Monday, December 19, 2011

David Graeber’s Heavenly Anarchism Vision

Over the weekend I’ve been delving into David Graeber.  Who is David Graeber you ask?  According to Bloomberg Businessweek, this is David Graeber.  David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street.

I was spurred to delve further into Graeber after reading the Bloomberg piece, and their pronouncement of Graeber as the OWS “anti-leader,” and fortutitously the The White Review provided additional opportunity to do so in an Interview With David Graeber.

In the both the Bloomberg piece and The White Review interview we learn the Graeber is an anthropologist teaching at Goldsmiths University of London, that he is an activist and anarchist who is considered “exceptionally bright,” and evidently so “revolutionary” in his thinking to have been, one could say, chased out of Yale.

But neither of the above pieces delved that deeply into Graeber’s thinking, so I went searching further and was able to locate a book penned by Graeber which lays out more robustly why Graeber is involved with the OWS movement.  The book is titled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (pdf of 55 pages) which was published by Prickly Paradigm Press.

While Graeber does indeed espouse a number of solid anarchist principles within his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and also provides some interesting anthropological and historical commentary on anarchist society, which will be of interest to individuals striving for individual liberty or at least interested in such freedom, he veers utopianly heavenword when the subject of capitialism is discussed, sugguesting that the need for individuals to work is somehow demeaning and exploitive, suggesting that four (4) hour workdays and four (4) day work weeks will somehow bring about the ability for individuals to dance in the streets attired in silly costumes to the accompaniment of drum circles while their basic needs for food and shelter are met as if they are birds of the air.

I think Graeber is indeed an interesting individual, and quite as bright as he has been declared to be, but his anarchism vision will fail to raise the world heavenward.  Graeber’s intellect, and his further anthropological studies, would be better directed in attempting to search out how free markets; rather than freeloading;  and anarchism could provide the basis for the individual freedom many individuals are in search of.

Posted by John Venlet on 12/19 at 09:12 AM
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