Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
David Graeber
Language: English
Pages: 120
ISBN: 1570272433
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists because they simply can t imagine an alternative that wouldn t be even more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have reached an impasse. Or has it? In this collection of essays David Graeber explores a wide-ranging set of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places. At a moment when the old assumption about politics and power have been irrefutably broken the only real choice is to begin again: to create a new language, a new common sense, about what people basically are and what it is reasonable for them to expect from the world, and from each other. In this volume Graeber draws from the realms of politics, art, and the imagination to start this conversation and to suggest that that the task might not be nearly so daunting as we d be given to imagine.
socialists, perhaps with a few anarchist ministers (as did in fact exist during the war), allow them impose government control on the right-wing majority areas, and then get some kind of deal out of them that they would allow the anarchist-majority cities, towns, and villages to organize themselves as they wish to. Then 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 each assembly
everything around them.10 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 I’ve been saying is true, the whole project of first invoking a revolutionary “multitude,” and then to start looking for the dynamic forces that lie behind it, begins to look a lot like the first step of that very process of institutionalization that must eventually
victorious battles in the streets, the spontaneous outpouring of popular festivity, the creation of new democratic institutions, the ultimate reinvention of life itself – never quite seemed to work itself out, and there is no particular reason to imagine it ever could have. It’s not that any of these dreams have ever gone away, or reason to believe they ever could either. It’s that, between the anarchist insistence that we can no longer imagine revolution solely within the framework of the
the constant return to such heroic moments. It is, ultimately, a subtle form of conservatism – or, perhaps one should say conservative radicalism, if such were possible – a nostalgia for the days when it was possible to put on a tin-foil suit, shout nonsense verse, and watch staid bourgeois audiences turn into outraged lynch mobs; to strike a blow against Cartesian Dualism and feel that by doing so, one has thereby struck a blow for oppressed people everywhere. About the concept of immaterial
money”), and oil, which actually is a limited resource, as if it were money – as something to be freely spent to generate ever-increasing economic activity, as if there would never be an end to it? The two forms of insanity are, clearly, linked. Really a coin is just a promise, and the only real limit to the amount of money we produce is how many promises we wish to make to one another, and what sort. Under existing arrangements, of course, there are all sorts of other, artificial limits: over