A stroll in Zuccotti Park?

Abstract

David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House Publishing, New York, 2011; 534 pp: 9781933633862, US$37 (hbk) David Graeber The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, Allen Lane, London, 2013; xxi + 326pp: 9781846146633, 14.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) These two books are important, bur not in the way their author intended. Together, they reveal as clearly as need be the seductions and pitfalls awaiting those who announce that they, finally, have the answers to hitherto elusive questions about revolutionary practice--the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in Zuccotti Park --and the anarchist theory about debt and democracy that informs it. 'In one year,' declares Graeber (2013: 149), 'Occupy managed to both identify the problem--a system of class power that has effectively fused finance and government--and to propose a solution: the creation of a genuinely democratic culture.' These claims are unpersuasive, largely because of an approach which refuses to commit to a political and economic programme. Graeber harks back to an era of industrial capitalism, seen by him as a golden age, and about which he appears to have little to say in terms of criticism. No longer able to regard themselves as middle class, a status Graeber equates (2013: xix, 66-67, 70, 142) with a perception of the police and credit providers as being 'basically on your side', Americans 'from solidly middle-class families' support OWS because they are unable to repay loans taken out to educate themselves, being either unemployed or in poorly-paid jobs. Graeber fails to note that while such mobilisation is certainly radical, it is not necessarily leftist: in the 1930s, opposition by 'solidly middle-class families' not to capitalism bur to 'money power' ('financialization') generated support for the political right. Contrary to his belief that questioning the role of money automatically constitutes a 'challenge to the very nature of the economic system,' therefore, implicit in much grassroots bourgeois anger at finance and the power of money is the view that, once banks are reformed, a benign/kind capitalism can be recuperated. Indeed, data provided by Graeber (2013: 93) showing that 'a plurality still prefer capitalism' undermines his assumption that OWS support equals a desire to change the economic system. Questioning whether neoliberal 'financialization' is actually still capitalism, Graeber (2013: 78-79) misunderstands the changes that have occurred in the world economy, as a result of which he interprets accumulation in national, not international terms. Like others (Hardt & Negri 2001; Harvey 2003), therefore, he seems to think that what we have now is no longer capitalism but some form of non-capitalist 'financialization'. Real industrial capitalism, Graeber maintains, is now located only in the BRIC economies (China, India, Brazil). In the USA, by contrast, what we have is akin to 'feudalism'. This misinterpretation overlooks two things. First, and most importantly, that capitalism is now global: one cannot separate European and US deindustrialization from the BRIC economies, since the latter are where European and US multinational corporations outsource production. These businesses are still capitalist enterprises, and are still part of a capitalist system that is now global in scope, in which they extract surpluses in order to accumulate. And second, within Europe and the USA, manufacturing still takes place, albeit in a different form. Production hasn't vanished so much as been decentralized and downsized: a lot of it takes place in small-scale units--sweatshops--that have replaced large-scale factories. In other words, it too has been outsourced, only nationally, not internationally. The analysis of debt--which according to Graeber (2011) informs OWS practice--is also lull of inconsistencies, not least in the claim that it has spotted developments of which no one else was aware. …