A timely and valuable article by one of the facilitators of the Occupy Wall St. process, David Graeber. I was there for the occupation’s humble beginnings last Saturday, but since then it has become a sensation among the conscious and concerned population of this country. Why? Because finally there is an ongoing, unignorable, and vibrant manifestation against the Wall St. crooks who quite blatantly stole trillions of dollars from us.
Whether the occupation on Lower Manhattan lasts, or grows, or dies in the coming weeks, the global upheaval will continue and become an ever-present feature of the 21st Century. Our theory is that capitalism has entered a crisis from which it will never recover. The youth can feel it, we know we have no future within the existing system. The only question is, what alternative models can we move to, when everything feels so bleak?
The Wall St. occupiers have followed the examples of Egypt, Greece, and Spain in using the direct democratic process of the “general assembly.” This means thousands of young people are having their first exhilarating taste of their voice being part of the actual exercise of power – participating in a movement. In truth, this is our best hope, so spread it and bring that exhilaration to your friends and family.
If we have a general assembly in every town, every workplace, every school, then capitalism is over for real. [alex]
“Occupy Wall St. Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”
by David Graeber
Originally published the The Guardian UK, September 25, 2011.
Youth of the multiracial working class - always at the front of things. Police arrested over 80 people during this 9/24 march, and pepper sprayed more. Photo by davids camera craft
The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future.
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?”
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.
Perhaps, it’s not surprising. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we’ve learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the “third world debt crisis”. But the global south fought back. The “alter-globalisation movement”, was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of “austerity”.
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
When the history is finally written, though, it’s likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it’s clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.
We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don’t know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
The End of Capitalism 
8 comments
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September 27, 2011 at 3:26 am
Marie Marshall
It gives me little satisfaction (when, for example, I see the NYPD pen and pepper-spray a small bunch of women) to be proved right time and time again by events. The only crumb of comfort I have is that repression, whether it is the general repression that is endemic in capitalism or specific incidents of repression, shows the nature of the beast with which we are dealing.
MM
October 5, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Jimmy Headen
I have never met a man woman nor child I consider more or less than self,
the man that I am having lived as a member of the most repressed people’s on this earth , the psychology directed at making me feel lesser than and the greed and apathy prevalent in it’s orchestration has led me to believe and hope for a better fairer and basic form of government. may capitalism die soon, it was time for equality yesterday and the day before, there are too few with too much simply because they were born into it or simply devious enough in their greed to acquire it by any means, ‘It is time for a change’ of which by the way I said before Obama!
October 6, 2011 at 1:02 am
Marie Marshall
Alex, by the way, you said:
“The Wall St. occupiers have followed the examples of Egypt, Greece, and Spain in using the direct democratic process of the ‘general assembly’.”
When they remain there 24/7 demanding an end to their system of government (official and unofficial) then you will be entitled to draw that analogy. One American swallow does not make an Arab Spring.
October 17, 2011 at 12:27 am
Marie Marshall
By the way, the above comment, which has only been published today 17th October, has been rendered redundant by events which occurred later. I freely acknowledge this.
M
October 29, 2011 at 7:46 am
Nalliah Thayabharan
We essentially have had modern-day bank robbers — except that they wore gray suits and not masks — and there’s been no accountability for it Every day we see energy speculators, war profiteers, managed health-care providers, media propagandists, and/or financiers of Wall Street given some unfair advantage over the average consumers and taxpayers, and the cumulative effect of the American people watching selfishness prevail over the public interest has been an undermining of the public’s trust in government. There’s no question the system is rigged against the little guy. The Wall Street interests have a lot more information. They jerry-rig the system so that they always win. Oligarchy is political power based on economic power. And it’s the rise of the Wall Street in economic terms, that it’d turn into political power. And Wall Street then feed that back into more deregulation, more opportunities to go out and take reckless risks and– and capture huge amounts of money. The American democracy was not given to us on a platter. It is not ours for all time, irrespective of our efforts. Either people organize and they find political leadership to take this on, or we are going to be in big trouble. That’s absolutely the heart of the problem. I would also say and tell you, and emphasize, these Wall Street people will not come out and debate with us. The heads of Wall Street or their representatives, they will not come out. They’re afraid. They don’t have the substance. They don’t have the arguments. We have the evidence. They have the lobbyists. And that’s all they have. Wall Street Corporations don’t make anything. They don’t produce anything. They gamble and bet and speculate. And when they lose vast sums they raid the U.S. Treasury so they can go back and do it again. Never mind that $50 trillion in global wealth was erased between September 2007 and March 2009, including $7 trillion in the U.S. stock market and $6 trillion in the housing market. Never mind that the total amount of retirement and household wealth trashed was $7.5 trillion or that we saw $2 trillion in 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts evaporate. Never mind the $1.9 trillion in traditional defined-benefit plans and the $2.6 trillion in nonpension assets that went up in smoke. Never mind the job losses, the foreclosures and the 35 percent jump in personal and small-business bankruptcies. There are bundles of new money, taken again from us, to make deals and hand out outrageous bonuses. And when these trillions run out they will come back for more until our currency becomes junk
—Nalliah Thayabharan
December 7, 2011 at 5:20 am
George Davis
I understand that the Occupy movement wants the end of capitalism, but what do they intend to replace it with? And how do they intend to make a smooth and successful transition from capitalism to this new system of government?
December 7, 2011 at 1:10 pm
alex
good questions George! but the answers are still being written, by millions of people, in their everyday actions. my opinion? see what I have written on what should replace capitalism: https://endofcapitalism.com/2010/07/31/the-end-of-capitalism-interview-part-3/
December 8, 2011 at 3:54 am
Marie Marshall
@ George
A ‘smooth transition’ is a pipe dream. A ‘smooth transition’ is an excuse for not doing anything. Any transition is going to be rough, and anyone who pretends different is lying to us. I never tire of quoting Thomas Jefferson: “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.” But the fact that the transition is going to be rough is no reason not to demolish a system which is solely responsible for so much inequality, right down to the use of slave labour in poor countries.
I can’t speak for all/any of the ‘Occupy’ movement. I’m not entitled to try to ‘liberate’ anyone. People must liberate themselves. But if I ‘had my druthers’ I would like to see a system that isn’t a system. I would like to see an end to national politics (which is the exercise of statecraft rather than of democracy) and a move (a return?) to communal politics based on local, free assemblies. I would like to see a state of affairs where power did not devolve upwards, where communities cooperated with each other, where if there was a need for a decision to be made which overlapped many communities they would choose delegates to deal with it, the delegates being subject to recall and the delegate body to exist only for as long as the task existed. I would like to see the demolition of top-down politics go hand-in-hand with the demolition of top-down wealth. I would like to see productive property owned by the community (no, not by the ‘State’ – we saw how the Soviet Union handled that one!). I would like to see the commercial value of work replaced by its social value.
Let me draw a picture for you. Imagine ten people on the bank of a river. They all want to get to the other side, and there is a small boat moored there. The rules of capitalism state that they must fight for the boat because only one person is allowed to cross the river. the rules of Bolshevism say that all ten must get into the boat at once even if it sinks beneath them. Mutual aid says to hell with ‘rules’, we get together and decide what’s the best way to get all of us safely across the river.