Ezra Klein, in the Washington Post

What the fuck? You want to know why people got upset and started occupying parks all over the country? It’s because the economic decisions that affect their lives are made by elites in fancy Washington, DC think tanks funded by billionaire investment bankers. And the Peter G. Peterson Institute is one of the prime culprits at pushing for “bipartisan” and ”centrist” neoliberal solutions to our problems, the primary one, naturally, being our federal budget deficit caused by “out-of-control entitlement spending.”

And Ezra Klein is the sort of bright, young, liberal journalist to impress with talk about how we could make some tax changes, reverse some of the financial deregulation of the Bush years, and we’ll be able to carry on just as before. I mean, I guess it’s something. The working classes don’t normally get that much of bone thrown our way unless somebody gets genuinely worried. But, for fuck’s sake, nobody camped out in an inhospitable downtown plaza under a purposely intimidating level of police surveillance so that the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics could host a luncheon and maybe put out some white papers about how to keep income inequality down to a manageable level.

Anthropology professor and anarchist activist David Graeber, discussing his new book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I just bought yesterday. I’m pretty excited about this book, so expect a bit more along these lines. Also, he’s involved with that whole Occupy Wall Street thing that I’ve been meaning to post about. (via youthisastateofmind)

Just saw this old post of mine get a couple reblogs. Obviously written back in the early days of Occupy Wall Street (I think it must have been October 4th or 5th that I bought the book).

(Source: Washington Post)

David Graeber in “The Shock of Victory” the first essay in his new collection Revolutions in Reverse, which I posted yesterday (complete with the whole thing in Scribd, so you can read it all yourself), in which he proposes the provocative thesis that “the biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.” If you’re interested in trying to figure out how we’re ever going to get around to overthrowing global capitalism, this is a must-read. It’s from 2008, I believe, so it’s interesting to see how things are playing out these days with our current protest movement. Certainly, these issues are going to become important in the future when we evaluate whether Occupy Wall Street succeeded or not.

This passage seems especially relevant as the Occupy movement matures and gets some successes to its credit:

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 one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking 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 didn’t care if they were offending suburban homeowners, because they didn’t see them as a potential element in a revolutionary anti-capitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, 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-file 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 don’t need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there’s something they can do about it.

I’m sitting alone at home on a Friday night, but after reading this I’ve at least got some big dreams. Seriously, though, read it.