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.
| 63 decision-making as primarily a religious practice) to begin creating training collectives. By the time of the direct action campaigns against the nuclear power industry in the late ‘70s, the whole apparatus of affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus and facilitation had already begun to take something like it’s contemporary form. The resulting outpouring of new forms of consensus process constitutes the most important contribution to revolutionary practice in decades. It is largely the
the situations themselves. It is an experiment one might say in the realignment of imagination, of creating truly non-alienated forms of experience. Conclusion Obviously it is also attempting to do so in a context in which, far from being put in temporary abeyance, state power (in many parts of the globe at least) so suffuses every aspect of daily existence that its armed representatives intervene to regulate the internal organizational structure of groups allowed to cash checks Revolution in
experienced a passage from formal to real subsumption? Or from modernity to postmodernity? Or have we passed postmodernity too, now, and entered an entirely new phase? 4) Everyone was remarkably polite. Dramatically lacking were bold, rebellious statements, or really anything likely to provoke discomfort in even the stodgiest Tate Britain curator, or for that matter any of their wealthy Tory patrons. This is worthy of note since no one can seriously deny the speakers’ radical credentials. Most
bizarrely, seem to want to turn back the theory clock to somewhere around 1935.2 2 Lazzarato for example argues that “the old dichotomy between ‘mental and manual labor,’ or between ‘material labor and immaterial labor,’ risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes the separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the ‘labor process’
reaction to the crash was not – as most activists, including myself, predicted – a rush towards Green Capitalism, that is, an economic response, but rather, a political one. This is the real meaning of the budget cuts. Any competent economist knows where radically slashing spending during a recession is likely to lead. They might pretend otherwise, summoning up obscure formulae to back up their political patrons of the moment, but that’s just their job – they know it’s a recipe for disaster. The
