A Farewell to Democracy
Can we all agree to treat this Speech as David Graeber's Last Words?
Dear Nevermorons,
We are gathered this month to honour the spirit of the great David Graeber - anarchist revolutionary, rock star anthropologist, and surely one of the most brilliant scholars of the 21st century so far.
David Graeber died four years ago. Mystery shrouds the circumstances of his untimely death, and the world is much stupider without him. But the good news is that he achieved immortality, because he will live on in the minds of all those who have influenced by his many brilliant ideas.
I think that’s what he would want us to remember him for most of all: his ideas. And those ideas haven’t gone anywhere. Not did most of them originate with him. As Terrence McKenna once explained: “These aren’t my thoughts. These are the thoughts.”
Some of you will immediately understand his meaning, but I’ll explain it anyway. Philosophy doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Philosophers engage with the ideas of those who came before as if they were living things. Occasionally, someone will insist they are living things. I don’t know how David Graeber would have felt about that, but he was very conscious of conversing with the thought of the human race itself. He knew that he was part of an intellectual lineage, which he called “the Grand Tradition”.
He was taught by Marshall Sahlins (author of Stone Age Economics and The Original Affluent Society), who was taught by Claude Levi-Strauss (the most reknown anthropologist of all time), who was taught by Marcel Mauss (the first ethnologist), who was taught by none other by Emile Durkheim, who founded sociology as an academic discipline.
David Graeber, like Marcel Mauss before him, was no armchair academic. He was a passionate activist who practiced what he preached, and whose ideas were very much influenced by what we learned by participating in real-world social movements.
It is surprising that no biography has yet appeared to put his ideas in their context for posterity, and I consider this oversight an indictment of academia as it now exists. Am I the only one who cares about ideas anymore? Am I the only one who understands the legacy that David Graeber bequeathed to us?
Anyway, I recently announced that I’m going to be doing a series of articles about the book that he wanted to call As If We Were Already Free, but which was published as The Democracy Project.
This is one book that you absolutely shouldn’t judge by its cover - I hate it, and I suspect that David Graeber probably hated it too.
But it is an extremely good book, and well worth reading. For people who want to understand David Graeber the man, I suggest reading this book in conjunction with Direct Action: An Ethnography. These two works are practically certain to leave you wanting to know more about his epic life, but until someone writes a biography, we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.
Although many people think that anarchism necessarily implies having no leaders, this is not true. Back in the heyday of the anarchist movement there were obvious leaders, including Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, Maria Nikiforova, Emma Goldman, Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magon.
David Graeber was an anarchist leader, and though he often sought to downplay this, he started the Occupy Movement. And he tells his story in As If We Were Already Free.
David died suddenly in 2020. I believe he was assassinated. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that when a prominent dissident dies mysteriously, it makes sense to question whether there was foul play. I seem to be the only one willing to do this nowadays. By no means is David Graeber the only prominent dissident to die mysteriously in recent years.
What you are about to read is a speech that David Graeber back in 2012, excerpted from As If We Were Already Free.
Although he uttered these words 12 years ago, they still ring true today.
And although he uttered them 8 years before he died, I feel like they might as well be his last words.
Rest In Peace, David Graeber.
Love & Solidarity,
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. I think I can speak on behalf of David Graeber’s ghost when I say that we would really appreciate it if someone wrote a folk song celebrating his life and martyrdom.
You know, something like this:
Or this:
Or this:
Thank you in advance for your consideration of this request!
CAN WE ALL AGREE TO PRETEND THESE WERE DAVID GRAEBER’S LAST WORDS?
by David Graeber, excerpted from As If We Were Already Free (a.k.a The Democracy Project)
On April 26, 2012, around thirty activists from Occupy Wall Street gathered on the steps of New York’s Federal Hall, across from the Stock Exchange.
For more than a month, we had been trying to reestablish a foothold in Lower Manhattan to replace the camp we had been evicted from six months earlier at Zuccotti Park. Even if we weren’t able to establish a new camp, we were hoping to find a place where we could hold regular assemblies and set up our library and kitchens. The great advantage of Zuccotti Park was that it was a place where anyone interested in what we were doing knew they could always find us, learn about upcoming actions, or just talk politics. Now, the lack of such a place was causing endless problems. However, the city authorities had decided that we would never have another Zuccotti. Whenever we found a legal spot to set up, they simply changed the laws and drove us off. When we tried to establish ourselves in Union Square, city authorities changed park regulations. When some occupiers began sleeping on the sidewalk on Wall Street itself, relying on a judicial decision that citizens had a right to sleep on the street as a form of political protest, the city designated that part of Lower Manhattan as a “special security zone” where the law no longer applied.
Finally, we settled on the Federal Hall steps, a broad marble staircase leading up to a statue of George Washington, guarding the door to the building where the Bill of Rights had been signed 223 years earlier. The steps were not under city jurisdiction; they were federal land, under the administration of the National Park Service. Representatives of the U.S. Park Police—perhaps mindful that the entire space was considered a monument to civil liberties—had told us they had no objections to our occupying the steps, as long as no one slept there. The steps were wide enough to accommodate a couple of hundred people, and at first, about that many occupiers showed up. But before long, the city convinced the parks department to let them effectively take over. Steel barriers were erected around the perimeter, and more barriers divided the steps into two compartments. We quickly began calling them “freedom cages.” A SWAT team was stationed by the entrance, and a white-shirted police commander carefully monitored everyone who tried to enter, informing them that, for safety reasons, no more than twenty people were allowed in either cage at a time. Despite this, a determined few persevered, maintaining a 24-hour presence, organizing teach-ins, engaging in debates with Wall Street traders, and keeping vigil on the marble stairs at night. Soon, large signs were banned, then anything made of cardboard. Then came the random arrests. The police commander wanted to make it clear that, even if he couldn’t arrest all of us, he could arrest any one of us at any time for any reason. That day, I saw one activist shackled for a “noise violation” and another, an Iraq war veteran, arrested on public obscenity charges for using four-letter words in a speech. Perhaps it was because we had advertised the event as a “speak-out.” The officer seemed to be making a point: even at the birthplace of the First Amendment, he still had the power to arrest us for engaging in political speech.
A friend of mine named Lopi, known for attending marches on a giant tricycle with a placard reading "Jubilee!," had organized the event. She billed it as “Speak Out of Grievances Against Wall Street: A Peaceable Assembly on the Steps of the Federal Hall Memorial Building, the Birthplace of the Bill of Rights, Currently Under Lockdown by the Army of the 1%.” I’m not much of a rabble-rouser. In all my time with Occupy, I had never made a speech, so I hoped to be there mainly as a witness and to provide moral support. For the first half hour, as occupiers spoke about war, ecological devastation, and government corruption, I lingered at the margins, trying to talk to the police.
“So you’re part of a SWAT team,” I said to one grim-faced officer guarding the entrance, a large assault rifle at his side. “Now, what does that stand for, SWAT? ‘Special Weapons …’ ”
“… and Tactics,” he replied, quickly.
“I see. So I’m curious: what kind of special weapons do your commanders think might be needed to deal with thirty unarmed citizens peacefully assembling on federal steps?”
“It’s just a precaution,” he replied uncomfortably.
After passing up two invitations to speak, Lopi was persistent, so eventually, I decided I should say something. Standing in front of the cameras, I glanced up at George Washington, gazing over the New York Stock Exchange, and began to speak.
“It strikes me that it’s very appropriate that we are meeting here today, on the steps of the very building where the Bill of Rights was signed. It’s funny. Most Americans think of themselves as living in a free country, the world’s greatest democracy. They feel it’s our constitutional rights and freedoms, placed there by our Founding Fathers, that define us as a nation, that make us who we really are—even, if you listen to politicians, that give us the right to invade other countries more or less at will. But actually, you know, the men who wrote the Constitution didn’t want it to include a Bill of Rights. That’s why they’re amendments. They weren’t in the original document. The only reason those ringing phrases about freedom of speech and freedom of assembly ended up in the Constitution is because anti-Federalists like George Mason and Patrick Henry were so outraged when they saw the final draft that they began to mobilize against ratification unless the text was changed—changed to include, among other things, the right to engage in that very kind of popular mobilization.
That terrified the Federalists since one of the reasons they convened the Constitutional Convention to begin with was to head off the danger they saw in even more radical popular movements calling for the democratization of finance, even debt cancellation. Mass public assemblies and an outbreak of popular debate, like they’d seen during the revolution, was the last thing they wanted. So eventually, James Madison gathered a list of more than two hundred proposals and used them to write what we now call the Bill of Rights.
Power never gives up anything voluntarily. Insofar as we have freedoms, it’s not because some great wise Founding Fathers granted them to us. It’s because people like us insisted on exercising those freedoms—by doing exactly what we’re doing here—before anyone was willing to acknowledge that they had them.
Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution does it say anything about America being a democracy. There’s a reason for that. Men like George Washington were openly opposed to democracy, which makes it a bit odd we’re standing here under his statue today. But the same was true of all of them: Madison, Hamilton, Adams… They wrote explicitly that they were trying to set up a system that could head off and control the dangers of democracy, even though it was people who wanted democracy that had made the revolution that put them in power to begin with.
And of course, most of us are here because we still don’t think we’re living under a democratic system in any meaningful sense of the term. I mean, look around you. That SWAT team over there tells you everything you need to know. Our government has become little more than a system of institutionalized bribery, where you can get hauled off to jail just for saying so. Maybe at this point they can still only keep us in jail for a day or two at a time, but they’re surely doing their best to change that. But they wouldn’t be locking us up at all if they didn’t know it’s true. There’s nothing that scares the rulers of America more than the prospect of democracy breaking out. And if there is a prospect of that, if anyone are heirs to those who took to the streets to demand a Bill of Rights, it’s pretty much come down to us.”
Oh cool, Graeber
NEVERMORE Y UN ADIOS FELICES GRACIAS