A-Infos (en) US, Alt Media, The harbingers of the Occupy Wall Street

Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of OccupyWallStreet By David Graeber - Just a 
few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started with a conversation I’d had 
with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina: ---- All these years,” she said, “we’ve been 
organizing marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you’re depressed, if you get 
300, you’re happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And you’re incredulous: on some 
level, even though you didn’t realize it, you’d given up thinking that you could actually 
win. ---- As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even the world, I 
am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she felt. ---- On August 2, I showed 
up at a 7 PM meeting at Bowling Green, that a Greek anarchist friend, who I’d met at a 
recent activist get together at 16 Beaver Street, had told me was meant to plan some kind 
of action on Wall Street in mid-September.

At the time I was only vaguely aware of the background: that a month before, the Canadian 
magazine Adbusters had put out the call to “Occupy Wall Street”, but had really just 
floated the idea on the internet, along with some very compelling graphics, to see if it 
would take hold; that a local anti-budget cut coalition top-heavy with NGOs, unions, and 
socialist groups had tried to take possession of the process and called for a “General 
Assembly” at Bowling Green. The title proved extremely misleading. When I arrived, I found 
the event had been effectively taken over by a veteran protest group called the Worker’s 
World Party, most famous for having patched together ANSWER one of the two great anti-war 
coalitions, back in 2003. They had already set up their banners, megaphones, and were 
making speeches—after which, someone explained, they were planning on leading the 80-odd 
assembled people in a march past the Stock Exchange itself.

The usual reaction to this sort of thing is a kind of cynical, bitter resignation. “I wish 
they at least wouldn’t advertise a ‘General Assembly’ if they’re not actually going to 
hold one.” Actually, I think I actually said that, or something slightly less polite, to 
one of the organizers, a disturbingly large man, who immediately remarked, “well, fine. 
Why don’t you leave?”

But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something. To adopt activist parlance: this 
wasn’t really a crowds of verticals—that is, the sort of people whose idea of political 
action is to march around with signs under the control of one or another top-down protest 
movement. They were mostly pretty obviously horizontals: people more sympathetic with 
anarchist principles of organization, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and 
direct action. I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered 
from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a 
Spanish couple who’d been involved with the indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek 
friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the 
Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist 
intellectual I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we 
both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing: “Why are we so complacent? 
Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter things and 
go home?” – though I think the way we put it was more like, “You know something? Fuck this 
shit. They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.”

So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and tried to get everyone 
else to join us. Almost immediately people appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, 
calling us back with promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the 
podium. We complied. It didn’t happen. My Greek friend made an impassioned speech and was 
effectively shooed off the stage. There were insults and vituperations. After about an 
hour of drama, we formed the circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the 
rally and come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would operate by 
modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and 
then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times 
for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups. It was difficult to figure out 
what to do since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major action, let 
alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required to actually shut down Wall 
Street—and anyway we couldn’t shut down Wall Street on the appointed day, since September 
17, the day Adbusters had been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind.

Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to put on our first 
flyer. Adbusters’ idea had been that we focus on “one key demand.” This was a brilliant 
idea from a marketing perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at 
all. We put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions 
to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did we represent? 
Someone—this time I remember quite clearly it was me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a 
half dozen others had equally strong memories of being the first to come up with 
it—suggested, “well, why not call ourselves ‘the 99%’? If 1% of the population have ended 
up with all the benefits of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the wealth, own 
the politicians… why not just say we’re everybody else?” The Spanish couple quickly began 
to lay out a “We Are the 99%” pamphlet, and we started brainstorming ways to print and 
distribute it for free.

Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. The core of the emerging group, which 
began to meet regularly in Tompkins Square park, were very young people who had cut their 
activist teeth on the Bloombergville encampment outside City Hall earlier in the summer; 
aside from that there was a smattering of activists who had been connected to the Global 
Justice movement with skills to share (one or two of whom I had to drag out of effective 
retirement), and, as mentioned a number of New Yorkers originally from Greece, Spain, even 
Tunisia, with knowledge and connections with those who were, or had been, involved in 
occupations there. We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like 
had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a public space to 
create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct 
democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the US 
government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. Still, it was almost 
impossible to predict what would really happen on the 17th. There were supposed to be 
90,000 people following us on the internet. Adbusters had called for 20,000 to fill the 
streets. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. But how many would really show up? What’s 
more, we were keenly aware that the NYPD numbered close to 40,000; Wall Street was, in 
fact, probably the single most heavily policed public space on the face of Planet Earth. 
To be perfectly honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and legal 
trainings, lessons on how to organize affinity groups and do non-violent civil 
disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings and the like, for most of us, the 
greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t 
turn out a total fiasco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten, 
arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply looked the other way.

We’d certainly seen it happen before.

This time it didn’t. True, there were all the predictable conflicts. Most of New York’s 
grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and mocked us from the sidelines as 
reformist; meanwhile, the more open, “small-a” anarchists, who had been largely 
responsible for organizing the facilitation and trainings, battled the verticals in the 
group to ensure that we did not institute anything that could become a formal leadership 
structure, such as police liaisons or marshals. There were also bitter battles over the 
web page, as well as minor crises over the participation of various fringe groups, ranging 
from followers of Lyndon LaRouche to one woman from a shadowy group that called itself US 
Day of Rage, and who we sometimes suspected might not have any other members, who 
systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because she felt we should be 
able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. On September 17th itself, I was troubled at first 
by the fact that only a few hundred people seemed to have shown up. What’s more the spot 
we’d chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut down by the 
city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee however had scouted out other 
possible locations, and distributed maps: around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to 
location #5—Zuccotti Park—and by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by 
at least two thousand people.

The real credit for what happened after that—within a matter of weeks, a movement that had 
spread to 800 different cities, with outpourings of support from radical opposition groups 
as far away as China—belongs mainly to the students and other young people who simply dug 
themselves and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many cases, obviously 
illegal) acts of police repression designed to intimidate, and to make life so miserable 
in the park (refusing to allow activists to cover their computers with tarps during 
rainstorms, that sort of thing) that its inhabitants would simply become demoralized and 
abandon the project. And, as the weeks went on, against calculated acts of terrorism 
involving batons and pepper-spray. Still, dogged activists have held out heroically under 
such conditions before, and the world simply ignored them. Why didn’t it happen this time? 
After so many years of vain attempts to revive the fervor of the Global Justice Movement, 
and constantly falling flat, I found myself, like Dina, asking “what did we actually do 
right?”

My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to write an oped on Occupy 
Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, 
another brilliant organizer of the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a 
video documentarian, doing one-on-one interviews of fellow campers during the first two 
nights at Zucotti Square. Over and over she heard the same story: “I did everything I was 
supposed to! I worked hard, studied hard, got into college. Now I’m unemployed, with no 
prospects, and $50 to $80,000.00 in debt.” These were kids who played by the rules, and 
were rewarded by a future of constant harassment, of being told they were worthless 
deadbeats by agents of those very financial institutions who—after having spectacularly 
failed to play by the rules, and crashing the world economy as a result, were saved and 
coddled by the government in all the ways that ordinary Americans such as themselves, 
equally spectacularly, were not.

“We are watching,” I wrote, “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new 
generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education 
with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.” Three 
weeks later, after watching more and more elements of mainstream America clamber on board, 
I think this is still true. In a way, the demographic base of OWS is about as far as one 
can get from that of the Tea Party—with which it is so often, and so confusingly, 
compared. The popular base of the Tea Party was always middle aged suburban white 
Republicans, most of middling economic means, anti-intellectual, terrified of social 
change—above all, for fear that what they saw as their one remaining buffer of privilege 
(basically, their whiteness) might finally be stripped away. OWS, by contrast, is at core 
forwards-looking youth movement, just a group of forward-looking people who have been 
stopped dead in their tracks; of mixed class backgrounds but with a significant element of 
working class origins; their one strongest common feature being a remarkably high level of 
education. It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation, and so 
many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a model of an alternative 
economy, where lending is from a communal pool, at 0% interest, and the currency being 
leant is knowledge, and the means to understanding.

In a way, this is nothing new. Revolutionary coalitions have always tended to consist of a 
kind of alliance between children of the professional classes who reject their parents’ 
values, and talented children of the popular classes who managed to win themselves a 
bourgeois education, only to discover that acquiring a bourgeois education does not 
actually mean one gets to become a member of the bourgeoisie. You see the pattern repeated 
over and over, in country after country: Chou Enlai meets Mao Tse Tung, or Che Guevara 
meets Fidel Castro. Even US counter-insurgency experts have long known the surest 
harbingers of revolutionary ferment in any country is the growth of a population of 
unemployed and impoverished college graduates: that is, young people bursting with energy, 
with plenty of time on their hands, every reason to be angry, and access to the entire 
history of radical thought. In the US, the depredations of the student loan system simply 
ensures such budding revolutionaries cannot fail to identify banks as their primary enemy, 
or to understand the role of the Federal Government—which maintains the student loan 
program, and ensures that their loans will be held over their heads forever, even in the 
event of bankruptcy—in maintaining the banking system’s ultimate control over every aspect 
of their future lives.

Ordinarily, though, the plight of the indebted college graduate would not be the sort of 
issue that would speak directly to the hearts of, say, members of New York City’s Transit 
Worker’s Union—which, at time of writing, is not only supporting the occupation, but suing 
the New York Police Department for commandeering their buses to conduct a mass arrest of 
OWS activists blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. Why would a protest by educated youth strike 
such a chord across America—in a way that it probably wouldn’t have in 1967, or even 1990? 
Clearly, it has much to do with the financialization of capital. It may well be the case 
by now that most of Wall Street’s profits are no longer to be being extracted indirectly, 
through the wage system, at all, but taken directly from the pockets of ordinary 
Americans. I say “may” because we don’t really have the numbers. In a way this is telling 
in itself. For all the endless statistical data available on every aspect of our economic 
system, I have been unable to find any economist who can tell me how much of an average 
American’s annual income, let alone life income, ends up being appropriated by the 
financial industries in the form of interest payments, fees, penalties, and service 
charges. Still, given the fact that interest payments alone takes up between 15-17% of 
household income,[1] a figure that does not include student loans, and that penalty fees 
on bank and credit card accounts can often double the amount one would otherwise pay, it 
would not be at all surprising if at least one dollar out of every five an American earns 
over the course of her lifetime is now likely to end up in Wall Street’s coffers in one 
way or another. The percentage may well be approaching the amount the average American 
will pay in taxes. In fact, for the least affluent Americans, it has probably long since 
overtaken it.

This has very real implications for how we even think about what sort of economic system 
we are in. Back when I was in college, I learned that the difference between capitalism 
and feudalism—or what was sometimes called the “tributary mode of production”—is that a 
feudal aristocracy appropriates its wealth through “direct juro-political extraction.” 
They simply take other people’s things through legal means. Capitalism was supposed to be 
a bit more subtle.[2] Yet as soon as it achieved total world dominance, capitalism seems 
to have almost immediately begun shifting back into something that could well be described 
as feudalism.[3] In doing so, too, it made the alliance of money and government impossible 
to ignore. In the years since 2008, we’ve seen examples ranging from the comical—as when 
loan collection agencies in Massachusetts sent their employees out en masse to canvas on 
behalf of a senate candidate (Scott Brown) who they assumed would be in favor of harsher 
laws against debtors, to the downright outrageous—as when “too big to fail” institutions 
like Bank of America, bailed out by the taxpayers, secure in the knowledge they would not 
be allowed to collapse no matter what their behavior, paying no taxes, but delivering vast 
sums of culled from their even vaster profits to legislators who then allow their 
lobbyists to actually write the legislation that is supposed to “regulate” them. At this 
point, it’s not entirely clear why an institution like Bank of America should not, at this 
point, be considered part of the federal government, other than that it gets to keep its 
profits for itself.

Still, this might explain the outrage at government’s alliance with the financial 
sector—the fact that bribery has, effectively, been made legal in America, a country that 
nonetheless presumes to go around the world pretending it is some sort of beacon of 
democracy. It does not explain the comprehensive rejection of existing political 
institutions of any sort.

This is where I must admit my own position is particularly confusing. On the one hand, 
this is exactly the kind of attitude I have been arguing for for years. I like to describe 
myself precisely as a “small-a anarchist.” That is, I believe in anarchist 
principles—mutual aid, direct action, the idea building the new, free society in the shell 
of the old—but I’ve never felt a need to declare allegiance to any particular anarchist 
school (Syndicalists, Platformists, etc). Above all, I am happy to work with anyone, 
whatever they call themselves, willing to work on anarchist principles—which in America 
today, has largely come to mean, a refusal to work with or through the government or other 
institutions which ultimately rely on the threat of force, and a dedication to horizontal 
democracy, to treating each other as we believe free men and women in a genuinely free 
society would treat each other. Even the commitment to direct action, so often confused 
with breaking windows or the like, really refers to the refusal of any politics of 
protest, that merely appeals to the authorities to behave differently, and the 
determination instead to act for oneself, and to do what one thinks is right, regardless 
of law and authority. Gandhi’s salt march, for example, is a classic example of direct 
action. So was squatting Zuccotti Park. It’s a public space; we were the public; the 
public shouldn’t have to ask permission to engage in peaceful political assembly in its 
own park; so we didn’t. By doing so we not only acted in the way we felt was right, we 
aimed to set an example to others: to begin to reclaim communal resources that have been 
appropriated for purposes of private profit to once again serve for communal use—as in a 
truly free society, they would be—and to set an example of what genuine communal use might 
actually be like. For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human 
freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

Small-a anarchists such as myself were at the core of the anti-nuclear movement in the 
‘70s and the global justice movement between 1998-2001, and over the years, we have put 
much of our creative energy into developing forms of egalitarian political process that 
actually work. I should emphasize that this is not just an anarchist project. Actually, 
the development of consensus process, which is probably the movement’s greatest 
accomplishment, emerges just as much from the tradition of radical feminism, and draws on 
spiritual traditions from Native American to Quakerism. This is where the whole exotic 
language of the movement comes from: facilitation, “the people’s microphone,” 
spokescouncils, blocks; though in the case of Occupy Wall Street, augmented and 
transformed by the experience of General Assembly movements across the Mediterranean.

Obviously, what happened is exactly what we hoped would happen. The politics of direct 
action is based, to a certain degree, on a faith that freedom is contagious. It is almost 
impossible to convince the average American that a truly democratic society would be 
possible. One can only show them. But the experience of actually watching a group of a 
thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a leadership 
structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the streets linking arms to holding 
their ground against a phalanx of armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and 
solidarity, can change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that 
matter, human life, could actually be like. Back in the days of the Global Justice 
movement we thought we might expose enough people, around the world, to these new forms of 
direct democracy, these traditions of direct action, that a new, global, democratic 
culture would begin to emerge. Of course it didn’t quite happen that way. Certainly, the 
movement did inspire thousands, and played a major role in transforming how activist 
groups in Europe and North America conducted meetings and thought about politics; but the 
contagion was largely contained within pre-existing activist ghettos; most Americans never 
even knew that direct democracy was so much of what we were about. The anti-war movements 
after 2003 mobilized hundreds of thousands, but they fell back on the old fashioned 
vertical politics of top-down coalitions, charismatic leaders, and marching around with 
signs. Many of us diehard kept the faith. We kept looking for the moment of revival. After 
all, we had dedicated our lives to the principle that something like this would eventually 
happen. But, like my Egyptian friend, we had also, in a certain way, failed to notice that 
we’d stop really believing that we could actually win.

And then it happened. The last time I went back to Zuccotti Square, and watched middle 
aged construction workers and Latino hip hop artists using all our old hand signals in 
mass meetings, one of my old anarchist comrades—a one-time tree-sitter and inveterate 
eco-activist who used to go by the name Warcry, and was now established in the park as 
video documentarians—admitted to me, “every few hours I do have to pinch myself to make 
sure it isn’t all a dream.”

So the social scientist in me has to ask: Why? Why now? Why did it actually work?

Again, I think the answer is generational. In politics, too, as in education, we are 
looking at a generation of young people who played by the rules, and have seen their 
efforts prove absolutely fruitless. We must remember that in 2008, the youth vote went 
overwhelmingly to Barrack Obama and the Democrats. We also have to remember that Obama was 
running, then, as a candidate of “Change”, using a campaign language that drew liberally 
from that of radical social movements (“yes we can!”, “be the change!”), and that as a 
former community organizer, he was one of the few candidates in recent memory who could be 
said to have emerged from a social movement background rather than from smoke-filled 
rooms. This, combined with the fact that Obama was Black, gave young people a sense that 
they were experiencing a genuinely transformative moment in American politics.

All this happened in a country where there was such a straightjacket on acceptable 
political discourse in the US—what a politician or media pundit can say, without being 
immediately written off as lunatic fringe—that the views of very large segments of the 
American public simply are never voiced at all. To give a sense of how radical is the 
disconnect between acceptable opinion, and the actual feelings of American voters, 
consider a pair of polls conducted by Rasmussen, the first in December 2008, right after 
Obama was elected, the second in April 2011. A broad sampling of Americans were asked 
which economic system they preferred: capitalism, or socialism? In 2008, 15% felt the USA 
would be better off adopting a socialist system; now, three years later, the number has 
gone up, to one in five. Even more striking was the breakdown by age: the younger the 
respondent, the more likely they were to reject a capitalist system. Among Americans 
between 15 and 25, a thin plurality still preferred capitalism: 37%, as opposed to 33% in 
favor of socialism (the rest were unsure). But think about what this means here. It means 
that almost two thirds of America’s youth think it might be a good idea to jettison the 
capitalist system entirely! This in a country where most have never seen a single 
politician, TV pundit, or mainstream “expert” use the term “socialism” as anything but a 
term of condescension and abuse. Granted, for that very reason, it’s hard to know exactly 
what young people who say they prefer “socialism” actually think they’re embracing. 
Presumably not an economic system modeled on that of North Korea. What then? Sweden? 
Canada? It’s impossible to say. But in a way it’s also beside the point. Most Americans 
might not be sure what socialism is supposed to be, but they do know a great deal about 
capitalism, and if “socialism” means anything to them, it means “something, pretty much 
anything, other than that!”

In 2008, young Americans preferred Obama to McCain by a rate 68% to 30[4]—again, an 
approximately 2/3 margin.

How, then, do you expect a young American voter to feel, after casting a vote for a 
fundamental change to our political and economic system, on discovering that in fact, they 
have elected a man who twenty years ago would have been considered a moderate conservative?

I mean that word, “conservative,” in its literal sense by the way. This literal sense is 
now rarely used. Nowadays, in the US, “conservative” has come to mean “right-wing 
radical,” but it used to mean someone whose main political imperative is to conserve 
existing institutions, more or less exactly as they are—and this is precisely what Obama 
has turned out to be. Almost all his greatest political efforts have been aimed in one way 
or another at preserving some institutional structure under threat of radical 
transformation: the banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry, 
since Obama’s main argument in pushing for health care reform was that the US health care 
system, based on for-profit, private insurers, was not economically viable over the long 
term, and indeed, what he ended up doing was preserving exactly that for-profit system in 
a way that it might endure for at least another generation. Considering the state of the 
US economy in 2008, it required genuinely heroic efforts not to change anything. Yet Obama 
did expend those heroic efforts, and the result was no structural change in existing 
institutions of any kind at all.

I am a frequenter of the liberal blog Daily Kos. Reading it regularly is probably the best 
way to get a sense of what the “progressive community” in the US—left-leaning voters and 
activists who still believe in acting through the Democratic Party—are currently thinking. 
Over the last two years, the level of hatred directed against Obama is extraordinary. He 
is regularly accused of being a fraud, a liar, a secret Republican who has intentionally 
flubbed every opportunity for progressive change presented to him in the name of 
“bipartisan compromise” with a rabid and uncompromising Right. Others suggest he is a 
well-meaning progressive whose hands are tied; or, alternately, blame progressives for not 
having mobilized to provide sufficient pressure to his Left. The latter seem to forget the 
way the grassroots activist groups created during the campaign, which were expected to 
endure afterwards for just this purpose, were rapidly dismantled once Obama was in power 
and handing the economic reigns of the US over to the very people (Geithner, Bernanke, 
Summers) responsible for the crisis, or how liberal groups that actually try to mount 
campaigns against such policies are regularly threatened with defunding by White-House 
friendly NGOs. But in a way, this feeling of personal betrayal is pretty much inevitable. 
It is the only way of preserving the faith that it’s possible for progressive policies to 
be enacted in the US through electoral means. Because if Obama was not planning all along 
to betray his Progressive base, then one would be forced to conclude any such project is 
impossible. After all, how could there have been a more perfect alignment of the stars 
than happened in 2008? That year saw a wave election that left Democrats in control of 
both houses of congress,[5] a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Change” 
coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical measures of some 
sort were unavoidable, and at a time when popular rage against the nation’s financial 
elites was so intense that most Americans would have supported almost anything. If it was 
not possible to enact any real progressive policies or legislation at such a moment, 
clearly, it would never be. Yet none were enacted.[6] Instead Wall Street gained even 
greater control over the political process, and, since Republicans proved the only party 
willing to propose radical positions of any kind, the political center swung even further 
to the Right. Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 
2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large 
numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.

Say what you will about Americans, and one can say many things, this is a country of 
deeply democratic sensibilities. The idea that we are, or are supposed to be, a democratic 
society is at the very core of what makes us proud to be Americans. If Occupy Wall Street 
has spread to every city in America, it’s because our financial overlords have brought us 
to such a pass that anarchists, pagan priestesses, and tree-sitters are about the only 
Americans left still holding out for the idea that a genuinely democratic society might be 
possible.
————-
[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/housedebt/default.htm.

[2] Similarly, Max Weber argued that the “irrational political capitalism” of “military 
adventurers … tax farmers, speculators, money dealers, and others” of, say, the Roman 
world, was an historical dead end, since it was ultimately parasitical off the state, and 
had nothing in common with the rational investment of production of modern industrial 
capitalism. By Weber’s logic, contemporary global capitalism, which is dominated by 
speculators, currency traders, and government contractors, has long since reverted to the 
dead-end irrational variety.

[3] See http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/underlying-ideology-of-the-99/ for a 
nice essay on Occupy Wall Street and “neo-feudalism.”

[4] 
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27525497/ns/politics-decision_08/t/youth-vote-may-have-been-key-obamas-win/

[5] The conventional response to this was to insist that the Democrats didn’t really 
control both houses because the Senate rules had changed, irresponsible use of the 
Filibuster meant that a 60-vote majority was required. This only makes sense if one 
assumes that any minority party, at any previous period of American history, could have 
gotten rid of majority rule and moved to a 60% system had they really wanted to, but 
somehow chose not to do so—which is obviously absurd. If the Republicans got away with it 
in 2008 it’s because the Democrats decided not to make a major issue an unprecedented 
opposition policy of systematically violating all previous tacit Senate rules.

[6] Obama’s health care legislation, I will repeat, does not count since it is not 
comprehensive and effectively reproduces Bob Dole’s Republican health plan of 2006.

David Graeber, who is currently a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University 
London. Prior to that he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He 
is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon.


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"



































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