The Democracy Project Read online

  The Democracy Project is a work of nonfiction.

  Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to

  The Weekly Standard for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Anarchy in the U.S.A.: The Roots of American Disorder” by Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Graeber, David.

  The Democracy Project : a history, a crisis, a movement / David Graeber.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64600-6

  1. Democracy—History. I. Title

  JC421.G677 2013

  321.8—dc23 2012031998

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  Jacket design: Jamie Keenan

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. The Beginning Is Near

  2. Why Did It Work?

  3. “The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason”: The Covert History of Democracy

  4. How Change Happens

  5. Breaking the Spell

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  On April 26, 2012, about thirty activists from Occupy Wall Street gathered on the steps of New York’s Federal Hall, across the street 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’d been evicted from six months earlier at Zuccotti Park. Even if we weren’t able to establish a new camp, we were hoping to at least find some place 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 come to find us, to learn about upcoming actions or just talk politics; now the lack of such a place was causing endless problems. The city authorities, however, had decided that we would never have another Zuccotti. Wherever we found a spot we could legally set up shop, they simply changed the laws and drove us off. When we tried to establish ourselves in Union Square, city authorities changed park regulations. When a band of occupiers started sleeping on the sidewalk on Wall Street itself, relying on a judicial decision that explicitly said citizens had a right to sleep on the street in New York as a form of political protest, the city deemed that part of lower Manhattan a “special security zone” in which the law did not apply.

  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 in which the Bill of Rights had been signed 223 years before. The steps were not under city jurisdiction; they were federal land, under the administration of the National Park Service, and representatives of the U.S. Park Police—cognizant, perhaps, 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 actually slept there. The steps were wide enough that they could easily accommodate a couple of hundred people, and at first, about that many occupiers showed up. But before long, the city had moved in and convinced the parks people to let them effectively take over: they’d erected steel barriers around the perimeter, and others that divided the steps themselves into two compartments. We quickly came to refer to them as the “freedom cages.” A SWAT team was positioned 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 any time. Nonetheless, a determined handful persevered. They kept up a twenty-four-hour presence, taking shifts, organizing teach-ins during the day, engaging in impromptu debates with bored Wall Street traders who wandered over during breaks, 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 clear to us that, even if he couldn’t arrest all of us, he could certainly arrest any one of us, for pretty much any reason, at any time. That day alone I had seen one activist shackled and led off for a “noise violation” while chanting slogans, and another, an Iraq war veteran, booked on public obscenity charges for using four-letter words while making a speech. Perhaps it was because we’d advertised the event as a “speak-out.” The officer in charge seemed to be making a point: even at the very birthplace of the First Amendment, he still had the power to arrest us just for engaging in political speech.

  A friend of mine named Lopi, famous for attending marches on a giant tricycle emblazoned with a colorful placard that read “Jubilee!” had organized the event, billing 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 which is currently under lock down from the army of the 1%.” Myself, I’ve never been much of a rabble-rouser. During the entire time I’d been involved in Occupy, I’d never once made a speech. So I was hoping to be there mainly as a witness, to provide moral and organizational support. For much of the first half hour of the event, as one occupier after another moved to the front of the cage, before an impromptu collection of video cameras on the sidewalk, to talk about war, ecological devastation, the corruption of government, I lingered on the margins, trying to chat up the police.

  “So you’re part of a SWAT team,” I said to one grim-faced young man guarding the entrance to the cages, a large assault rifle at his side. “Now, what does that stand for, SWAT? ‘Special Weapons …’ ”

  “… and Tactics,” he said—quickly, before I would have any chance to get out the original name for the unit, which was Special Weapons Assault Team.

  “I see. So I’m curious: what sort of special weapons do your commanders think might be required to deal with thirty unarmed citizens engaging in peaceable assembly on the federal steps?”

  “It’s just a precaution,” he replied uncomfortably.

  I’d already passed up two invitations to speak, but Lopi was persistent, so eventually, I figured I’d better say something, however brief. So I took my place in front of the cameras, glanced up at George Washington gazing at the sky over the New York Stock Exchange, and started improvising.

  “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 that all 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 th
at 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 of even more radical popular movements that had been calling for a democratization of finance, even debt cancellation. Mass public assemblies and an outbreak of popular debate like they’d seen during the revolution was the very last thing they wanted. So eventually, James Madison gathered up a list of more than two hundred proposals, and used them to write the actual text of 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 did want 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 really 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, for the most part, but surely they’re 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 were willing to take to the streets to demand a Bill of Rights, it’s pretty much come down to us.”

  Before that moment when Lopi pushed me on the stage I hadn’t really been thinking of Occupy Wall Street as rooted in any grand tradition in U.S. history. I’d been more interested in talking about its roots in anarchism, feminism, or even the Global Justice Movement. But I think in retrospect, what I said was true. After all, there’s something strangely incoherent about the way we’re taught to think about democracy in America. On the one hand, we’re constantly told that democracy is just a matter of electing politicians to run the government. On the other, we’re aware that most Americans love democracy, hate politicians, and are skeptical about the very idea of government. How can all these things be true? Clearly, when Americans embrace democracy, they can only be thinking of something much broader and deeper than mere participation in elections (which half of them don’t bother to vote in anyway); it has to be some sort of combination of an ideal of individual liberty with a notion, so far unrealized, that free people really ought to be able to sit down together like reasonable adults and govern their own affairs. If so, it’s hardly surprising that those who currently govern America are so afraid of democratic movements. Taken to its ultimate conclusions, the democratic impulse can only lead to rendering them entirely unnecessary.

  Now, one might well object that, even if this were true, most Americans would surely balk at taking that democratic impulse to anywhere near its ultimate conclusions. And no doubt they have a point. Most Americans aren’t anarchists. However much they may profess to dislike the government, or in many cases the very idea of government, very few would really support dismantling it. But this may be because they have no idea what could possibly replace it. The truth is that most Americans have been taught since a very young age to have extremely limited political horizons, an extremely narrow sense of human possibility. For most of them, democracy is ultimately something of an abstraction, an ideal, not something they’ve ever practiced or experienced; this is why so many, when they first began to take part in the general assemblies and other forms of horizontal decision making we employed in Occupy, felt—as I did, too, when I first became involved in the Direct Action Network in New York back in 2000—as if their entire sense of what was politically possible had transformed overnight.

  This, then, is not just a book about Occupy, but about the possibility of democracy in America. Even more, it’s about the opening up of the radical imagination that Occupy allowed.

  One need only compare the widespread excitement that greeted the initial few months of Occupy with the mood during the presidential election season one year later. This autumn has witnessed two candidates—one a sitting president imposed as a fait accompli on a Democratic Party base that felt he had often betrayed them; the other foisted by sheer power of money on a Republican base that made it clear it would have preferred almost anybody else—spending the main part of their energy on courting billionaires, as the public occasionally checks in via television, in the full knowledge that, unless they happen to be among that roughly 25 percent of Americans who live in swing states, their votes won’t make the slightest difference anyway. Even for those whose votes do matter, it’s simply assumed that the choice is between which of the two parties will play the dominant role in making a deal to cut their pensions, Medicare, and Social Security—since sacrifices will have to be made, and the realities of power are such that no one even considers the possibility those sacrifices could be borne by the rich.

  In a recent piece in Esquire, Charles Pierce points out that the performances of TV pundits this election cycle often seem little more than sado-masochistic celebrations of popular powerlessness, akin to reality TV shows where we like to watch aggressive bosses pushing their acolytes around:

  We have allowed ourselves to become mired in the habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics are possible, even in a putatively self-governing republic, and resignation is one of the most obvious of those habits. We acclimate ourselves to the habit of having our politics acted upon us, rather than insisting that they are ours to command. TV stars tell us that political stars are going to cut their Grand Bargain and that “we” will then applaud them for making the “tough choices” on our behalf. That is how you inculcate the habits of oligarchy in a political commonwealth. First, you disabuse people of the notion that government is the ultimate expression of that commonwealth, and then you eliminate or emasculate any centers of power that might exist independent of your smothering influence—like, say, organized labor—and then you make it quite clear who’s in charge. I’m the boss. Get used to it.1

  This is the kind of politics one is left with when any notion of the very possibility of democracy goes by the boards. But it’s also a momentary phenomenon. We might do well to remember that the same conversations were happening in the summer of 2011, when all the political class could talk about was an artificially concocted crisis over the “debt ceiling” and the “grand bargain” (to cut Medicare and Social Security again) that would inevitably ensue. Then in September of that year, Occupy happened, and with it hundreds of genuine political forums where ordinary Americans could talk about their actual concerns and problems—and the conventional pundit conversation stopped in its tracks. It wasn’t because occupiers brought the politicians specific demands and proposals; instead, they’d created a crisis of legitimacy within the entire system by providing a glimpse of what real democracy might be like.

  Of course, these same pundits have been declaring Occupy dead since the evictions of November 2011. What they don’t understand is that once people’s political horizons have been broadened, the change is permanent. Hundreds of thousands of Americans (and not only Americans, of course, but Greeks, Spaniards, and Tunisians) now have direct experience of self-organization, collective action, and human solidarity. This makes it almost impossible to go back to one’s previous l
ife and see things the same way. While the world’s financial and political elites skate blindly toward the next 2008-scale crisis, we’re continuing to carry out occupations of buildings, farms, foreclosed homes, and workplaces—temporary or permanent—organizing rent strikes, seminars, and debtors’ assemblies, and in doing so, laying the groundwork for a genuinely democratic culture, and introducing the skills, habits, and experience that would make an entirely new conception of politics come to life. With it has come a revival of the revolutionary imagination that conventional wisdom has long since declared dead.

  Everyone involved recognizes that creating a democratic culture will have to be a long-term process. We are talking about a profound moral transformation, after all. But we’re also aware that such things have happened before. There have been social movements in the United States that have effected profound moral transformations—the abolitionists and feminism come most immediately to mind—but doing so took a good deal of time. Like Occupy, such movements also operated largely outside the formal political system, employed civil disobedience and direct action, and never imagined they could achieve their goals in a single year. Obviously, there were plenty of others that tried to bring about equally profound moral transformations but failed. Still, there are very good reasons to believe that fundamental changes are taking place in the nature of American society—the same ones that made it possible for Occupy to take off so rapidly in the first place—that afford a real opportunity for such a long-term revival of the democratic project to succeed.

  The social argument I’ll be making is fairly simple. What’s being called the Great Recession merely accelerated a profound transformation of the American class system that had already been under way for decades. Consider the following two statistics: at the time of this writing, one out of every seven Americans is being pursued by a debt collection agency; at the same time, one recent poll revealed that for the first time, only a minority of Americans (45 percent) describe themselves as “middle class.” It’s hard to imagine these two facts are unrelated. There has been a good deal of discussion of late of the erosion of the American middle class, but most of it misses out on the fact that “middle class” in the United States has never primarily been an economic category. It has always had everything to do with that feeling of stability and security that comes from being able to simply assume that—whatever one might think of politicians—everyday institutions like the police, education system, health clinics, and even credit providers are basically on your side. If so, it’s hard to imagine how someone living through the experience of seeing their family home foreclosed on by an illegal robo-signer would be feeling particularly middle class. And this is true regardless of their income bracket or degree of educational attainment.