monolithic on the planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see the background reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be used. The issues involved can only be addressed using propaganda terms like free trade or the free market. So American activists nd themselves in a quandary: if one suggests putting the N word (as its often called) in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells immediately go o: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all sorts of attempts to frame alternative expressions were a global justice movement, were a movement against corporate globalization. None are especially elegant or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to hear the speakers using globalization movement and anti-globalization movement pretty much interchangeably. The phrase globalization movement, though, is really quite apropos. If one takes globalization to mean the eacement of borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then its pretty clear that not only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in it the most radical ones in particular are far more supportive of globalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an international network called Peoples Global Action, for example, that put out the rst summons for planet-wide days of action such as J18 and N30 the latter the original call for protest against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famous International Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas, in August 1996; and was itself initiated, as Subcomandante Marcos put it, by all the rebels around the world. People from over 50 countries came streaming into the Zapatista-held village of La Realidad. The vision for an intercontinental network of resistance was laid out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: We declare that we will make a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an 27

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 for humanity and against neoliberalism. A network that covers the ve continents and helps to resist the death that Power promises us. 2 This, the Declaration made clear, was not an organizing structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist. The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya Basta! groups organized a second encuentro in Spain, where the idea of the network process was taken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva in February 1998. From the start, it included not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmers league in India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan sherfolk, 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 communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America and any number of others. For a long time, North America was scarcely represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers Union which acted as PGAs main communications hub, until it was largely replaced by the internet and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC. If the movements origins are internationalist, so are its demands. The threeplank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls for a universally guaranteed basic income, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of people across borders, and free access to new technology which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism). The noborder network their slogan: No One is Illegal has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for creative resistance, on the Polish German and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have dressed up as border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder and blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of suocation on Lufthansa 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 Len, ed., New York 2001.

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KLM ights). This summers camp is planned for Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information System, a search-and-control database with tens of thousands of terminals across Europe, targeting the movements of migrants, activists, anyone they like. More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision of globalization is pretty much limited to the movement of capital and commodities, and actually increases barriers against the free ow of people, information and ideas the size of the US border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to eectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of sovereignty in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nationstate in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are ghting against, in the name of genuine globalization. These connexions and the broader links between neoliberal policies and mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism) have played a more and more salient role in our analyses as we ourselves have confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during the IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At the FTAA summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had previously been treated as if they didnt exist (at least for white people) were converted overnight into fortications against the movement of would-be global citizens, demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometre wall constructed through the center of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what neoliberalism actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became for that very reason one of the most powerful moments in the movements history. 3 There is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the ow has if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of the movements signature techniques including mass nonviolent civil disobedience itself were rst developed in the global South. In the 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 authors life.

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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, breaking windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as they blockaded intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression that the only truly violent parties were the police. The US media is probably the biggest oender here and this despite the fact that, after two years of increasingly militant direct action, it is still impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has caused physical injury. I would say that what really disturbs the 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 revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar patterns of armed resistance. The eort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network, Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche have all, in their own ways, been trying to map out a completely new territory in between. Theyre attempting to invent what many call a new language of civil disobedience, combining elements of street theatre, festival and what can only be 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. Ya Basta! for example is famous for its tute bianche or white-overalls tactics: men and women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner tubes to rubber-ducky otation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this mock army pushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting each other against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon characters misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. The eect is only increased when lines of costumed gures attack police with balloons and water pistols or, like the Pink Bloc at Prague and elsewhere, dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters. At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads of fake money into the cops pockets, thanking them for repressing the dissent. None were even slightly hurt perhaps police are given aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a tuxedo. The Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high bicycles, 30

rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by attacking each other (or the billionaires). They had all the best chants: Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!, The pizza united can never be defeated, Hey ho, hey ho ha ha, hee hee!, as well as meta-chants like Call! Response! Call! Response! and everyones favourite Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant! In Quebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines (with help from the left caucus of the Society for Creative Anachronism) lobbed soft toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violent but very militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts and hoplites (the former mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the latter from Montreal) at Quebec City, and research continues into Roman-style shield walls. Blockading has become an art form: if you make a huge web of strands of yarn across an intersection, its actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like ies. The Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can block a four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile blockade. Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions Building Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla Gardening only partly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most militant of the militant eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front scrupulously avoid doing anything that would cause harm to human beings (or animals, for that matter). Its this scrambling of conventional categories that so throws the forces 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 hooligans to 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 theater of the Yippies or Italian metropolitan Indians in the sixties, the squatter battles in Germany or Italy in the seventies and eighties, even the peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it seems to me that here, too, the really crucial origins lie with the Zapatistas, and other movements in the global South. In many ways, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by people who have always been denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance to seize it; essentially, to call the blu of neoliberalism and its pretenses to democratization and yielding power to civil society. It is, as its commanders say, an army which aspires not to be an army any more (its something of an open secret that, for the last ve years at least, they have not even been carrying real guns). As Marcos explains their conversion from standard tactics of guerrilla war: We thought the people would either not pay attention to us, or come together with us to ght. But they did not react in either of these two ways. It turned out that all these people, who were thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds 31

of thousands, perhaps millions, did not want to rise up with us but . . . neither did they want us to be annihilated. They wanted us to dialogue. This completely broke our scheme and ended up dening zapatismo, the neozapatismo. 4 Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes invasions of Mexican military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to yell at and try to shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the Landless Workers Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying unused lands entirely non-violently. In either case, its pretty clear that if the same people had tried the same thing twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot.

Anarchy and peace

However you choose to trace their origins, these new tactics are perfectly in accord with the general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it. The critical 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 at the moment: one that may well determine the overall direction of the twentyrst century. We should remember that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when most Marxist parties were rapidly becoming reformist social democrats, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were the centre of the revolutionary left. 5 The situation only really changed with World War I and the Russian Revolution. It was the Bolsheviks success, we are usually told, that led to the decline of anarchism with the glorious exception of Spain and catapulted Communism 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 between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England, on French or English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered
4 5

Interviewed by Yvon LeBot, Subcomandante Marcos: El Sueo Zapatista, Barcelona 1997, pp. 214 5; Bill Weinberg, Homage to Chiapas, London 2000, p. 188. In 1905 1914 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of Marxists had been identied with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left 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.

32

an antiquated barbarism. The short twentieth century was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political eectiveness became the ability to maintain huge mechanized killing machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by denition, can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties who have been only too good at it seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left. If this is right, it becomes clearer what the ultimate stakes of the current antiterrorist mobilization are. In the short run, things do look very frightening. Governments who were desperately scrambling for some way to convince the public we were terrorists even before September 11 now feel theyve been given carteblanche; there is little doubt that a lot of good people are about to suer terrible repression. But in the long run, a return to twentieth-century levels of violence is simply impossible. The September 11 attacks were clearly something of a uke (the rst wildly ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually worked); the spread of nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and larger portions of the globe will be for all practical purposes o-limits to conventional warfare. And if war is the health of the state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing can only be improving.

Practising direct democracy

A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the progressive press is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks any central theme or coherent ideology. (This seems to be the left equivalent of the corporate medias claims that we 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 attack is that the movement is plagued by a generic opposition to all forms of structure or organization. Its distressing that, two years after Seattle, I should have to write this, but someone obviously should: in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus 33

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 rst organized itself in the political sphere mainly because this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned. Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups own internal processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like. In this weve drawn particularly, as Ive noted, on examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on some process of consensus nding, rather than majority vote. The result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments spokescouncils, anity groups, facilitation tools, break-outs, shbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so on all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum eective solidarity, without stiing dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do. The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone or at least, not highly objectionable to anyone: rst state the proposal, then ask for concerns and try to address them. Often, at this point, people in the group will propose friendly amendments to add to the original proposal, or otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed. Then, nally, 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 wouldnt stop anyone else from doing it. Blocking is a way of saying I think this violates the fundamental principles or purposes of being in the group. It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal completely by blocking it although there are ways to challenge whether a block is genuinely principled. There are dierent sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for example, are large assemblies that coordinate between smaller anity groups. They are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each anity group (which might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a spoke, who is empowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of nding consensus at the council, but before major decisions they break out into anity 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 into smaller ones that will focus on making decisions or generating proposals, which can then be presented for approval before the whole group when it reassembles. 34

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 people are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other peoples; or for a nonbinding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to see how everyone feels about a proposal, rather than to make a decision. A shbowl would only be used if there is a profound dierence of opinion: you can take two representatives for each side one man and one woman and have the four of them sit in the middle, everyone else surrounding them silently, and see if the four cant work out a synthesis or compromise together, which they can then present as a proposal to the whole group.

Pregurative politics
This is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of democracy among people who have little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of stumblings and false starts, but as almost any police chief who has faced us on the streets can attest direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly eective. And it is dicult to nd anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. Its one thing to say, Another world is possible. Its another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best way 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 matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups. 6 Where the democratic-centralist party puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; its taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. The motto might be, If you are willing to act like an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business. Which seems only sensible: none of us know how far these principles can actually take us, or what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their

What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North East Federation of Anarchist Communists whose members must accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by Nestor Makhno do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists are the real locus of historical dynamism right now.

35

practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way. Finally, Id like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of rst imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a societys least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap. This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftsmen or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftsmen who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and not those inured to generations of wage labour. It would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous peoples struggles in the new movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth. Now that new communication technologies have made it possible to include them in global revolutionary alliances, as well as local resistance and revolt, it is well-nigh inevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational role. Previous texts in this series have been Naomi Klein, Reclaiming the Commons (NLR 9), Subcomandante Marcos, The Punch Card and the Hourglass (NLR 9), John Sellers, Raising a Ruckus (NLR 10) and Jos Bov, A Farmers International? (NLR 12).

Originally published in New Left Review, 13 January-February 2002. Retrieved on May 14 th, 2009 from http://www.newleftreview.org/A2368

36

David Graeber

Revolution in Reverse

2007

Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conict between political ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination)

All power to the imagination. Be realistic, demand the impossible . . . Anyone involved in radical politics has heard these expressions a thousand times. Usually they charm and excite the rst time one encounters them, then eventually become so familiar as to seem hackneyed, or just disappear into the ambient background noise of radical life. Rarely if ever are they the object of serious theoretical reection. It seems to me that at the current historical juncture, some such reection wouldnt be a bad idea. We are at a moment, after all, when received denitions have been thrown into disarray. It is quite possible that we are heading for a revolutionary moment, or perhaps a series of them, but we no longer have any clear idea of what that might even mean. This essay then is the product of a sustained eort to try to rethink terms like realism, imagination, alienation, bureaucracy, revolution itself. Its 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 preliminary theoretical report. I want to ask, among other things, why is it these terms, which for most of us seem rather to evoke long-since forgotten debates of the 1960s, still resonate in those circles? Why is it that the idea of any radical social transformation so often seems unrealistic? What does revolution mean once one no longer expects a single, cataclysmic break with past structures of oppression? These seem disparate questions but it seems to me the answers are related. If in many cases I brush past existing bodies of theory, this is quite intentional: I am trying to see if it is possible to build on the experience of these movements and the theoretical currents that inform them to begin to create something new. Here is the gist of my argument: 1. Right and Left political perspectives are founded, above all, on dierent assumptions about the ultimate realities of power. The Right is rooted in a political ontology of violence, where being realistic means taking into account the forces of destruction. In reply the Left has consistently proposed variations on a political ontology of the imagination, in which the forces that are seen as the ultimate realities that need to be taken into account are those forces (of production, creativity . . . ) that bring things into being. 2. The situation is complicated by the fact that systematic inequalities backed by force structural violence always produces skewed and fractured structures of the imagination. It is the experience of living inside these fractured structures that we refer to as alienation. 3. Our customary conception of revolution is insurrectionary: the idea is to brush aside existing realities of violence by overthrowing the state, then, to 39

unleash the powers of popular imagination and creativity to overcome the structures that create alienation. Over the twentieth century it eventually became apparent that the real problem was how to institutionalize such creativity without creating new, often even more violent and alienating structures. As a result, the insurrectionary model no longer seems completely viable, but its 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 a dramatic confrontation with state power leading rst to an outpouring of popular festivity, the creation of new democratic institutions, and eventually the reinvention of everyday life, in organizing mass mobilizations, activists drawn principally from subcultural groups create new, directly democratic institutions to organize festivals of resistance that ultimately lead to confrontations with the state. This is just one aspect of a more general movement of reformulation that seems to me to be inspired in part by the inuence of anarchism, but in even larger part, by feminism a movement that ultimately aims to recreate the eects of those insurrectionary moments on an ongoing basis Let me take these one by one.

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Part I

Be realistic . . .

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 part of 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 direct democracy according to an elaborate, but strikingly eective, form of consensus process. It played a central role in ongoing eorts to create new organizational forms that I wrote about in an earlier essay in these pages. DAN existed in a purely political space; it had no concrete resources, not even a signicant treasury, to administer. Then one day someone gave DAN a car. It caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car. Cars can be owned by individuals, or they can be owned by corporations, which are ctive individuals. They cannot be owned by networks. Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprot corporation (which would have required a complete reorganization and abandoning most of our egalitarian principles) the only expedient was to nd a volunteer willing to claim to be the owner for legal purposes. But then that person was expected to pay all outstanding nes, insurance fees, provide written permission to allow others to drive out of state, and, of course, only he could retrieve the car if it were impounded. Before long the DAN car had become such a perennial problem that we simply abandoned it. It struck me there was something important here. Why is it that projects like DANs projects of democratizing society are so often perceived as idle dreams that melt away as soon as they encounter anything that seems like hard material reality? In our case it had nothing to do with ineciency: police chiefs across the country had called us the best organized force theyd ever had to deal with. It seems to me the reality eect (if one may call it that) comes rather from the fact that radical projects tend to founder, or at least become endlessly dicult, the moment they enter into the world of large, heavy objects: buildings, cars, tractors, boats, industrial machinery. This is in turn is not because these objects are somehow intrinsically dicult to administer democratically; its because, like the DAN car, they are surrounded by endless government regulation, and eectively impossible to hide from the governments armed representatives. In America, Ive seen endless examples. A squat is legalized after a long struggle; suddenly, building inspectors arrive to announce it will take ten thousand dollars worth of repairs to bring it up to code; organizers are forced spend the next several years organizing bake sales and soliciting contributions. This means setting up bank accounts, and legal regulations then specify how a group receiving funds, or dealing with the government, must be organized (again, not as an egalitarian collective). All these regulations are enforced by violence. True, in ordinary life, police rarely come in swinging billy clubs to enforce building code regulations, but, as anarchists often 42

discover, if one simply pretends they dont exist, that will, eventually, happen. The rarity with which the nightsticks actually appear just helps to make the violence harder to see. This in turn makes the eects of all these regulations regulations that almost always assume that normal relations between individuals are mediated by the market, and that normal groups are organized hierarchically seem to emanate not from the governments monopoly of the use of force, but from the largeness, solidity, and heaviness of the objects themselves. When one is asked to be realistic then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts; neither is it really some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Normally its a recognition of the eects 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? The real in this usage is not derived from Latin res, or thing: its from the Spanish real, meaning, royal, belonging to the king. All land within a sovereign territory ultimately belongs to the sovereign; legally this is still the case. This is why the state has the right to impose its regulations. But sovereignty ultimately comes down to a monopoly of what is euphemistically referred to as force that is, violence. Just as Giorgio Agamben famously argued that from the perspective of 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 takes a realist position in International Relations, one assumes that states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal, including force of arms, to pursue their national interests. What reality is one recognizing? Certainly not material reality. The idea that nations are human-like entities with purposes and interests is an entirely metaphysical notion. The King of France had purposes and interests. France does not. What makes it seem realistic to suggest it does is simply that those 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 name of what they describe as their national interests and that it would be foolish to ignore that possibility. National interests are real because they can kill you. The critical term here is force, as in the states monopoly of the use of coercive force. Whenever we hear this word invoked, we nd ourselves in the presence of a political ontology in which the power to destroy, to cause others pain or to threaten to break, damage, or mangle their bodies (or just lock them in a tiny room for the rest of their lives) is treated as the social equivalent of the very 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.

43

Police are experts in the scientic application of physical force in order to enforce the laws that govern society. This is to my mind the essence of Right-wing thought: a political ontology that through such subtle means, allows violence to dene the very parameters of social existence and common sense. The Left, on the other hand, has always been founded on a dierent set of assumptions about what is ultimately real, about the very grounds of political being. Obviously Leftists dont deny the reality of violence. Many Leftist theorists have thought about it quite a lot. But they dont tend to give it the same foundational status. Instead, I would argue that Leftist thought is founded on what I will call a political ontology of the imagination though I could as easily have called it an ontology of creativity or making or invention. Nowadays, most of us tend to identify it with the legacy of Marx, with his emphasis on social revolution and forces of material production. But really Marxs terms emerged from much wider arguments about value, labor, and creativity current in radical circles of his day, whether in the workers movement, or for that matter various strains of Romanticism. Marx himself, for all his contempt for the utopian socialists of his day, never ceased to insist that what makes human beings dierent from animals is that architects, unlike bees, rst raise their structures in the imagination. It was the unique property of humans, for Marx, that they rst 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 artists needed 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 soon became the charter for a sporadic, uncertain, but apparently permanent alliance that endures to this day. If artistic avant gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar anity for one another ever since, borrowing each others languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and, could just as easily make dierently. In this sense, a phrase like all power to the imagination expresses the very quintessence of the Left. To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production of course the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the means of destruction: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, 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 that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more realistic approach.

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Obviously, this dichotomy is very much a simplication. One could level endless qualications. The bourgeoisie of Marxs time for instance had an extremely productivist philosophy one reason Marx could see it as a revolutionary force. Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and 20 th century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power, and paid little more than lip service to the determinant nature of production. Nonetheless, I think these are useful terms because even if one treats imagination and violence not as the single hidden truth of the world but as immanent principles, as equal constituents of any social reality, they can reveal a great deal one would not be able to see otherwise. For one thing, everywhere, imagination and violence seem to interact in predictable, and quite signicant, ways. Let me start with a few words on violence, providing a very schematic overview of arguments that I have developed in somewhat greater detail elsewhere:

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Part II

On violence and imaginative displacement

Im an anthropologist by profession and anthropological discussions of violence are almost always prefaced by statements that violent acts are acts of communication, that they are inherently meaningful, and that this is what is truly important about them. In other words, violence operates largely through the imagination. All of this is true. I would hardly want to discount the importance of fear and terror in human life. Acts of violence can be indeed often 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 perhaps the only form of human action that holds out the possibility of operating on others without being communicative. Or let me put this more precisely. Violence may well be the only way in which it is possible for one human being to have relatively predictable eects on the actions of another without understanding anything about them. Pretty much any other way one might try to inuence anothers actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and a host of similar considerations. Hit them over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. Its true that the eects one can have by hitting them are quite limited. But they are 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 sort of eect at all. Whats more, even attempts to inuence another by the threat of violence, which clearly does require some level of shared understandings (at the very least, the other party must understand they are being threatened, and what is being demanded of them), requires much less than any alternative. Most human relations particularly ongoing ones, such as those between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies are extremely complicated, endlessly dense with experience and meaning. They require a continual and often subtle work of interpretation; everyone involved must put constant energy into imagining the others point of view. Threatening others with physical harm on the other hand allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more schematic kind: i.e., cross this line and I will shoot you and otherwise I really dont care who you are or what you want. This is, for instance, why violence is so often 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 most dicult to come up with any intelligent response. There is, however, one crucial qualication to be made. The more evenly matched 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 indeed a very good idea to understand as much as possible about them. A military commander will obviously try to get inside his opponents mind. Its really only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical 47

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, or blowing people up. The threat will usually suce. This has a curious eect. It means that the most characteristic quality of violence its capacity to impose very simple social relations that involve little or no imaginative identication becomes most salient in situations where actual, physical violence is likely to be least present. We can speak here (as many do) of structural violence: that systematic inequalities that are ultimately backed up by the threat of force can be seen as a form of violence in themselves. Systems of structural violence invariably seem to produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identication. Its not that interpretive work isnt carried out. Society, in any recognizable form, could not operate 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. The jokes of course were always told by men. Womens logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. Thats because the women had no choice but to understand men: this was the heyday of the American patriarchal family, and women with no access to their own income or resources had little choice but to spend a fair amount of time and energy understanding what the relevant men thought was going on. Actually, this sort of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind is a perennial feature of patriarchal families: structures that can, indeed, be considered forms of structural violence insofar as the power of men over women within them is, as generations of feminists have pointed out, ultimately backed up, if often in indirect and hidden ways, by all sorts of coercive force. But generations of female novelists Virginia Woolf comes immediately to mind have also documented the other side of this: the constant work women perform in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of apparently oblivious men involving an endless work of imaginative identication and what Ive called interpretive labor. This carries over on every level. Women are always imagining what things look like from a male point of view. Men almost never do the same for women. This is presumably the reason why 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 womens occupations. Faced with the prospect of even trying to imagine a womens perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, one popular trick among High School creative writing teachers is to assign students to write an essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what 48

it would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. The results are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write long and detailed essays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal of time thinking about such questions; roughly half the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Almost invariably they express profound resentment about having to imagine what it might be like to be a woman. It should be easy enough to multiply parallel examples. When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not hell tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: youre the new guy, you must have messed up if you do it again, youre red. Its those who do not have the power to re arbitrarily who have to do the work of guring out what actually happened. What occurs on the most petty or intimate level also occurs on the level of society as a whole. Curiously enough it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (written in 1761), who rst made notice of whats nowadays labeled compassion fatigue. Human beings, he observed, appear to have a natural tendency not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but also, as a result, to actually feel one anothers joys and pains. The poor, however, are just too consistently miserable, and as a result, observers, for their own self-protection, tend to simply blot them out. The result is that while those on the bottom spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and actually caring about, those on the top, but it almost never happens the other way around. That is my real point. Whatever the mechanisms, something like this always seems to occur: whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, bosses and workers, rich and poor. Structural inequality structural violence invariably creates the same lopsided structures of the imagination. And since, as Smith correctly observed, imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneciaries, or at least, to care far more about them than those beneciaries care about them. In fact, this might well be (aside from the violence itself) the single most powerful force preserving 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 ignorance as modes of organizing situations already marked by stupidity and ignorance owing 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 subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether its a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplication. Ultimately the 49

eect is not so dierent than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: its a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations. The same goes, in fact, for police, who are after all simply low-level administrators with guns. Police sociologists have long since demonstrated that only a tiny fraction of police work has anything to do with crime. Police are, rather, the immediate representatives of the states monopoly of violence, those who step in to actively simplify situations (for example, were someone to actively challenge some bureaucratic denition). Simultaneously, police they have become, in contemporary industrial democracies, America in particular, the almost obsessive objects of popular imaginative identication. In fact, the public is constantly invited, in a thousand TV shows and movies, to see the world from a police ocers perspective, even if it is always the perspective of imaginary police ocers, the kind who actually do spend their time ghting crime rather than concerning themselves with broken tail lights or open container laws.

Excursus on transcendent versus immanent imagination

To imaginatively identify with an imaginary policeman is of course not the same as to imaginatively identify with a real one (most Americans in fact avoid a real policeman like the plague). This is a critical distinction, however much an increasingly digitalized world makes it easy to confuse the two. It is here helpful to consider the history of the word imagination. The common Ancient and Medieval conception, what we call the imagination was considered the zone of passage between reality and reason. Perceptions from the material world had to pass through the imagination, becoming emotionally charged in the process and mixing with all sorts of phantasms, before the rational mind could grasp their signicance. Intentions and desires moved in the opposite direction. Its only after Descartes, really, that the word imaginary came to mean, specically, anything that is not real: imaginary creatures, imaginary places (Middle Earth, Narnia, planets in faraway Galaxies, the Kingdom of Prester John . . . ), imaginary friends. By this denition of course a political ontology of the imagination would actually a contradiction in terms. The imagination cannot be the basis of reality. It is by denition that which we can think, but has no reality. Ill refer to this latter as the transcendent notion of the imagination since it seems to take as its model novels or other works of ction that create imaginary worlds that presumably, remain the same no matter how many times one reads 50

them. Imaginary creatures elves or unicorns or TV cops are not aected by the real world. They cannot be, since they dont 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-oating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real eects on the material world, and as such, always changing and adapting. This is equally true whether one is crafting a knife or a piece of jewelry, or trying to make sure one doesnt hurt a friends feelings. One might get a sense of how important this distinction really is by returning to the 68 slogan about giving power to the imagination. If one takes this to refer to the transcendent imagination preformed utopian schemes, for example doing so can, we know, have disastrous eects. Historically, it has often meant imposing 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. The relation of violence and imagination is made much more complicated because while in every case, structural inequalities tend to split society into those doing imaginative labor, and those who do not, they do so in very dierent ways. Capitalism here is a dramatic case in point. Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor housework, childcare relegated mainly to women. The rst is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations. The distinction is obviously a bit of a caricature: there has never been a society, not even Engels Manchester or Victor Hugos Paris, where most men were factory workers or most women worked exclusively as housewives. Still, it is a useful starting point, since it reveals an interesting divergence. In the sphere of industry, it is generally those on top that relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks (i.e., that design the products and organize production), whereas when inequalities emerge in the sphere of social production, its those on the bottom who end up expected to do the major imaginative work (for example, the bulk of what Ive called the labor of interpretation that keeps life running). No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally dierent sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as womens work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, its the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions are always other 51

people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, its 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 aspects of 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.

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Part III

On alienation

In the twentieth century, death terries men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the nal saturation with absence. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life Creativity and desire what we often 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 to skew the imagination. They might create situations where laborers are relegated to mind-numbing, boring, mechanical jobs and only a small elite is allowed to indulge 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 someone else. It might also create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities or CEOs prance about oblivious to almost everything around them while their wives, servants, sta, and handlers spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them in their fantasies. Most situations of inequality, I suspect, combine elements of both. The subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures of imagination is what we are referring to when we talk about alienation. It strikes me that if nothing else, this perspective would help explain the lingering appeal of theories of alienation in revolutionary circles, even when the academic Left 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, the great theorists of alienation (alongside theorists of the imagination like Cornelius Castoriadis). For a long time I was genuinely puzzled as to how so many suburban American teenagers could be entranced, for instance, by Raoul Vaneigems The Revolution of Everyday Life a book, after all, written in Paris almost forty years ago. In the end I decided it must be because Vaneigems book was, in its own way, the highest theoretical expression of the feelings of rage, boredom, and revulsion that almost any adolescent at some point feels when confronted with the middle class existence. The sense of a life broken into fragments, with no ultimate meaning or integrity; of a cynical market system selling its victims commodities and spectacles that themselves represent tiny false images of the very sense of totality and pleasure and community the market has in fact destroyed; the tendency to turn every relation into a form of exchange, to sacrice life for survival, pleasure for renunciation, creativity for hollow homogenous units of power or dead time on some level all this clearly still rings true.

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The question though is why. Contemporary social theory oers little explanation. Poststructuralism, which emerged in the immediate aftermath of 68, was largely born of the rejection of this sort of analysis. It is now simple common sense among social theorists that one cannot dene a society as unnatural unless 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 unied self, and so on. Since these positions are untenable since there is no natural condition for society, no authentic human essence, no unitary self theories of alienation have no basis. Taken purely as arguments, these seem dicult to refute. But how then do we account for the experience? If one really thinks about it, though, the argument is much less powerful than it seems. After all, what are academic theorists saying? They are saying that the idea of a unitary subject, a whole society, a natural order, are unreal. That all these things are simply gments of our imagination. True enough. But then: what else could they be? And why is that a problem? If imagination is indeed a constituent element in the process of how we produce our social and material realities, there is every reason to believe that it proceeds through producing images of totality. Thats 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 are in fact endlessly multiple, imagine some sort of coherent, bounded society in order to produce that chaotic open-ended network of social relations that actually exists, and so forth. Normally, people seem able to live with the disparity. The question, 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 hollow travesty or malicious joke. This, I would argue, is the result of that warping and shattering of the imagination that is the inevitable eect of structural violence.

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Part IV

On Revolution

The Situationists, like many 60s radicals, wished to strike back through a strategy of direct action: creating situations by creative acts of subversion that undermined the logic of the Spectacle and allowed actors to at least momentarily recapture their imaginative powers. At the same time, they also felt all this was inevitably leading up to a great insurrectionary moment the revolution, properly speaking. If the events of May 68 showed anything, it was that if one does not aim to seize state power, there can be no such fundamental, one-time break. The main dierence between the Situationists and their most avid current readers is that the millenarian element has almost completely fallen away. No one thinks the skies are about to open any time soon. There is a consolation though: that as a result, as close as one can come to experiencing genuine revolutionary freedom, one can begin to experience it immediately. Consider the following statement from the Crimethinc collective, probably the most inspiring young anarchist propagandists operating in the Situationist tradition today: We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice and it is up to you to create these situations Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the deant insistence on acting as if one is already free? The obvious question is how it can contribute to an overall strategy, one that should lead to a cumulative movement towards a world without states and capitalism. Here, no one is completely sure. Most assume the process could only be one of endless improvisation. Insurrectionary 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 multifaceted revolutionary process whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be fully anticipated. In retrospect, what seems strikingly nave is the old assumption that a single uprising or successful civil war could, as it were, neutralize the entire apparatus of structural violence, at least within a particular national territory: that within that territory, right-wing realities could be simply swept away, to leave the eld open for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity. But if so, the truly puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that appeared to be exactly what was happening. It seems to me that if we are to have any chance of grasping the new, emerging conception of revolution, we need to begin by thinking again about the quality of these insurrectionary moments. 57

One of the most remarkable things about such moments is how they can seem to burst out of nowhere and then, often, dissolve away as quickly. How is it that the same public that two months before say, the Paris Commune, or Spanish Civil War, had voted in a fairly moderate social democratic regime will suddenly nd itself willing to risk their lives for the same ultra-radicals who received a fraction of the actual vote? Or, to return to May 68, how is it that the same public that seemed to support or at least feel strongly sympathetic toward the student/worker uprising could almost immediately afterwards return to the polls and elect a right-wing government? The most common historical explanations that the revolutionaries didnt really represent the public or its interests, but that elements of the public perhaps became caught up in some sort of irrational eervescence seem obviously inadequate. First of all, they assume that the public 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 specic institutions that allow specic forms of action taking polls, watching television, voting, signing petitions or writing letters to elected ocials or attending public hearings and not others. These frames of action imply certain ways of talking, thinking, arguing, deliberating. The same public that may widely indulge in the use of recreational chemicals may also consistently vote to make such indulgences illegal; the same collection of citizens are likely to come to completely dierent decisions on questions aecting their communities if 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. They become a workforce, of course, when they are engaged in dierent sorts of activity. The public does not work at least, a sentence like most of the American public works in the service industry would never appear in a magazine or paper if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, their editor would certainly change it. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public, or that whether if they succeed in raising wage levels this will be a public benet. And certainly the public does not go out into the streets. Its role is as audience to public spectacles, and consumers of public services. When buying or using goods and services privately supplied, the same collection of individuals become something else (consumers),

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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, dene certain horizons of possibility. Hence when voting in parliamentary elections one might feel obliged to make a realistic choice; in an insurrectionary situation, on the other hand, suddenly anything seems possible. A great deal of recent revolutionary thought essentially asks: what, then, does this collection of people become during such insurrectionary moments? For the last few centuries the conventional answer has been the people, and all modern legal regimes ultimately trace their legitimacy to moments of constituent power, when the people rise up, usually in arms, to create a new constitutional order. The insurrectionary paradigm, in fact, is embedded in the very idea of the modern state. A number of European theorists, understanding that the ground has shifted, have proposed a new term, the multitude, an entity that cannot by denition become the basis for a new national or bureaucratic state. For me the project is deeply ambivalent. In the terms Ive been developing, what the public, the workforce, consumers, population all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating. Voting booths, television screens, oce cubicles, hospitals, the ritual that surrounds them one might say these are the very machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered. Insurrectionary moments are moments when this bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the eect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open. This only to be expected if one of the main things that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited ones. (This is probably why, as Rebecca Solnit has observed, people often experience something very similar during natural disasters.) This would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identication are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view. Normally unequal structures of creativity are disrupted; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them. Hence the ambivalence of the process of renaming. On the one hand, it is understandable that those who wish to make radical claims would like to know in whose name they are making them. On the other, if what Ive been saying is true, the whole project of rst invoking a revolutionary multitude, and then to start looking for the dynamic forces that lie behind it, begins to look a lot like the rst step of that very process of institutionalization that must eventually kill the 59

very thing it celebrates. Subjects (publics, peoples, workforces . . . ) are created by specic institutional structures that are essentially frameworks for action. They are what they do. What revolutionaries do is to break existing frames to create new horizons of possibility, an act that then allows a radical restructuring of the social imagination This is perhaps the one form of action that cannot, by denition, be institutionalized. This is why a number of revolutionary thinkers, from Raaele Laudani in Italy to the Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina, have begun to suggest it might be better her to speak not of constituent but destituent power.

Revolution in Reverse
There is a strange paradox in Marxs approach to revolution. Generally speaking, when Marx speaks of material creativity, he speaks of production, and here he insists, as Ive mentioned, that the dening feature of humanity is that we rst 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 insists that imagining something and then trying to bring it into being is precisely what we should never do. That would be utopianism, and for utopianism, he had only withering contempt. The most generous interpretation, I would suggest, is that Marx on some level understood that the production of people and social relations worked on dierent principles, but also knew he did not really have a theory of what those principles were. Probably it was only with the rise of feminist theory that I was drawing on so liberally in my earlier analysis that it became possible to think systematically about such issues. I might add that it is a profound reection on the eects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subeld where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists. It seems to me no coincidence, then, that so much of the real practical work of developing a new revolutionary paradigm in recent years has also been the work of feminism; or anyway, that feminist concerns have been the main driving force in their transformation. In America, the current anarchist obsession with consensus and other forms of directly democratic process traces back directly to organizational issues within the feminist movement. What had begun, in the late 60s and early 70s, as small, intimate, often anarchist-inspired collectives were thrown into crisis when they started growing rapidly in size. Rather than abandon the search for consensus in decision-making, many began trying to develop more formal versions on the same principles. This, in turn, inspired some radical Quakers (who had previously seen their own consensus decision-making 60

as primarily a religious practice) to begin creating training collectives. By the time of the direct action campaigns against the nuclear power industry in the late 70s, the whole apparatus of anity groups, spokescouncils, consensus and facilitation had already begun to take something like its contemporary form. The resulting outpouring of new forms of consensus process constitutes the most important contribution to revolutionary practice in decades. It is largely the work of feminists engaged in practical organizing a majority, probably, tied to the anarchist tradition. This makes it all the more ironic that male theorists who have not themselves engaged in on-the-ground organizing or taken part in anarchist decision-making processes, but who nd themselves drawn to anarchism as a principle, so often feel obliged to include in otherwise sympathetic statements, that of course they dont agree with this obviously impractical, pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic notion of consensus. The organization of mass actions themselves festivals of resistance, as they are often called can be considered pragmatic experiments in whether it is indeed possible to institutionalize the experience of liberation, the giddy realignment of imaginative powers, everything that is most powerful in the experience of a successful spontaneous insurrection. Or if not to institutionalize it, perhaps, to produce it on call. The eect for those involved is as if everything were happening in reverse. A revolutionary uprising begins with battles in the streets, and if successful, proceeds to outpourings of popular eervescence and festivity. There follows the sober business of creating new institutions, councils, decision-making processes, and ultimately the reinvention of everyday life. Such at least is the ideal, and certainly there have been moments in human history where something like that has begun to happen much though, again, such spontaneous creations always seems to end being subsumed within some new form of violent bureaucracy. However, as Ive noted, this is more or less inevitable since bureaucracy, however much it serves as the immediate organizer of situations of power and structural blindness, does not create them. Mainly, it simply evolves to manage them. This is one reason direct action proceeds in the opposite direction. Probably a majority of the participants are drawn from subcultures that are all about reinventing everyday life. Even if not, actions begin with the creation of new forms of collective decision-making: councils, assemblies, the endless attention to process and uses those forms to plan the street actions and popular festivities. The result is, usually, a dramatic confrontation with armed representatives of the state. While most organizers would be delighted to see things escalate to a popular insurrection, and something like that does occasionally happen, most would not expect these to mark any kind of permanent breaks in reality. They serve more as something almost along the lines of momentary advertisements 61

 or better, 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. There is usually a great deal of work involved. For much of human history, what has been taken as politics has consisted essentially of a series of dramatic performances carried out upon theatrical stages. One of the great gifts of feminism to political thought has been to continually remind us of the people is in fact making and preparing and cleaning those stages, and even more, maintaining the invisible structures that make them possible people who have, overwhelmingly, been women. The normal process of politics of course is to make such people disappear. Indeed one of the chief functions of womens work is to make itself disappear. One might say that the political ideal within direct action circles has become to eace the dierence; or, to put it another way, that action is seen as genuinely revolutionary when the process of production of situations is experienced as just as liberating as the situations themselves. It is an experiment one might say in the realignment of imagination, of creating truly non-alienated forms of experience.

Conclusion
Obviously it is also attempting to do so in a context in which, far from being put in temporary abeyance, state power (in many parts of the globe at least) so suuses every aspect of daily existence that its armed representatives intervene to regulate the internal organizational structure of groups allowed to cash checks or own and operate motor vehicles. One of the remarkable things about the current, neoliberal age is that bureaucracy has come to be so all-encompassing this period has seen, after all, the creation of the rst eective global administrative system in human history that we dont even see it any more. At the same time, the pressures of operating within a context of endless regulation, repression, sexism, racial and class dominance, tend to ensure many who get drawn into the politics of direct action experience a constant alteration of exaltation and burnout, moments where everything seems possible alternating with moments where nothing does. In other parts of the world, autonomy is much easier to achieve, but at the cost of isolation or almost complete absence of resources. How to create alliances between dierent zones of possibility is a fundamental problem. These however are questions of strategy that go well beyond the scope of the current essay. My purpose here has been more modest. Revolutionary theory, it seems to me, has in many fronts advanced much less quickly than revolutionary practice; my aim in writing this has been to see if one could work back from the 62

experience of direct action to begin to create some new theoretical tools. They are hardly meant to be denitive. They may not even prove useful. But perhaps they can contribute to a broader project of re-imagining.

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

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David Graeber

The Twilight of Vanguardism

2003

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, its almost impossible to nd a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction. But (rather like the idea of progress itself, to which its obviously connected), it seems much easier to renounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought. Vanguardist, even, sectarian attitudes have become deeply ingrained in academic radicalism its hard to say what it would mean to think outside them. The depth of the problem rst really struck me when I rst became acquainted with the consensus modes of decision-making employed in North American anarchist 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 eldwork in rural Madagascar. Theres enormous variation among dierent styles and forms of consensus but one thing almost all the North American variants have in common is that they are organized in conscious opposition to the style of organization and, especially, of debate typical of the classical sectarian Marxist group. Where the latter are invariably organized around some Master Theoretician, who oers a comprehensive analysis of the world situation and, often, of human history as a whole, but very little theoretical reection on more immediate questions of organization and practice, anarchist-inspired groups tend to operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to ones own point of view, that decisionmaking structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and considering immediate 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 the benet of the doubt for honesty and good intentions, whatever else one might think of their arguments. In part too this emerges from the style of debate consensus decision-making encourages: where voting encourages one to reduce ones opponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever it takes to defeat them, a consensus process is built on a principle of compromise and creativity where one is constantly changing proposals around until one can come up with something everyone can at least live with; therefore, the incentive is always to put the best possible construction on others 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 University of Chicago, for example really does resemble sectarian modes of debate. One of the things which had most disturbed me about my training there was precisely the way we were encouraged to read other theorists arguments: that if 65

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 latter. I had sometimes wondered how this could be reconciled with an idea that intellectual practice was, on some ultimate level, a common enterprise in pursuit of truth. The same goes for other intellectual habits: for example, that of carefully assembling lists of dierent ways to be wrong (usually ending in ism: i.e., subjectivism, empiricism, all much like their sectarian parallels: reformism, left deviationism, hegemonism . . . ) and being willing to listen to points of view diering from ones own only so long as it took to gure out which variety of wrongness to plug them into. Combine this with the tendency to treat (often minor) intellectual dierences not only as tokens of belonging to some imagined ism but as profound moral aws, on the same level as racism or imperialism (and often in fact partaking of them) then one has an almost exact reproduction of style of intellectual debate typical of the most ridiculous vanguardist sects. I still believe that the growing prevalence of these new, and to my mind far healthier, modes of discourse among activists will have its eects on the academy but its hard to deny that so far, the change has been very slow in coming.

Why So Few Anarchists in the Academy?

One might argue this is because anarchism itself has made such small inroads into the academy. As a political philosophy, anarchism is going through veritable explosion in recent years. Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements are growing everywhere; anarchist principles autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy have become the basis for organizing within the globalization movement and beyond. As Barbara Epstein has recently pointed out, at least in Europe and the Americas, it has by now largely taken the place Marxism had in the social movements of the 60s: the core revolutionary ideology, it is the source of ideas and inspiration; even those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to dene themselves in relation to it. Yet this has found almost no reection in academic discourse. Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the crudest stereotypes (anarchist organization! but isnt that a contradiction in terms?) In the United States and I dont think is all that dierent elsewhere there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly anyone who is willing to openly call herself an anarchist. I dont think this is just because the academy is behind the times. Marxism has always had an anity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after 66

all was invented by a Ph.D.; and theres always been something about its spirit which ts that of the academy. Anarchism on the other hand was never really invented by anyone. True, historians usually treat it as if it were, constructing the history of anarchism as if its basically a creature identical in its nature to Marxism: it was created by specic 19 th century thinkers, perhaps Godwin or Stirner, but denitely Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, it inspired working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles . . . But in fact the analogy is rather strained. First of all, the 19 th century generally credited with inventing anarchism didnt think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The basic principles of anarchism self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid are as old as humanity Similarly, the rejection of the state and of all forms 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 nd evidence of people making similar arguments throughout history, despite the fact there is every reason to believe that such opinions were the ones least likely to be written down. We are talking less about a body of theory than about an attitude, or perhaps a faith: a rejection of certain types of social relation, a condence that certain others are a much better ones on which to build a decent or 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 dierent sort of thing. Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, 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 eld is a game in which scholars strive for dominance, then you know you have won when other scholars start wondering how to make an adjective out of your name. It is, presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other, on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man theories of history they would sco at in discussing just about anything else: Foucaults ideas, like Trotskys, are never treated as primarily the products of a certain intellectual milieu, as something that emerging from endless conversations and arguments in cafes, classrooms, bedrooms, barber shops involving thousands of people inside and outside the academy (or Party), but always, as if they emerged from a single mans genius. Its not quite either that Marxist politics organized itself like an academic discipline or become a model for how radical intellectuals, or increasingly, all intellectuals, treated one another; rather, the two developed somewhat in tandem.

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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. (Signicantly, those few Marxist tendencies which are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are themselves the closest to anarchism.) Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for the peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops being empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is leadership necessarily a bad thing? 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 okay to break a window? One might sum it up like this: 1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. 2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. Now, this does imply theres a lot of potential complementary between the two (and indeed there has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his endless battles with Marx over practical questions, also personally translated Marxs Capital into Russian.) One could easily imagine a systematic division of labor in which Marxists critique the political economy, but stay out of organizing, and Anarchists handle the day-to-day organizing, but defer to the Marxists on questions of abstract theory; i.e., in which the Marxists explain why the economic crash in Argentina occurred and the anarchists deal with what to do about it. (I also should point out that I am aware I am being a bit hypocritical here by indulging in some of the same sort of sectarian reasoning Im otherwise critiquing: there are schools of Marxism which are far more open-minded and tolerant, and democratically organized, there are anarchist groups which are insanely sectarian; Bakunin himself was hardly a model for democracy by any standards, etc. etc. etc.). But it also makes it easier to understand why there are so few anarchists in the academy. Its not just that anarchism does not lend itself to high theory. Its that it is primarily an ethics of practice; and it insists, before anything else, that ones means most be consonant with ones ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian 68

means; that as much as possible, one must embody the society one wishes to create. This does not square very well with operating within Universities that still have an essentially Medieval social structure, presenting papers at conferences in expensive hotels, and doing intellectual battle in language no one who hasnt spent at least two or three years in grad school would ever hope to be able to understand. 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 though it does suggest that a single Anarchist High Theory in the style typical of university radicalism might be rather a contradiction in terms. One could imagine a body of theory that presumes and indeed values a diversity of sometimes incommensurable perspectives in much the same way that anarchist decision-making process 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 revolution intellectuals is not to form an elite that can arrive at the correct strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow, what precisely is it? This is an area where I think anthropology is particularly well positioned to help. And not only because most actual, self-governing communities, non-market economies, and other radical alternatives have been mainly studied by anthropologists; also, because the practice of ethnography provides at least something of a model, an incipient model, of how non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice might work. Ethnography is about teasing out the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that underly certain types of social action; the way peoples habits and actions makes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely aware of. One obvious role for a radical intellectual is precisely that: the rst thing we need to do is to look at those who are creating viable alternatives on the group, and try to gure 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 dicult task because historically, modern social theory and the idea of the vanguard were born more or less together. On the other hand, so was the idea of an artistic avant garde (avant garde is in fact simply the French word for vanguard), and the relation between the three might itself suggest some unexpected possibilities. The term avant garde was actually coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, the product of a series of essays he wrote at the very end of his life. Like his onetime secretary and disciple (and later bitter rival Auguste Comte), Saint-Simon was writing in the wake of the French revolution and essentially, were asking what had gone 69

wrong: why the transition from a medieval, feudal Catholic society to a modern, industrial democratic one seemed to be creating such enormous violence and social dislocation. The problem he concluded was that modern society lacked any force of ideological cohesion that could play the same role as the Medieval church, which gave everyone the sense of having a meaningful place in the overall social order. Towards the end of their lives each actually ended up creating his own religion: Saint-Simons called his the New Christianity, Comte, the New Catholicism. In the rst, artists were to play the role of the ultimate spiritual leaders; in an imaginary dialogue with a scientist, he has an artist explaining that in their role of imagining possible futures and inspiring the public, they can play the role of an avant garde, a truly priestly function as he puts it; in his ideal future, artists would hatch the ideas which they would then pass on to the scientists and industrialists to put into eect. Saint-Simon was also perhaps the rst to conceive the notion of the withering away of the state: once it had become clear that the authorities were operating for the good of the public, one would no more need force to compel the public to heed their advice than one needed it to compel patients to take the advice of their doctors. Government would pass away into at most some minor police functions. Comte, of course, is most famous as the founder of sociology; he invented the term to describe what he saw as the master-discipline which could both understand and direct society. He ended up taking a dierent, far more authoritarian approach: ultimately proposing the regulation and control of almost all aspects of human life according to scientic principles, with the role of high priests (eectively, the vanguard, though he did not actually call them this) in his New Catholicism being played by the sociologists themselves. Its a particularly fascinating opposition because in the early twentieth century, the positions were eectively reversed. Instead of the left-wing Saint-Simonians looking to artists for leadership, while the right-wing Comtians fancied themselves scientists, we had the fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini who imagined themselves as great artists inspiring the masses, and sculpting society according to their grandiose imaginings, and the Marxist vanguard which claimed the role of scientists. At any rate the Saint Simonians at any rate actively sought to recruit artists for their various ventures, salons, and utopian communities; though they quickly ran into diculties because so many within avant garde artistic circles preferred the more anarchistic Fourierists, and later, one or another branch of outright anarchists. Actually, the number of 19 th century artists with anarchist sympathies is quite staggering, ranging from Pissaro to Tolstoy or Oscar Wilde, not to mention almost all early 20 th century artists who later became Communists, from Malevich to Picasso. Rather than a political vanguard leading the way to 70

a future society, radical artists almost invariably saw themselves as exploring new and less alienated modes of life. The really signicant development in the 19 th century was less to idea of a vanguard than that of Bohemia (a term rst coined by Balzac in 1838): marginal communities living in more or less voluntary poverty, seeing themselves as dedicated to the pursuit of creative, unalienated forms of experience, united by a profound hatred of bourgeois life and everything it stood for. Ideologically, they were about equally likely to be proponents of art for arts sake or social revolutionaries. Contemporary theorists are actually quite divided over how to evaluate their larger signicance. Pierre Bourdieu for example insisted that the promulgation of the idea of art for arts sake, far from being depoliticizing, should be considered a signicant accomplishment, as was any which managed to establish the autonomy of one particular eld of human endeavor 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 vanguard of the market itself, or more precisely, of consumerism: their actual social function, much though they would have loathed to admit it, was to explore new forms of pleasure or aesthetic territory which could be commoditized in the next generation. (One might call this the Tom Franks version of history.) Campbell also echoes common wisdom that bohemia was almost exclusively inhabited by the children of the bourgeoisie, who had temporarily, at least rejecting their families money and privilege; and who, if they did not die young of dissipation, were likely to end up back on the board of fathers company. This is a claim that has been repeated so often about activists and revolutionaries over the years that it 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 activist circles, and historically, most vanguardist revolutionary parties as well: a kind of meeting between certain elements of (intentionally) downwardly mobile professional classes, in broad rejection of bourgeois values, and upwardly mobile children of the working class. Though such suspicions can only be conrmed by historical investigation. In the 19 th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves the Avant Garde. It was Marx though who began to signicantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class he didnt 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 to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything signicant to oer. The 71

results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party to dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was rst outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late 60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious eect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiques, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always dened themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then nally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord nally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be nally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)

Non-alienated Production
The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have been explored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so drawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the one place on is most likely to nd one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more so, in fact, that among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of rst imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively) that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated 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 shift between seeing the vanguard as 72

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 societys least alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople or alternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople who actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous peoples struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the anti-globalization movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitable that they should take a leading role. The role of indigenous peoples in turn leads us back to the role of ethnography as a possible model for the would-be non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual as well as some of its potential pitfalls. Obviously what I am proposing would only work if it was, ultimately, a form of auto-ethnography, combined, perhaps, with a certain utopian extrapolation: a matter of teasing out the tacit logic or principles underlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only oering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions (if one applied the same principles as you are applying to political organization to economics, might it not look something like this? . . . ) Here too there are suggestive parallels in the history of radical artistic movements, which became movements precisely as they became their own critics (and of course the idea of self-criticism took on a very dierent, and more ominous, tone within Marxist politics); 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 to open up a eld for discussion, rst 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.

This essay was delivered as a keynote address during the History Matters: Social Movements Past, Present, and Future conference at the New School for Social Research (http://www.newschool.edu/gf/historymatters for more information). Retrieved on May 16 th, 2009 from http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/71522/index.php

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David Graeber

The Shock of Victory

2007

The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we dont know how to handle victory. This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us havent been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but thats just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it. I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here: 1. Odd though it may seem, the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average Americans really get wind of what theyre up to, they might all end up hanging from trees. It know it seems implausible but its hard to come up with any other explanation for the way they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of mass mobilization, and especially mass direct action, and usually try to distract attention by starting some kind of war. 2. In a way this panic is justied. Mass direct action especially when organized on democratic lines is incredibly eective. Over the last thirty years in America, there have been only two instances of mass action of this sort: the anti-nuclear movement in the late 70s, and the so called anti-globalization movement from roughly 19992001. In each case, the movements main political goals were reached far more quickly than almost anyone involved imagined possible. 3. The real problem such movements face is that they always get taken by surprise by the speed of their initial success. We are never prepared for victory. It throws us into confusion. We start ghting each other. The ratcheting of repression and appeals to nationalism that inevitably accompanies some new round of war mobilization then plays into the hands of authoritarians on every side of the political spectrum. As a result, by the time the full impact of our initial victory becomes clear, were usually too busy feeling like failures to even notice it. Let me take the two most prominent examples case by case:

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I: The Anti-Nuclear Movement

The anti-nuclear movement of the late 70s marked the rst appearance in North America of what we now consider standard anarchist tactics and forms of organization: mass actions, anity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process, jail solidarity, the very principle of decentralized direct democracy. It was all somewhat primitive, compared to now, and there were signicant dierences notably a much stricter, Gandhian-style conceptions of non-violence but all the elements were there and it was the rst 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. Then almost as quickly, it distintegrated. It all began when, in 1974, some veteran peaceniks turned organic farmers in New England successfully blocked construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague, Massachusetts. In 1976, they joined with other New England activists, inspired by the success of a year-long plant occupation in Germany, to create the Clamshell Alliance. Clamshells immediate goal was to stop construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. While the alliance never ended up managing an occupation so much as a series of dramatic mass-arrests, combined with jail solidarity, their actions involving, at peak, tens of thousands of people organized on directly democratic lines succeeded in throwing the very idea of nuclear power into question in a way it had never been before. Similar coalitions began springing up across the country: the Palmetto alliance in South Carolina, Oystershell in Maryland, Sunower in Kansas, and most famous of all, the Abalone Alliance in California, reacting originally to a completely insane plan to build a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, almost directly on top of a major geographic fault line. Clamshell rst three mass actions, in 1976 and 1977, were wildly successful. But it soon fell into crisis over questions of democratic process. In May 1978, a newly created Coordinating Committee violated process to accept a last-minute government oer for a three-day legal rally at Seabrook instead of a planned fourth occupation (the excuse was reluctance to alienate the surrounding community). Acrimonious debates began about consensus and community relations, which then expanded to the role of non-violence (even cutting through fences, or defensive measures like gas masks, had originally been forbidden), gender bias, and so on. By 1979 the alliance split into two contending, and increasingly ineective, factions, and after many delays, the Seabrook plant (or half of it anyway) did go into operation. The Abalone Alliance lasted longer, until 1985, in part because its strong core of anarcha-feminists, but in the end, Diablo Canyon too got its license and went into operation in December 1988.

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On the surface this doesnt 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 in question (Seabrook, Diablo Canyon . . . ) 2. Medium-Term Goals: to block construction of all new nuclear plants, delegitimize the very idea of nuclear power and begin moving towards conservation and green power, and legitimate new forms of non-violent resistance and feminist-inspired direct democracy 3. Long-Term Goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash the state and destroy capitalism If so the results are clear. Short-term goals were almost never reached. Despite numerous tactical victories (delays, utility company bankruptcies, legal injunctions) 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 battle. Long-term goals were also obviously not obtained. But one reason they werent is that the medium-term goals were all reached almost immediately. The actions did delegitimize the very idea of nuclear power raising public awareness to the point that when Three Mile Island melted down in 1979, it doomed the industry forever. While plans for Seabrook and Diablo Canyon might not have been cancelled, just about every other then-pending plan to build a nuclear reactor was, and no new ones have been proposed for a quarter century. There was indeed a more towards conservation, green power, and a legitimizing of new democratic organizing techniques. All this happened much more quickly than anyone had really anticipated. In retrospect, its easy to see most of the subsequent problems emerged directly from the very speed of the movements success. Radicals had hoped to make links between the nuclear industry and the very nature of the capitalist system that created it. As it turns out, the capitalist system proved more than willing to jettison the nuclear industry the moment it became a liability. Once giant utility companies began claiming they too wanted to promote green energy, eectively inviting what wed now call the NGO types to a space at the table, there was an enormous 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 begin with. The inevitable result was a series of heated strategic debates. But its impossible to understand this though without rst understanding that strategic debates, within directly democratic movements, are rarely conducted as such. They almost 77

always take the form of debates about something else. Take for instance the question of capitalism. Anti-capitalists are usually more than happy to discuss their position on the subject. Liberals on the other hand really dont like to have to say actually, I am in favor of maintaining capitalism, so whenever possible, they try to change the subject. So debates that are actually about whether to directly challenge capitalism usually end up getting argued out as if they were short-term debates about tactics and non-violence. Authoritarian socialists or others who are suspicious of democracy itself dont like to make that an issue either, and prefer to discuss the need to create the broadest possible coalitions. Those who do like democracy but feel a group is taking the wrong strategic direction often nd it much more eective to challenge its decision-making process than to challenge its actual decisions. There is another factor here that is even less remarked, but I think equally important. Everyone knows that faced with a broad and potentially revolutionary coalition, any governments rst move will be to try to split in it. Making concessions to placate the moderates while selectively criminalizing the radicals this is Art of Governance 101. The US government, though, is in possession of a global empire constantly mobilized for war, and this gives it another option that most governments do not. Those running it can, pretty much any time they like, decide to ratchet up the level of violence overseas. This has proved a remarkably eective way to defuse social movements founded around domestic concerns. It seems no coincidence that the civil rights movement was followed by major political concessions and a rapid escalation of the war in Vietnam; that the anti-nuclear movement 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 and Central America; that the Global Justice Movement was followed by the collapse the Washington consensus and the War on Terror. As a result early SDS had to put aside its early emphasis on participatory democracy to become a mere antiwar movement; the anti-nuclear movement morphed into a nuclear freeze movement; the horizontal structures of DAN and PGA gave way to top-down mass organizations like ANSWER and UFPJ. From the point of view of government the military solution does have its risks. The whole thing can blow up in ones face, as it did in Vietnam (hence the obsession, at least since the rst Gulf War to design a war that was eectively protest-proof.) There is also always a small risk some miscalculation will accidentally trigger a nuclear Armageddon and destroy the planet. But these are risks politicians faced with civil unrest appear to have normally been more than willing to take if only because directly democratic movements genuinely scare them, while anti-war movements are their preferred adversary. States are, after all, ultimately forms of violence. For them, changing the argument to one about violence is taking things back to their home turf, what 78

they really prefer to talk about. Organizations designed either to wage, or to oppose, wars will always tend to be more hierarchically organized than those designed with almost anything else in mind. This is certainly what happened in the 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 also marked a return to marching along with signs, permitted rallies, and abandoning experiments with new forms of direct democracy.

II: The Global Justice Movement

Ill assume our gentle reader is broadly familiar with the actions at Seattle, IMFWorld Bank blockades six months later in Washington at A16, and so on. In the US, the movement ared up so quickly and dramatically even the media could not completely dismiss it. It also quickly started eating itself. Direct Action Networks were founded in almost every major city in America. While some of these (notably Seattle and L.A. DAN) were reformist, anti-corporate, and fans of strict non-violence codes, most (like New York and Chicago DAN) were overwhelmingly anarchist and anti-capitalist, and dedicated to diversity of tactics. Other cities (Montreal, Washington D.C.) created even more explicitly anarchist Anti-Capitalist Convergences. The anti-corporate DANs dissolved almost immediately, but very few lasted more than a couple years. There were endless and bitter debates: about non-violence, about summit-hopping, about racism and privilege issues, about the viability of the network model. Then there was 9/11, followed by a huge increase up of the level of repression and resultant paranoia, and the panicked ight of almost all our former allies among unions and NGOs. By Miami, in 2003, it seemed like wed been put to rout, and a paralysis swept over the movement from which weve only recently started to recover. September 11 th was such a weird event, such a catastrophe, that it makes it almost impossible for us to perceive anything else around it. In its immediate aftermath, almost all of the structures created in the globalization movement collapsed. But one reason it was so easy for them to collapse was not just that war seemed such an immediately more pressing concern but that once again, in most of our immediate objectives, wed already, unexpectedly, won. Myself, I joined NYC DAN right around the time of A16. At the time DAN as a whole 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, and what was then called the Washington Consensus, to destroy the hegemony of neoliberal ideas, stop all the new big trade agreements (WTO, FTAA), and to discredit and eventually destroy organizations like the IMF. The other was to disseminate a 79

(very much anarchist-inspired) model of direct democracy: decentralized, anitygroup structures, consensus process, to replace old-fashioned activist organizing styles with their steering committees and ideological squabbles. At the time we sometimes called it contaminationism, the idea that all people really needed was to be exposed to the experience of direct action and direct democracy, and they would want to start imitating it all by themselves. There was a general feeling that we werent trying to build a permanent structure; DAN was just a means to this end. When it had served its purpose, several founding members explained to me, there would be no further need for it. On the other hand these were pretty ambitious goals, so we also assumed even if we did attain them, it would probably take 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, as top-down popular front groups, almost every small-scale radical group that isnt dominated by Marxist sectarians of some sort or another and this includes anything from organizations of Syrian immigrants in Montreal or community gardens in Detroit now operate on largely anarchist principles. They might not know it. But contaminationism worked. Alternately, take the domain of ideas. The Washington consensus lies in ruins. So much so its hard no to remember what public discourse in this country was even like before Seattle. Rarely have the media and political classes been so completely unanimous about anything. That free trade, free markets, and no-holds-barred supercharged capitalism was the only possible direction for human history, the only possible solution for any problem was so completely assumed that anyone who cast doubt on the proposition was treated as literally insane. Global justice activists, when they rst forced themselves into the attention of CNN or Newsweek, were immediately written o as reactionary lunatics. A year or two later, CNN and Newsweek were saying wed won the argument. Usually when I make this point in front of anarchist crowds someone immediately objects: well, sure, the rhetoric has changed, but the policies remain the same. This is true in a manner of speaking. That is to say, its true that we didnt destroy capitalism. But we (taking the we here as the horizontalist, direct-action oriented wing of the planetary movement against neoliberalism) did arguably deal it a bigger blow in just two years than anyone since, say, the Russian Revolution. Let me take this point by point:

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FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS. All the ambitious free trade treaties planned since 1998 have failed, The MAI was routed; the FTAA, focus of the actions in Quebec City and Miami, stopped dead in its tracks. Most of us remember the 2003 FTAA summit mainly for introducing the Miami model of extreme police repression even against obviously non-violent civil resistance. It was that. But we forget this was more than anything the enraged ailings of a pack of extremely sore losers Miami was the meeting where the FTAA was denitively killed. Now no one is even talking about broad, ambitious treaties on that scale. The US is reduced to pushing for minor country-to-country trade pacts with traditional allies like South Korea and Peru, or at best deals like CAFTA, uniting its remaining client states in Central America, and its not even clear it will manage to pull o that. THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION. After the catastrophe (for them) in Seattle, organizers moved the next meeting to the Persian Gulf island of Doha, apparently deciding they would rather run the risk of being blown up by Osama bin Laden than having to face another DAN blockade. For six years they hammered away at the Doha round. The problem was that, emboldened by the protest movement Southern governments began insisting they would no longer agree open their borders to agricultural imports from rich countries unless those rich countries at least stopped pouring billions of dollars of subsidies at their own farmers, thus ensuring Southern farmers couldnt possibly compete. Since the US in particular had no intention of itself making any of the sort of sacrices it demanded of the rest of the world, all deals were o. In July 2006, Pierre Lamy, head of the WTO, declared the Doha round dead and at this point no one is even talking about another WTO negotiation for at least two years at which point the organization might very possibly not exist. THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND WORLD BANK. This is the most amazing story of all. The IMF is rapidly approaching bankruptcy, and it is a direct result of the worldwide mobilization against them. To put the matter bluntly: we destroyed it. The World Bank is not doing all that much better. But by the time the full eects were felt, we werent even paying attention.

This last story is worth telling in some detail, so let me leave the indented section here for a moment and continue in the main text: The 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, 81

basically, by manipulating debt. In exchange for emergency renancing, the IMF would demand structural adjustment programs that forced massive cuts in health, education, price supports on food, and endless privatization schemes that allowed foreign capitalists to buy up local resources at resale prices. Structural adjustment never somehow worked to get countries back on their feet economically, but that just meant they remained in crisis, and the solution was always to insist on yet another round of structural adjustment. The IMF had another, less celebrated, role: of global enforcer. It was their job to ensure that no country (no matter how poor) could ever be allowed to default on loans to Western bankers (no matter how foolish). Even if a banker were to oer a corrupt dictator a billion dollar loan, and that dictator placed it directly in his Swiss bank account and ed the country, the IMF would ensure billion 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 credit boycott whose economic eects were roughly comparable to that of a nuclear bomb. (All this ies in the face of even elementary economic theory, whereby those lending money are supposed to be accepting a certain degree of risk, but in the world of international politics, economic laws are only held to be binding on the poor.) This role was their downfall. What happened was that Argentina defaulted and got away with it. In the 90s, Argentina had been the IMFs star pupil in Latin America they had literally privatized every public facility except the customs bureau. Then in 2002, the economy crashed. The immediate results we all know: battles 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. The political class was so completely discredited that politicians were obliged to put on wigs and phony mustaches to be able to eat in restaurants without being physically attacked. When Nestor Kirchner, a moderate social democrat, took power in 2003, he knew he had to do something dramatic in order to get most of the population even to accept even the 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 on Argentinas foreign debt. Actually Kirchner was quite clever about it. He did not default on his IMF loans. He defaulted on Argentinas private debt, announcing that for all outstanding loans, 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 the rst time in its history, the IMF balked. First of all, with Argentinas economy already in ruins, even the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb would do little more than make the rubble bounce. Second of all, just about everyone was aware 82

it was the IMFs disastrous advice that set the stage for Argentinas crash in the rst place. Third 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 on the planet, and willfully destroying what little remained of the Argentine middle class would have been pushing things just a little bit too far. So Argentina was allowed to get away with it. After that, everything changed. Brazil and Argentina together arranged to pay back their outstanding debt to the IMF itself. With a little help from Chavez, so did the rest of the continent. In 2003, Latin American IMF debt stood at $49 billion. Now its $694 million. To put that in perspective: thats a decline of 98.6%. For every thousand dollars owed four years ago, Latin America now owes fourteen bucks. Asia followed. China and India now both have no outstanding debt to the IMF and refuse to take out new loans. The boycott now includes Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and pretty much every other signicant regional economy. Also Russia. The Fund is 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 result its revenues have plummeted by 80% in four years. In the irony of all possible ironies, its increasingly looking like the IMF will go bankrupt if they cant nd someone willing to bail them out. Neither is it clear theres anyone particularly wants to. With its reputation as scal enforcer in tatters, the IMF no longer serves any obvious purpose even for capitalists. Theres been a number of proposals at recent G8 meetings to make up a new mission for the organization a kind of international bankruptcy court, perhaps but all ended up getting torpedoed for one reason or another. Even if the IMF does survive, it has already been reduced to a cardboard cut-out of its former self. The World Bank, which early on took on the role of good cop, is in somewhat better 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 boycotts. On the other hand the Bank is currently being kept alive largely by the fact India and China are still willing to deal with it, and both sides know that, so it is no longer in much of a position to dictate terms. Obviously, all of this does not mean all the monsters have been slain. In Latin America, neoliberalism might be on the run, but China and India are carrying out devastating reforms within their own countries, European social protections are under attack, and most of Africa, despite much hypocritical posturing on the part of the Bonos and rich countries of the world, is still locked in debt, and now also facing a new colonization by China. The US, its economic power retreating in most of the world, is frantically trying to redouble its grip over Mexico and Central America. Were not living in utopia. But we already knew that. The question is why we never noticed our victories. 83

Olivier de Marcellus, a PGA activist from Switzerland, points to one reason: whenever some element of the capitalist system takes a hit, whether its the nuclear industry or the IMF, some leftist journal will start explaining to us that really, this is all part of their plan or maybe, an eect of the inexorable working out of the internal contradictions of capital, but certainly, nothing for which we ourselves are in any way responsible. Even more important, perhaps, is our reluctance to even say the word we. The Argentine default, wasnt that really engineered by Nestor Kirchner? What does he have to do with the globalization movement? I mean, its not as if his hands were forced by thousands of citizens were rising up, smashing banks, and replacing the government with popular assemblies coordinated by the IMC. Or, well, okay, maybe it was. Well, in that case, those citizens were People of Color in the Global South. How can we take responsibility for their actions? Never mind that they mostly saw themselves as part of the same global justice movement as us, espoused similar ideas, wore similar clothes, used similar tactics, in many cases even belonged to the same confederacies or organizations. Saying we here would imply the primal sin of speaking for others. Myself, I think its reasonable for a global movement to consider its accomplishments in global terms. These are not inconsiderable. Yet just as with the antinuclear movement, they were almost all focused on the middle term. Let me map out 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 neoliberalism, block all new trade pacts, delegitimize and ultimately shut down institutions 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 and destroy capitalism. Here again, we nd the same pattern. After the miracle of Seattle, short term tactical goals were rarely achieved. But this was mainly because faced with such a movement, governments tend to dig in their heels and make it a matter of principle that they shouldnt be. This was usually considered much more important, in fact, than the success of the summit in question. Most activists do not seem to be aware that in a lot of cases the 2001 and 2002 IMF and World Bank meetings for example police ended up enforcing security arrangements so elaborate that they came very close to shutting down the meetings themselves; 84

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 whether trade ocials got to meet or not. The point was that the protestors could not be seen to win. Here, too, the medium term goals were achieved so quickly that it actually made the longer-term goals more dicult. NGOs, labor unions, authoritarian Marxists, and similar allies jumped ship almost immediately; strategic debates ensued, but they were carried out, as always, indirectly, as arguments about race, privilege, tactics, almost anything but as actual strategic debates. Here, too, everything was made innitely more dicult by the states recourse to war. It is hard, as I mentioned, for anarchists to take much direct responsibility for the inevitable end of the war in Iraq, or even to the very bloody nose the empire has already acquired there. But a case could well be made for indirect responsibility. Since the 60s, and the catastrophe of Vietnam, the US government has not abandoned its policy of answering any threat of democratic mass mobilizing by a return to war. But it has to be much more careful. Essentially, they have to design wars to be protest-proof. There is very good reason to believe that the rst Gulf War was explicitly designed with this in mind. The approach taken to the invasion of Iraq the insistence on a smaller, high-tech army, the extreme reliance on indiscriminate repower, even against civilians, to protect against any Vietnam-like levels of American casualties appears to have been developed, again, more with a mind to heading o any potential peace movement at home than one focused on military eectiveness. This, anyway, would help explain why the most powerful army in the world has ended up being tied down and even defeated by an almost unimaginably ragtag group of guerillas with negligible access 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 to win the battle 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 cant claim to have any simple answers. Really I wrote this essay more to start a conversation, to put the problem on the table to inspire a strategic debate. Still, some implications are pretty obvious. The next time we plan a major action campaign, I think we would do well to at least take into account the possibility that we might obtain our mid-range strategic goals very quickly, and that when that happens, many of our allies will fall away. We have to recognize strategic debates for what they are, even when they seem to be about something else. Take 85

one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried windowbreaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global-exchange style green consumerism, to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to create a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated at all. Those who did break windows didnt care if they were oending suburban homeowners, because they didnt see them as a potential element in a revolutionary anti-capitalist coalition. They were trying, in eect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, rank-and-le laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anti-capitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who dont need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that theres something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets which most of us are hoping it is, since lets face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose theres no possible way we could have an anti-capitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. The latter actually leads to an interesting question. What would it mean to win, 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 19 th or 20 th century sense of the term. After all, the total view of revolution, that there will be a single mass insurrection or general strike and then all walls will come tumbling down, is entirely premised on the old fantasy of capturing the state. Thats the only way victory could possibly be that absolute and complete at least, if we are speaking of a whole country or meaningful territory. In way of illustration, consider this: what would it have actually meant for the Spanish anarchists to have actually won 1937? Its amazing how rarely we ask ourselves such questions. We just imagine it would have been something like the Russian Revolution, which began in a similar way, with the melting away of the old army, the spontaneous creation of workers soviets. But that was in the major cities. The Russian Revolution was followed by years of civil war in which the Red Army gradually imposed the new states control on every part of the old Russian Empire, whether the communities in question wanted it or not. Let us imagine that anarchist militias in Spain had routed the fascist army, which then completely 86

dissolved, and kicked the socialist Republican Government out of its oces in Barcelona and Madrid. That would certainly have been victory by anybodys standards. But what would have happened next? Would they have established Spain as a non-Republic, an anti-state existing within the exact same international borders? Would they have imposed a regime of popular councils in every singe village and municipality in the territory of what had formerly been Spain? How exactly? We have to bear in mind here that were there many villages towns, even regions of Spain where anarchists were almost non-existent. In some just about the entire population was made up of conservative Catholics or monarchists; in others (say, the Basque country) there was a militant and well-organized working class, but one that was overwhelmingly socialist or communist. Even at the height of revolutionary fervor, most of these would stay true to their old values and ideas. If the victorious FAI attempted to exterminate them all a task which would have required killing millions of people or chase them out of the country, or forcibly relocate them into anarchist communities, or send them o to reeducation camps they would not only have been guilty of world-class atrocities, they would have had to give up on being anarchists. Democratic organizations simply cannot commit atrocities on that systematic scale: for that, youd need Communist or Fascist-style top-down organization, since you cant actually get thousands of human beings to systematically massacre helpless women and children and old people, destroy communities, or chase families from their ancestral homes unless they can at least say they were only following orders. There appear to have been only 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 majority areas, and get some kind of deal out of them that they would leave the anarchist-majority cities, towns, and villages alone to organize themselves as they wish to, and hope 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, and let them decide on their own mode of self-organization. The latter seems the more tting with anarchist principles, but the results wouldnt have likely been too much dierent. After 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 landlords still commanded popular support would presumably put the same old right-wing authorities in charge; socialist or communist municipalities would put socialist or communist party bureaucrats in charge; Right and Left statists would then each form rival confederations that, even though they controlled only a fraction 87

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-government like the FAI, even assuming the FAI wished to exchange ambassadors with them, which it wouldnt. In other words the actual shooting war might end, but the political struggle would continue, and large parts of Spain would presumably end up looking like contemporary Chiapas, with each district or community divided between anarchist and anti-anarchist factions. Ultimate victory would have to be a long and arduous process. The only way to really win over the statist enclaves would be win over their children, which could be accomplished by creating an obviously freer, more pleasurable, more beautiful, secure, relaxed, fullling life in the stateless sections. Foreign capitalist powers, on the other hand, even if they did not intervene militarily, would do everything possible to head o the notorious threat of a good example by economic boycotts and subversion, and pouring resources into the statist zones. In the end, everything would probably depend on the degree to which anarchist victories in Spain inspired similar insurrections elsewhere. The real point of the imaginative exercise is just to point out that there are no clean breaks in history. The ip-side of the old idea of the clean break, the one moment when the state falls and capitalism is defeated, is that anything short of that is not really a victory at all. If capitalism is left standing, if it begins to market your once-subversive ideas, it shows that the capitalists really won. Youve lost; youve been coopted. To me this is absurd. Can we say that feminism lost, that it achieved nothing, just because corporate culture felt obliged to pay lip service to condemning sexism and capitalist rms began marketing feminist books, movies, and other products? Of course not: unless youve managed to destroy capitalism and patriarchy in one fell blow, this is one of the clearest signs that youve gotten somewhere. Presumably any eective road to revolution will involve endless moments of cooptation, endless victorious campaigns, endless little insurrectionary moments or moments of ight and covert autonomy. I hesitate to even speculate what it might really be like. But to start in that direction, the rst thing we need to do is to recognize that we do, in fact, win some. Actually, recently, weve been winning quite a lot. The question is how to break the cycle of exaltation and despair and come up with some strategic visions (the more the merrier) about these victories build on each other, to create a cumulative movement towards a new society.
Also published in Rolling Thunder: an anarchist journal of dangerous living, number 5 by the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective. Retrieved on May 16 th, 2009 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-victory

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The Anarchist Library Anti-Copyright February 5, 2012