David Graeber, 1961-2020
I was as shocked by David Graeber’s death as everybody else. As was the case with Michael Brooks, this was a case of dying much too young. Both men were beloved by their respective constituencies. Brooks, a Sandernista, was mourned most deeply by his colleagues in and around Jacobin Magazine after he died of a blood clot at the age of 36 on July 20th. Like Brooks, Graeber also died unexpectedly from a blood-related illness—internal bleeding from an unspecified cause. An autopsy will likely provide the exact nature of his untimely death.
Graeber, who was 59 when he died, was far better known than Brooks as obituaries in the leading newspapers would indicate. He was primarily known as an anarchist bien pensant but also as an author of best-selling books such as “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” that like Thomas Piketty’s “Capital” broke through to a larger audience. In addition, Graeber was considered an innovative thinker by his peers in the academy even though (or, maybe, because) his articles were far removed from the minutiae typical of JSTOR articles.
After seeing numerous tributes to him on Facebook, I thought twice about writing anything critical since it might be regarded as a gratuitous Marxist attack on a revered figure. I suppose I was waiting for someone to write such an article but could only find the same kind of tribute in Marxist magazines that he received from his anarchist and academic comrades and colleagues. For example, Left Voice—a rock-ribbed Trotskyist journal—spoke of him as “more than just a visionary academic.” Perhaps the author’s past encounters (or lack of encounters) helped shaped her article: “When I was a student at the London School of Economics, I tried to get into his public lectures and was unsuccessful. The lines stretched across courtyards and snaked through lobbies as students lined up far in advance to see him in action.”
Seeing nobody else willing to write a balance sheet on his career as an activist, I guess I’ll have to fill the bill until someone more qualified comes along. Maybe with my bad reputation in certain places on the left, I have nothing to lose. Those who hate me for criticizing Graeber will have to stand on line behind the people who hate me for a thousand other offenses. (Not having read his best-sellers, I will of course have nothing to to say about them.)
I hadn’t paid much attention to David Graeber after his well-known political firing from Yale University in 2007. But it was difficult not to miss his meteoric rise as the chief ideologist of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. At the time, I was very impressed with the role of anarchists in the struggle as was my friend Pham Binh, who had a Marxist background like me but could understand anarchism’s importance in this struggle. In a guest post on my blog, he wrote, “Occupy Wall Street (OWS) mobilized more workers and oppressed people in four weeks than the entire socialist left combined has in four decades. We would benefit by coming to grips with how and why other forces (namely anarchists) accomplished this historic feat.”
Graeber’s role was not to help organize the occupation, which admittedly eschewed any kind of organization except providing mutual aid, but to both theorize and popularize it. As for popularization, his description of Occupy as fighting for “the ninety-nine percent” was brilliant and helped shape the thinking of the Sanders campaign that battled conversely against the one-percent.
Unfortunately, Graeber’s narrowly constrained anarchist concepts helped to derail the movement in the long run. To start with, Graeber was opposed to the movement adopting demands. When he learned that there were plans to march on Wall Street with predetermined demands, Graeber and his small group created their own general assembly, which eventually developed into the New York General Assembly. This was a pyrrhic victory since the General Assembly forestalled the possibility of a mass movement fighting for structural changes that could have truly benefited the 99 percent, such as nationalizing the banks.
He was also wrong to fetishize the physical occupation of public spaces such as Zuccotti Park in New York, which were supposed to “prefigure” the future anarchist world. By not being more flexible, the movement could not project a future plan of action after the cops systematically removed activists everywhere from parks, plazas, etc. This is not to speak of the exclusion of people from the ostensible heart of the movement because jobs, family responsibilities, age and infirmity made sleeping out in the cold in a sleeping bag impossible. As is so often the case with anarchist activism, the masses are supposed to function as if observers at a sporting event, cheering on the participants.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, but this strikes me as the latest example of the “prefigurative” dead-end. The NY Times reported on the experience of coffee shop owner Faizel Khan:
Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.
“They barricaded us all in here,” Mr. Khan said. “And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.”
Finally, Graeber defended the idea of consensus rather than taking a vote. This might have been the worst idea of all since it paralyzed the movement. In an interview with Platypus, Graeber tried to defend the practice:
…you’ll only get broad and tepid solutions if you bring everything to the General Assembly. That’s why we have working groups, empower them to perform actions, and encourage them to form spontaneously. This is another of the key principles in dealing with consensus and decentralization. In an ideal world, the very unwieldiness of finding consensus in a large group should convince people not to bring decisions before this large group unless they absolutely have to. That’s actually the way it’s supposed to work out.
This strikes me as muddle-headed nonsense.
I’ve often considered the possibility that anarchism is as dogmatic in its own ways as “Leninism”. Even though it does not operate under democratic centralism, you get a cult-like devotion to some of its core ideas, especially the “propaganda of the deed” that included bombings in Czarist Russia and, more recently, the black bloc.
On February 6, 2012, Chris Hedges wrote an article for Truthdig titled “The Cancer in Occupy” that began:
The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists — so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property — is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.
Hedge’s article pissed Graeber off enough to make him write a reply titled “Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges” in New Inquiry. Graeber’s defense was one I heard a thousand times. The Black Bloc was not a group but a tactic, as if the people carrying it out weren’t part of the same affinity group.
For Graeber, the black bloc is a form of horizontalist direct democracy that is based on consensus rather than majority vote. Yeah, who needs a cumbersome and verticalist procedure such as voting that would only get in the way of a determined horizontalist bunch of people wearing bandannas over their faces intent on raising Cain.
Essentially, the black bloc is as elitist and verticalist in its own way as the self-declared vanguard groups of the Leninist left that aspire to control mass organizations. Groups like the American SWP that I belonged to for 11 years used to caucus before a meeting to make sure that the membership followed a predetermined line before a critical vote even if in the course of discussion they decided that the SWP was wrong. Meanwhile, the black bloc does not bother with votes at all. This is a Hobson’s Choice, if there ever was one.
Finally, there was Graeber’s efforts to persuade the left that Rojova was the ultimate “prefigurative” experiment. He never bothered to write about the relations between the PYD and the Syrian rebels who in their own way created “prefigurative” liberated territories all across the country until aerial bombardment, chemical warfare and starvation sieges preempted the possibility of them becoming as ideal as Rojova. Trying to apply Murray Bookchin’s theories to a place like Homs was dead on arrival.
For Graeber, Rojova’s reliance on co-ops made it superior to Marxist-style central planning. You can find an interview with Graeber on Co-Operative Economy, a website that describes itself as follows:
The co-operative movement in North Syria, known colloquially as Rojava (meaning “West” in Kurdish) is thriving.
In Rojava, a revolution is taking place, based on the political model of Democratic Confederalism, and within this system, co-operatives play an integral part in reshaping the economy. People here are taking collective control of their lives and workplaces.
In Bakur, (the predominantly Kurdish region which lies within Turkey’s border) co-operatives have been set up within a similar model of democratic autonomy, despite the ongoing military repression by the state of Turkey.
Anticipating his 2018 best-seller, Graeber said, “And in fact, my father was in Barcelona when it was run by an anarchist principle. They just got rid of white collar workers, and sure enough they discovered these were basically bullshit jobs, that they didn’t make any difference if they weren’t there.”
Well, I was in Nicaragua in the late 80s—a country trying to implement socialist policies under very difficult conditions—and can assure you that engineers, programmers, economists and other white-collar professionals were desperately needed. If they were doing “bullshit jobs”, that was not what we heard from Daniel Ortega. One supposes that Nicaragua would have been better off it had tried to implement Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism rather than state ownership and planning but then again Somoza would have thrown the practitioners out of helicopters before they got very far.
Graeber has a rather quaint way of expressing the difference between Marxism and anarchism. People like Somoza or Assad don’t mind if Marxists say things like “I hate you, I want to overthrow you” nearly as much as what the anarchists say: “You guys are ridiculous and unnecessary.” Gosh, where did I go wrong? Instead of joining the SWP in the (vain) hope of making a revolution in the USA, I should have gone up to Vermont and started a maple syrup co-operative. That would have saved me the trouble of reading all that stuff about revolutionary struggles in Cuba or Vietnam and eventually figuring out that the SWP was right in its ultimate goal but totally fucked-up in the way it went about it.
Showing that he has read his Bakunin, Graeber puts it this way: “When those Marxists come, the police will still be there. There are probably going to be more of them, right? Anarchists come, the whole structure will be changed. People will be told that it’s completely unnecessary.” Oh, I see. With Rojava chugging along, the police will disappear. What a relief to everybody except the families of the 13,000 men who were secretly hanged in Syrian prisons without even a trial.
Here’s Graeber summing up the Rojava experiment:
They run the cities. It’s a country of a real economy; it’s a poor one and they’re under embargo. But there are people driving cars, there is traffic rules, there’s workshops and factories producing things, there’s farms. It does all the things you have in a normal society. Roads have to be maintained.
But essentially, what they have done is created … it’s very interesting. I’ve said, I’ve described it as a dual power situation, but this is the first time in human history, I think, where you have a dual power situation where the same guy set up both sides. So they have a thing that looks like a government; it’s got a parliament, it’s got ministers. They pass legislation.
For me, “dual power” refers to what takes place under revolutionary conditions. For example, in the country Graeber’s father fought in, there really was a dual-power situation. Vast portions of the country were producing food and manufactured goods on farms and factories after ousting the bosses. Were those bosses the white-collar people Graeber was referring to? A computer programmer working for Michael Bloomberg is not a member of the same class as his boss. Been there, done that.
In order to regain control of the country, Franco used his air force and powerful military to destroy the militias and regular troops who defended worker and farmer owned and controlled property. Any resemblance between what took place in Spain and now in Rojava is purely coincidental.
