By DAVID GRAEBER [interviewed by Kevin Depew in Minyanville] – Okay, so that takes us to Occupy Wall Street and so this movement began on Sept. 17 here in New York City and has now I believe spread to nearly a thousand cities globally?

David Graeber
I can’t even keep track, I heard 1,300 at one point.

Kevin Depew
So what’s your involvement with Occupy Wall Street?

David Graeber
Well, I was, by pure coincidence, really, I was there at the start….There’s these wonderful young people there, the 17 to 22 years old, on average, who’d been involved in Bloomberg-ville, this previous camp that never got much attention. Those guys were great, but an activist generation is like three years, people burn out so fast. So they didn’t really have much contact with the grand tradition that we came from of, people actually knew how to do facilitation and consensus, how to form affinity groups, civil disobedience. So my main role was sort of connecting people. I was on the trainings working group, for example. I found people who could give legal training, CD training. I facilitated two meetings and got people to do trainings for that. Learning the basic nuts and bolts, how to do democracy. And the way it’s been worked out over the last 30 years by anarchists, feminists and people like that—the horizontals, as I call them.

Kevin Depew
Right. And in September you wrote a piece for The Guardian, I think, which did a really good job of outlining what Occupy Wall Street is really about…But one of the things that you discussed in the article was the demands, what’s—that’s probably what the media, the mainstream media apparently is obsessed with this.

David Graeber
Obsessed with, yeah, why don’t you have demands?…I think that the problem of asking for demands is that, who are you demanding them of? You’re in a sense saying to the people in power, “We would like you to do things differently. Do something for us. Save the whales. Who’s going to save the whales? I’m not going to save the whales, I guess they’re going to go out and save the whales.” But it’s a little ambiguous and slogans like that. But ultimately the idea of protest is you’re saying, “You people in power are doing this wrong and we want you to do something.” And even if that something is “step aside,” you are addressing them directly.

The kind of politics we represent—we represent, I think, we’re more interested in a language of visions, a language of solutions than a language of demands, because we think that the political structure which we would be making demands of is itself part of the problem. It would be like making a demand of people to be someone else. They’re not going to do that.

So rather than recognize the existing structures, we’re saying this isn’t a democratic system at all. It’s completely owned by Big Money. We call ourselves a democracy, but it’s increasingly a sham. As evidence of which the fact that they’re not even talking about the problems that most Americans face in any kind of serious way. And it’s not that there aren’t ideas of how you could resolve this. The problem is there’s hundreds floating around. There’s no possibility of those in power even looking at them or thinking about them, even talking about what the actual, day-to-day dilemmas most Americans face.

So, if this isn’t a democracy, what we want to do is, first of all, create a vision of what democracy actually would be to remind people that it’s possible. And, at the same time, by contrast, demonstrate just how corrupt and undemocratic the system, which is going around the world claiming to promote democracy and represent democracy but doesn’t practice at all, actually is.

Continued at Minyanville | David Graeber in The Guardian | Hat tip – The Arendt Center: “The Morality of Debt” |

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