Why I like/dislike David Graeber's ideas

They shifted the discourse to some discussion revolving around 'income inequality', but only very briefly. And that's mostly in the capitalist press.

Was it a victory? No. It didn't really raise class consciousness, and wasn't capable of doing so.

It's difficult to discuss and parse out the long term effects of something as "spontaneous" as OWS. He does feel strongly that the alter-globalization movements had a powerful impact, and I haven't really read his argument in full here. Given it consists of something like a 500 page book, I'm not certain it's done much justice on many internet forums.

In terms of relevant concepts for Marxists/communists, I think Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value would be the jumping off point. He does seem to have some hang-ups/taboos about marxism as distilled through Althusser-Foucault-Post-Structuralism it seems, but this is from a vague first impression of the text. I need to finish it and re-read the beginning. Anyone read it? Thoughts? He deals a lot with Mauss, and other anthropologists as well as explicitly in one section with Marx.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring-curse-working-class-austerity-solidarity-scourge

Soapy

I do not think that "activism" is nearly as worthwhile as Graeber argues, as he does for example in "Debt the First 5000 years" when he writes that he and his activist cohorts, "managed to almost completely destroy the IMF."

I don't recall the exact wording Graeber uses, but I'm sure if he had actually claimed that the anti-globalisation movement consisted of him and "his activist cohorts" I would have remembered such ridculous hubris. So I don't think he made any such claim and I think it's unfair to accuse him of that.

As to the claim that the anti-globalisation movement contributed to nearly putting the IMF out of business prior to the 2007-2008 crash, I recall that claim being made by Giovanni Arrighi in a talk he gave in Dublin in late 2008 (iirc?). At that stage the IMF only had two clients left, one being Turkey and the other being maybe Namibia (not sure on that last one). People both within and without the IMF were seriously talking about the option of winding up shop. So the IMF were very nearly out of business at that stage, and not just according to lefties like Arrighi, but by their own admission. Similarly the WTO's post-Seattle "Doha Round" is an utter failure, as admitted by pretty much everyone.

So the only question then becomes, did the anti-globalisation movement contribute to the downfall of the "Washington Consensus", or was this the result of the geopolitical shifts brought about by globalisation in the post 1998 "Asian Crisis" (called, bitterly, the "IMF Crisis" in Asia) era?

It's hard to say. Certainly delegates from the poorer countries who were kept penned apart from the "main players" at Seattle attested that the protests on the streets encouraged them to rebel against their third-class status in the proceedings and demand a place at the table. Since when their opposition to the previous politics of the cosy carve-up between the OECD countries has contributed to blocking further progress in the WTO. But also you have to include the rise to power of China and Brazil and the other BRICS and "emergent" countries who have used their own power and recourse to the poorest countries lobby to block Western proposals - when it suited them.

To what extent the anti-globalisation movements activities contributed to delegitimising the IMF/WTO is open to question. But there is enough evidence to say the proposal that it did contribute significantly, can't be dismissed out of hand.

So in summary, a) your sloppy framing of what Graeber actually said, that makes him out to be a monstrous egocrat, is unfair and unwarranted, b) the claim itself (that the anti-globalisation movement contributed to the downfall of the WTO/IMF) has enough merit to make a simple dismissal as "obviously wrong" insufficient.

Usual disclaimers about not necessarily supporting Graeber's positions on other matters (monetarism and eocnomics for e.g.) apply. Similarly while I still think activism beats the shit out of inactivism, I'm also sceptical of "Activism(TM)"'s propensity to substitute itself for organising. Albeit, NB that organising is itself an "activity" so you need to define your terms carefully. Name-checking that "Give up activism" piece from the Reflections on J18 publication doesn't count (and that article really wasn't as good or original as people who namecheck its title without any reference to its content seem to think - its really just a crib of an old Situ critique of the alienation of the militant)

Not in my opinion.

You just dismissed an entire international and multi-decadal movement as "David Graeber's activist cohorts" which is pretty insulting to the participants of that movement. Acting all shocked for being called on it, is not particularly convincing.

Pennoid

In terms of relevant concepts for Marxists/communists, I think Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value would be the jumping off point. He does seem to have some hang-ups/taboos about marxism as distilled through Althusser-Foucault-Post-Structuralism it seems, but this is from a vague first impression of the text. I need to finish it and re-read the beginning. Anyone read it? Thoughts? He deals a lot with Mauss, and other anthropologists as well as explicitly in one section with Marx.

I think Graeber's development of Mauss' work is significant. I reckon Mauss' work on the 'gift economy' is foundational for Graeber's work on debt. If we take the thesis that a barter economy is non-foundational and so all opposing economic systems have been distorted by a belief in the originality of truck and barter, then along with Mauss, Graeber's belief in 'prefigurative' - new world in the shell of the old - anarchist tactics, would fit with the alter-globalization movements strategy for social change. This would also cause a massive headache for Smith and Ricardo.

Similarly Mauss' dislike of Georges Sorel's 'anarchist vanguardism' and Sorel's concurrent belief that humankind's original state was, or is, a 'war of all against all', then it is understandable why Graeber dislikes the lineage of Althusser-Foucault-(post)structuralism. An example of the outcome of this Hobbesian position as applied to an anarchist perspective, could be the work of (post)anarchist Saul Newman. This perspective seems the opposite of Graeber's.

There is also another point of significance for Graeber's work. He is one of the few popular anarchist theorists who considers the views of writers from the global South. He develops decolonial subjectivities within his work, if by a different name and with less critical reference. For more on this see the essay 'There Never was a West: Democracy as a form of interstitial cosmopolitanism'.

Thanks Jrre, that last essay sounds really interesting. I have to say, Ocelot is essentially correct, whatever you think of their tone, that Graeber spends time dealing with the alter-globalization movement which involved global networks and actions involving the Zapatista's, all the classic summit battles and much more. To deny that it was a point if the wave of struggle is not very accurate. I know he says "we" but he was very involved in it. I'd say "we" if I was writing public literature about the contemporary communist/anarchist movement, at least to some extent. (Not if I was referencing those dirty Bordigists! ZING!)

@Jrre
Does he write about Sorel and Mauss all in any essays, or is that more of an original thought? If so, you should write it up, to counter the bullshit from people like Ciccirello-Maher (sp?)

jrre

Similarly Mauss' dislike of Georges Sorel's 'anarchist vanguardism' and Sorel's concurrent belief that humankind's original state was, or is, a 'war of all against all',

Could you point to where Sorel states that belief?

Sorel was not an anarchist, he NEVER was. Why all of a sudden this repeating occurence of mentions of Sorel here on this site. He was a confused thinker and it is no surprise that he went to the anti-Semitic Action Francaise of Charles Maurras for a while. He had no influence on the syndicalism of the CGT whatsoever. He appears to be a favourite of some intellectuals but for workers he is and was of no interest whatsoever.

Anyway, this is worth reading on Graeber
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-fragments-of-a-reformist-anarchism

From pages 17-19 of Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology:

Mauss believed socialism could never be built by state fiat but only gradually, from below, that it was possible to begin building a new society based on mutual aid and self-organization “in the shell of the old”; he felt that existing popular practices provided the basis both for a moral critique of capitalism and possible glimpses of what that future society would be like. All of these are classic anarchist positions. Still, he did not consider himself an anarchist. In fact, he never had anything good to say about them. This was, it appears, because he identified anarchism mainly with the figure of Georges Sorel, an apparently quite personally distasteful French anarcho-syndicalist and anti-Semite, now mainly famous for his essay Reflections sur le Violence. Sorel argued that since the masses were not fundamentally good or rational, it was foolish to make one’s primary appeal to them through reasoned arguments. Politics is the art of inspiring others with great myths. For revolutionaries, he proposed the myth of an apocalyptic General Strike, a moment of total transformation. To maintain it, he added, one would need a revolutionary elite capable of keeping the myth alive by their willingness to engage in symbolic acts of violence—an elite which, like the Marxist vanguard party (often somewhat less symbolic in its violence), Mauss described as a kind of perpetual conspiracy, a modern version of the secret political men’s societies of the ancient world. In other words, Mauss saw Sorel, and hence anarchism, as introducing an element of the irrational, of violence, and of vanguardism. It might seem a bit odd that among French revolutionaries of the time, it should have been the trade unionist emphasizing the power of myth, and the anthropologist objecting, but in the context of the ‘20s and ‘30s, with fascist stirrings everywhere, it’s understandable why a European radical—especially a Jewish one—might see all this as just a little creepy. Creepy enough to throw cold water even on the otherwise rather appealing image of the General Strike—which is after all about the least violent possible way to imagine an apocalyptic revolution. By the ‘40s, Mauss concluded his suspicions had proved altogether justified.

To the doctrine of the revolutionary vanguard, he wrote, Sorel added a notion originally culled from Mauss’ own uncle Durkheim: a doctrine of corporatism, of vertical structures glued together by techniques of social solidarity. This he said was a great influence on Lenin, by Lenin’s own admission. From there it was adopted by the Right. By the end of his life, Sorel himself had become increasingly sympathetic with fascism; in this he followed the same trajectory as Mussolini (another youthful dabbler with anarcho-syndicalism) and who, Mauss believed, took these same Durkheimian/Sorelian/Leninist ideas to their ultimate conclusions.

- and yeah, what Battlescarred said.

Graeber is totally superficial in characterising Sorel as a trade unionist, or rather he means syndicalist, because Sorel never was a member of the CGT or any other union and stood outside workers' struggles.Again, it has to be repeated that he was not an anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist or otherwise, at any time in his life.

Yeah, I was wondering exactly what Graeber believed anarcho-syndicalism was when he wrote that. The first paragraph in the quote:

Mauss believed socialism could never be built by state fiat but only gradually, from below, that it was possible to begin building a new society based on mutual aid and self-organization “in the shell of the old”; he felt that existing popular practices provided the basis both for a moral critique of capitalism and possible glimpses of what that future society would be like. All of these are classic anarchist positions.

corroborates Price's point in the article you linked to that, Ward-like, Graeber conflates reformism and liberalism with revolution. Thanks for that link, it contained one of the clearest arguments I've seen demonstrating the impossibility of revolutionary change without revolutionary action.

Yes i agree Price's article is very well written and is a model of clear and direct polemic, unlike an increasing number of pieces here on libcom riddled with academicese and obscurismo.Writing by revolutionaries should always be clear and direct, should always seek to enlighten and for want of a better word, to democratise language. Malatesta knew that, Price appears to too.
by the way, have you seen the lengthy piece on Graeber in the latest Aufheben??

"The so-called excesses of the Bolsheviks are due to the Jewish elements that had penetrated the movement" Sorel, in an appendix to a revised Reflections on Violence published after the Russian Revolution

On the Mauss/Sorel thing:

from WP(French) - Le Mouvement socialiste

Le Mouvement socialiste was a bi-monthly socialist magazine founded in 1899 by Hubert Lagardelle, which appeared until 1914.
.
Created by Lagardelle, one of the main theorists of revolutionary syndicalism at a time when socialist magazines/reviews were numerous, Le Mouvement socialiste was appreciated for its seriousness[sic], to which is attributed its longevity. Figures of French socialism such as Marcel Mauss and Jean Longuet, the grand-son of Karl Marx, contributed to its creation. Among its most notable contributors, note the signatures of Karl Kautsky, Georges Sorel and Charles Peguy. It is in this review Sorel published in 1906 what would become his most famous book, Reflections on Violence.

So as a founder of the review, Mauss would have had dealings with Sorel and this would probably have been as close as he would have got to anyone loosely associated with anarchism, having no more connection with the actual workers movement than Sorel. It's impossible to underestimate the giant social chasm that separated the French academic and intellectual (and technocratic) products of "les Grandes Écoles" (ENA, ENS, Polytechnique, etc) and the working class at the turn of the century (and still to this day, to a certain extent).

The habit of intellectuals to substitute famous writers for the social movements to which they are mediatically associated with (regardless of actual participation), is one that still continues, however. The Zabalaza coms archaeological unearthing of the continuing influence of Eltzbacher's "seven sages of anarchism" model on academic/intellectual understanding of anarchism is a case in point. As, more recently, is Andrew Kliman's poorly executed targeting of Graeber in his (AK's) attempt to re-hegemonise this "new Occupy thingy" for Marxism(^TM). In fairness to Graeber, whatever my disagreements with his, imo, somewhat Proudhonist politics (see the W. Price text Battlescarred linked above), he has at least been a movement participant. Unlike some of the other academics recently trying to (falsely) promote themselves as having something relevant to say about anarchism (e.g. Saul Newman, Todd May, etc).

I think one of the more destructive aspects of Graeber's ideas is his hard core support for "consensus decision-making," and I think he influenced Occupy Wall Street in adopting this. There are other American anarchists who superficially identify consensus-decision-making with direct democracy, based on a certain activist tradition in the USA that goes back to the '70s/80s anti-nuke & peace movements.

Forcing a movement to organize into "affinity groups" with spokescouncils, allowing individuals or small groups to block decisions in GAs...these methods were introduced in the USA back in the '70s/80s by the Quakers, who have a rather bizarre theory that majority vote decision-making is "violence".

Consensus decision making has long played a destructive role, as it did in Occupy. The pamphlet "Blocking Progress" explains the destructive role of consensus decision making in the Livermore Action Group, an anti-nuke movement in the bay area in the '80s.

Occupy GAs were to some extent expressive rather than decision-making bodies, where people got a certain sense of support from hearing others with similar circumstances. But for decision-making, intractable, lengthy meetings make it hard for ordinary people with jobs & children to participate, and leads to people blocking attempts to accommodate various concerns. This in turn led to fragmentation & various committees & groups going off doing separate organizing. A black nurse from New York City told me that when blacks & other people of color tried to introduce some proposals to reflect their concerns at OWS, they were blocked by wingnuts. This led to the creation of People of Color in Occupy, and other projects, like Occupy the Hood.

The practice of direct democracy in assemblies of course is very old but in anarcho-syndicalist or IWW practice this usually involved majority vote decision-making.

I tried to discuss my objections to consensus decision making with Graeber in person, but he puffed himself up & dismissed my concerns by saying, "I wrote a 500 page book about this so I know it works." (I think this is probably a reference to his book on his anthropological work in Africa.) That's an elitist argument from authority.

From the above academic quotes it’s not clear to me why Sorel would be described as “anarchist” or “vanguardist” by anyone who’d bothered to read him. In the intro to Reflections on Violence he writes about anarchists as distinct and separate from himself and seems to see himself as an advocate of revolutionary syndicalism.

And one would have to clarify in what sense he can be termed “vanguardist”. Sorel’s critique was actually of the existing socialist vanguard and its pretentions. His main motivation appears to have been to make a critique of the reformism of the ‘official socialism’ of the existing parties and unions of his time; their “middle class leadership” was criticised as a hopeless dead-end for working class emancipation. Against the dull plodding gradual utopias of ‘scientific socialism’ – which embodied the middle class values of the parliamentarist/social democrat reformists - Sorel wanted to encourage the working class in creating a self-generating inspirational myth embodying the radical aspirations of a General Strike that made no apologies for its intentions to overcome class society – with all necessary violence that this might entail. But Sorel saw this as only clarifying and amplifying tendencies already present in the often violent class struggle of his time. Whatever the limits of those views, they arguably sought to encourage working class self-reliance on its own agency and its own formulation of goals.

syndicalistcat

I think one of the more destructive aspects of Graeber's ideas is his hard core support for "consensus decision-making," and I think he influenced Occupy Wall Street in adopting this. There are other American anarchists who superficially identify consensus-decision-making with direct democracy, based on a certain activist tradition in the USA that goes back to the '70s/80s anti-nuke & peace movements.

Forcing a movement to organize into "affinity groups" with spokescouncils, allowing individuals or small groups to block decisions in GAs...these methods were introduced in the USA back in the '70s/80s by the Quakers, who have a rather bizarre theory that majority vote decision-making is "violence".

Consensus decision making has long played a destructive role, as it did in Occupy. The pamphlet "Blocking Progress" explains the destructive role of consensus decision making in the Livermore Action Group, an anti-nuke movement in the bay area in the '80s.

Occupy GAs were to some extent expressive rather than decision-making bodies, where people got a certain sense of support from hearing others with similar circumstances. But for decision-making, intractable, lengthy meetings make it hard for ordinary people with jobs & children to participate, and leads to people blocking attempts to accommodate various concerns. This in turn led to fragmentation & various committees & groups going off doing separate organizing. A black nurse from New York City told me that when blacks & other people of color tried to introduce some proposals to reflect their concerns at OWS, they were blocked by wingnuts. This led to the creation of People of Color in Occupy, and other projects, like Occupy the Hood.

The practice of direct democracy in assemblies of course is very old but in anarcho-syndicalist or IWW practice this usually involved majority vote decision-making.

I tried to discuss my objections to consensus decision making with Graeber in person, but he puffed himself up & dismissed my concerns by saying, "I wrote a 500 page book about this so I know it works." (I think this is probably a reference to his book on his anthropological work in Africa.) That's an elitist argument from authority.

You make many good points here, but I don't feel that consensus-focused decision making should necessarily be scrapped for majoritarian decision making. Rather, I feel that majoritarianism has often been a terribly oppressive thing and perhaps we should not be focusing on attacking the existence of consensus-focused direct democracy but try to figure out ways to make it more effective. That said, I don't know anything about how the IWW makes decisions. Can you enlighten me? Does it address the possible abuses that make come of (my admittedly simple minded conception of) majoritarian decision making?

Battlescarred wrote:

by the way, have you seen the lengthy piece on Graeber in the latest Aufheben??

No I don't subscribe to it but it's a review of Debt isn't it? What was the verdict?

Thanks for the stuff on Le Mouvement Socialiste Ocelot, it's great having sharp-witted, clued up comrades with encyclopaedic info to pass around. I agree with you regarding Newman and May. The abstracted view from their towers likely wasn’t one of Occupy, alter-globalisation, summits, roads, Zapatismo, etc. as ‘anarchist’ attempts at change that stemmed from principled critical analyses of capitalism and state. They probably saw these actions as ‘conforming to a set of practices that are anarchistic’, clear evidence that we have cast off the past failures of that flawed ‘classical’ anarchism (honestly, how could those old anarchists have been so careless?) and finally moved into the post-anarchist ahistorical present.

I'm all in favour of a general strike if food and weapons production centres are used to effectively feed and arm the revolutionary workers. To quote from Battlescarred's In Defence of Malatesta elsewhere on the site:

'It should be recognised that it was in this context that Malatesta, who, as we have seen was instrumental in advancing the idea of the general strike among anarchists, criticised it at the 1906 Amsterdam anarchist congress. He stated that the general strike on its own could not overthrow capitalism, but that what was needed was complementary insurrectionary action to destroy the State. In fact he had emphasised this in his first article on the subject back in 1889. He was aware that some syndicalists were substituting the General Strike for generalised revolutionary action and indeed this spurious notion reached its apogee with the General Strike being seen as a non-violent alternative to the failed uprisings during the German Revolution by the leadership of the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands , which included Rudolf Rocker.'

[youtube]yBUZH2vCD_k[/youtube]

syndicalistcat

This in turn led to fragmentation & various committees & groups going off doing separate organizing.

A recent counterpunch.org article summarizes how many groups Occupy split up into.

Internationally, a movement is still present.[2] There are a number of Occupy groups which are still present in the US: (1) Occupy the SEC which is trying to “ensure that financial regulators act in the public interest, not for Wall Street and its lobbyists,” (2) Occupy the Hood which is meant to bring issues of people of color to the forefront, and Occupy Sandy which was created as a people’s response to Hurricane Sandy and helping the victims of the storm. The last group listed here, Occupy Sandy, has engaged in recent actions such as Occupy Christie which was an encampment to protest how Governor Christie has stolen money meant to go to hurricane victims and has other branches: Occupy Sandy Staten Island and Occupy Sandy Relief NJ as well. Also there’s groups like Occupy Monsanto which has a website “dedicated to empowering citizens of the world to take action against Monsanto & it’s enablers” in the government along with “processed food companies that use Monsanto’s products.”[3] One of their project are called ‘Genetic Crimes Units‘ where they carry out ‘decontamination’ efforts or actions opposing GMOs and Monsanto, for good reason.

I can’t forget Occupy Our Homes, which is a part of the US Occupy movement that is meant to help homeowners, defining itself as “a movement that supports Americans who stand up to their banks and fight for their homes.” They recently created a new website allowing anyone to “start, run and deliver your own campaign in support of a home occupation or stopping an eviction, with the technology you need at your fingertips.” Additionally, there’s a group called ‘Occupy the Economy‘ which is working to democratize the economy and create an ‘industrial democracy’ in the US, which is still around as well.

Then, there is a group that tries to make sure women’s voices are heard in the occupy movement: Women Occupy.[4] If this isn’t enough, there’s Occupy Design, which defines itself as a “grassroots project connecting designers with on-the-ground demonstrators” that work to “create freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%.” This group is connected to the Creative Action Network which defines itself as a “crowdsourcing creativity for causes.” For environmentalists, there is Occupy the Pipeline, which defines themselves as a “grassroots, not-for-profit, environmental working group” that works to oppose the Spectra pipeline through “non-violent, direct action and civil disobedience.” There’s also an occupy offshoot called Strike Debt which helps people get rid of their debt by buying it up at a low price and relieving people of their burden, part of a project called the ‘Rolling Jubilee.’ Then there’s groups which are meant to organize remaining occupiers like InterOccupy and Occupy Together which are still existing along with sites like occupy.com and occupyeverything.org which share articles on social justice issues. Oh yeah, and there’s still the twitter for Occupy Weather.

There are a number of occupy groups still kicking beyond this. According to my research, occupy groups are still active in twenty-nine US cities.[5] Additionally, there is also a Google Group still for Occupy Baltimore, along with a page for the New York City General Assembly which is where it all began. The website created by Adbusters, way back, occupywallst.org still is thriving, but is not a voice for the movement since there not one voice for the movement, no ‘official’ website, ‘official’ organization or person that speaks for Occupy. If there is any further indication one needs that this movement is still living and breathing, consider the trial against Occupy activist Cecily McMillian who has nonviolently fought the powers that be, and the trials of Occupy activists (NATO 3 and Cleveland 4, etc…). There’s also hundreds upon hundreds of Occupy Together meetups, but only further investigation would prove how active each of these groups is. Even the Occupied Chicago Tribune is still hanging on and Tidal magazine which analyses ‘Occupy Theory.’

yes a variety of organizing initiatives came out of Occupy. But note this: Before Occupy we had lots of single-issue campaigns & various kinds of organizations organizing or representing sections of the working class in particular sectors or spheres. The thing about Occupy is that it was a multi-issue formation, initial statements brought together a long list of criticisms of the system, things that affect a broad variety of people. That's why various groups wanted inclusion. It sort of hinted at being a multi-issue movement, centered on class inequality...as hinted at by the vague bit about the 1 percent vs the 99 percent (a rather inaccurate picture of the class structure but at least points to the ruling class). This was its importance in my opinion. I think there will be new attempts in the future, but they will hopefully learn from Occupy's mistakes, like dropping the consensus decision making scheme.

syndicalistcat

I think one of the more destructive aspects of Graeber's ideas is his hard core support for "consensus decision-making," and I think he influenced Occupy Wall Street in adopting this. There are other American anarchists who superficially identify consensus-decision-making with direct democracy, based on a certain activist tradition in the USA that goes back to the '70s/80s anti-nuke & peace movements.

Forcing a movement to organize into "affinity groups" with spokescouncils, allowing individuals or small groups to block decisions in GAs...these methods were introduced in the USA back in the '70s/80s by the Quakers, who have a rather bizarre theory that majority vote decision-making is "violence".

Consensus decision making has long played a destructive role, as it did in Occupy. The pamphlet "Blocking Progress" explains the destructive role of consensus decision making in the Livermore Action Group, an anti-nuke movement in the bay area in the '80s.

Occupy GAs were to some extent expressive rather than decision-making bodies, where people got a certain sense of support from hearing others with similar circumstances. But for decision-making, intractable, lengthy meetings make it hard for ordinary people with jobs & children to participate, and leads to people blocking attempts to accommodate various concerns. This in turn led to fragmentation & various committees & groups going off doing separate organizing. A black nurse from New York City told me that when blacks & other people of color tried to introduce some proposals to reflect their concerns at OWS, they were blocked by wingnuts. This led to the creation of People of Color in Occupy, and other projects, like Occupy the Hood.

Years ago, I was a member of an Anarchist bookshop collective that used consensus decision making. We used the stuff from Movement for a New Society as our textbooks. One thing that we learnt from it is that consensus, while superior to majority rule, has certain preconditions and that, if those preconditions are not present, it won't work. Those preconditions included:

(a) A manageable number of people involved, ideally 8-12, no more than 20;

(b) The people involved know each other well and have a personal commitment to each other;

(c) The group has a defined process for joining and conditions of membership, so that everybody knows who is in the group and how to go from being a non-member (who can't block consensus) to being a member (who can).

The peace movement has abused consensus decision making terribly in the last 30 years, because it has tried to use it in circumstances where the preconditions don't apply. In Occupy, they didn't come anywhere near close to applying. Breaking up into smaller groups and having a spokescouncil is merely a single step in the direction of what needed to be done if consensus was going to work.

For what it's worth, my opinion is that the Anarchist movement should be based on small groups, which meet the criteria set out above, and use consensus as their internal decision making process. Relations between groups would be managed by consistent federalism, where constituent groups (and, in larger federations, constituent federations) have autonomy - i.e. the minority is not bound by the majority, but cannot prevent the majority acting. It is this process which preserves the liberty of the individual and ensures that organisation is a means of enhancing liberty rather than curtailing it.

Ablokeimet

For what it's worth, my opinion is that the Anarchist movement should be based on small groups, which meet the criteria set out above, and use consensus as their internal decision making process. Relations between groups would be managed by consistent federalism, where constituent groups (and, in larger federations, constituent federations) have autonomy - i.e. the minority is not bound by the majority, but cannot prevent the majority acting. It is this process which preserves the liberty of the individual and ensures that organisation is a means of enhancing liberty rather than curtailing it.

Inconsistent federalism, more like.

If we were living in some liberal utopia where the anarchist movement could gaily exist (or even have meaning) for itself in abstraction from anything or anyone else as a sort of "be the change you want to see in the world" drop-out culture, then this approach might make sense (and even then...).

But if you start from the historical position that the anarchist movement is a political tendency in the movement for proletarian self-emancipation from capital, then this makes no sense at all. You have to pick sides in the class war. You can't have one lot of "constituent groups" deciding to back the workers on strike and another lot deciding to support the management or the scabs. Not without disgracing the name of anarchism in the eyes of the very workers you're trying to convert to an anarchist way of doing things.

Collective responsibility is not something you voluntarily adopt (or not) on a purely internal initiative. The working class will see you - quite rightly - as being collectively responsible for the actions of the "constituent group" backing the scabs in the next-door town/neighbourhood/etc. You can either face up to your collective responsibility or you can deny it - but you cannot escape it.

By chance found this Graeber quote

"You can't create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same."

The identification of means and ends as the same thing is a utopian misunderstanding of prefiguration, in my view. The problem of social transformation is that you can't simply presuppose the set of social relations you want to end up at, as your starting point. Because your starting point is the existing, different social relations of capitalism. And if you could voluntarily opt out of social relations, they wouldn't be social relations but personal or voluntary relations.

And, as an AFA vet, while I may agree with the fine sentiments behind the idea that "you can't create a just society through violence", I also have to agree with Ali G's response to some pacifist hippy asking him what kind of situation violence could be of use in - "Well, a violent one". Faced with fascist or police violence, refusing to respond likewise is definitely not going to lead to a better society - quite the opposite. No pasaran, and all that...

The means-ends problem then has to be seen in terms of non-contradiction rather than identity. The instrumentalist view that "the end justifies the means" is a moral (justificatory) rather than pragmatic argument (although it quite often asserts that it is being ruthlessly pragmatic - utter nonsense). The correct half of Graeber's position is that you can't hope to attain a given end with means that are completely in contradiction to it. However the "bootstrap problem" of not being able to presuppose the social relations that don't yet exist, means that in some cases you have to adopt transitional means that can make the bridge from one set of social relations to the other, which itself is not entirely consistent with either. The problem with the "instrumentalists" false "practicality" is that the means they choose are the ones that are entirely consistent with the existing relations, hence are doomed, apriori, to simply reproduce them. The problem with the utopians false identity between means and ends, is that means which are entirely consistent with "the next world" cannot engage sufficiently with the here and now to effect any transformation. It's that dialectics-thingy, innit?

[quote was from this article (which I came across via the Viewpoint mag article on the Castoriadis-Pannekoek correspondence, of all places)]

Years ago, I was a member of an Anarchist bookshop collective that used consensus decision making. We used the stuff from Movement for a New Society as our textbooks. One thing that we learnt from it is that consensus, while superior to majority rule, has certain preconditions and that, if those preconditions are not present, it won't work. Those preconditions included:

(a) A manageable number of people involved, ideally 8-12, no more than 20;

(b) The people involved know each other well and have a personal commitment to each other;

(c) The group has a defined process for joining and conditions of membership, so that everybody knows who is in the group and how to go from being a non-member (who can't block consensus) to being a member (who can).

Whenever I criticize consensus decision making, its advocates will always say "they weren't doing it right." This was then used, in Occupy, as a justification for having supposedly expert facilitators, who were not elected, and not accountable. At any rate, I heard complaints about the unaccountability of the facilitation committee in Occupy Oakland.

The thing about majority vote direct democracy is that it has more leeway for real world circumstances. It allows for large scale movements & decision making to take place, given the inevitable disagreements in such situations. People can discuss & if no agreement, they can vote on it. In worker movements where direct democracy is practiced, there is also the advantage of a closer commonality of interests, which reduces the range of potential disagreements, but does not eliminate them. Think about a discussion of whether to continue a strike or not after the employer has made some concessions but not what we want.

It is utopian to suppose that mass movements to change the society will be exactly like the society we aim to create. Such movements must be built with people as they are, or as they are becoming, learning & developing, with various conflicts. Such a movement is likely to reflect some of the limitations of the existing society where such a movement has arisen. Nonetheless, it's hard to see how a society based on direct, democratic control by the masses could come about if practices of direct participation & democracy & solidarity had not become very widespread in the movement that is the main force for change.

There is also the basic fact that a revolution, a change in which the dominating classes have their power taken away, is a case where a mass movement enforces a change against the will of a sizeable minority.That in itself tells us there will be no consensus in the society as it emerges from such a situation. Also, it should tell us there is a good chance that violence will be deployed against us.

syndicalistcat

I think one of the more destructive aspects of Graeber's ideas is his hard core support for "consensus decision-making," and I think he influenced Occupy Wall Street in adopting this. There are other American anarchists who superficially identify consensus-decision-making with direct democracy, based on a certain activist tradition in the USA that goes back to the '70s/80s anti-nuke & peace movements.

I think blaming Graeber for Occupy's adoption of consensus is a little over the top. Consensus decision making has been firmly ensconced in activist culture for a while. Honestly, I'd be surprised if there was initially even any debate or discussion over which kind of decision making structure OWS would use.

I didn't say he was exclusively responsible for this. I agree there are many activists who sort of assume this method of decision making. But he is in fact a hard core advocate of it. And that was my point. In case you didn't notice, this thread is about agreements or disagreements with Graeber's ideas.

syndicalistcat

I didn't say he was exclusively responsible for this. I agree there are many activists who sort of assume this method of decision making. But he is in fact a hard core advocate of it. And that was my point. In case you didn't notice, this thread is about agreements or disagreements with Graeber's ideas.

Fair enough. I just don't think he really had much influence on it at all, which you said you thought that he did.

ocelot

You have to pick sides in the class war. You can't have one lot of "constituent groups" deciding to back the workers on strike and another lot deciding to support the management or the scabs. Not without disgracing the name of anarchism in the eyes of the very workers you're trying to convert to an anarchist way of doing things.

Collective responsibility is not something you voluntarily adopt (or not) on a purely internal initiative. The working class will see you - quite rightly - as being collectively responsible for the actions of the "constituent group" backing the scabs in the next-door town/neighbourhood/etc. You can either face up to your collective responsibility or you can deny it - but you cannot escape it.

One thing that follows from what I said (and, in my haste, I thought it OK to leave unsaid) is that, if the preconditions for consensus decision making aren't there, majority rule should apply. This is certainly the case in mass organisations of the working class (even Anarcho-Syndicalist unions). The ideal structure I outlined was for an Anarchist Communist organisation, not a mass organisation of the working class.

Majority rule, however, should not override federalism. What's far more of a problem than certain groups of workers wanting "out" of a struggle and using federal structures to do it, is bureaucrats squashing initiatives of militant workers by using a conservative majority in a centralised structure to vote the militants back to work. In pre-revolutionary situations, it is certain that there will be massive conflict between conservative officials and militant workers - and the transformation of the situation from pre-revolutionary to revolutionary will crucially depend on the freedom of initiative of the militant minority.

The issue of conservative workers weakening the struggle by opting out is a real one, but it shouldn't be tackled by centralism. Rather, it should be tackled by the constant assetion of the bedrock principle of unionism - that an injury to one is an injury to all. Workers will be drawn into the revolutinary struggle, not by central discipline, but by solidarity.

In USA it has often been the case that militant minorities get trapped in unions with conservative majorities who support the bureaucracy. This led me to the view that in organizing a new union in a workplace I would be against a "union security" provision, that is, forced union membership. Better to let the conservatives not join. In many workplaces there are individual conservatives, often relatives or friends of a boss. They don't like the union's militant politics? So, let them not join. There are plenty of cases of unions in USA being purely voluntary organizations....and in those cases what happens is that the more conservative element do not join.

The problem with Greaber is not only his being stuck with consensus decision making but with ignorance about working class people personal opinion systems. The activists main mission is to sow in the opinion systems of the people the revolutionary ideas that will sprout in mass uprisings in time of crisis, and not to organize them or build the new within the old. (These can help in the margin of the sowing but cannot replace the sowing in the broad mass of the not organized masses.)

Just read the following, away from internet a lot:

ocelot wrote:

The means-ends problem then has to be seen in terms of non-contradiction rather than identity. The instrumentalist view that "the end justifies the means" is a moral (justificatory) rather than pragmatic argument (although it quite often asserts that it is being ruthlessly pragmatic - utter nonsense). The correct half of Graeber's position is that you can't hope to attain a given end with means that are completely in contradiction to it. However the "bootstrap problem" of not being able to presuppose the social relations that don't yet exist, means that in some cases you have to adopt transitional means that can make the bridge from one set of social relations to the other, which itself is not entirely consistent with either. The problem with the "instrumentalists" false "practicality" is that the means they choose are the ones that are entirely consistent with the existing relations, hence are doomed, apriori, to simply reproduce them. The problem with the utopians false identity between means and ends, is that means which are entirely consistent with "the next world" cannot engage sufficiently with the here and now to effect any transformation. It's that dialectics-thingy, innit?

I don't think there's any great dichotomy, at least there isn't to my simple outlook: If a comrade is being beaten up by the fash/state etc. in the street it seems to me a fairly straightforward moral, instrumental and prefigurative requirement to get stuck in and kick the fuck out of them. If the revolution requires violence to have this disgusting, parasitic, genocidal system replaced by an anarchist communist society, ditto. No brainer. Graeber is a decent writer but when reading him the niggling question always stirs at the back of my mind 'Strange how that word academic means 'of no interest or importance to anyone.'

ocelot

By chance found this Graeber quote

"You can't create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same."

The identification of means and ends as the same thing is a utopian misunderstanding of prefiguration, in my view. The problem of social transformation is that you can't simply presuppose the set of social relations you want to end up at, as your starting point. Because your starting point is the existing, different social relations of capitalism. And if you could voluntarily opt out of social relations, they wouldn't be social relations but personal or voluntary relations.

And, as an AFA vet, while I may agree with the fine sentiments behind the idea that "you can't create a just society through violence", I also have to agree with Ali G's response to some pacifist hippy asking him what kind of situation violence could be of use in - "Well, a violent one". Faced with fascist or police violence, refusing to respond likewise is definitely not going to lead to a better society - quite the opposite. No pasaran, and all that...

The means-ends problem then has to be seen in terms of non-contradiction rather than identity. The instrumentalist view that "the end justifies the means" is a moral (justificatory) rather than pragmatic argument (although it quite often asserts that it is being ruthlessly pragmatic - utter nonsense). The correct half of Graeber's position is that you can't hope to attain a given end with means that are completely in contradiction to it. However the "bootstrap problem" of not being able to presuppose the social relations that don't yet exist, means that in some cases you have to adopt transitional means that can make the bridge from one set of social relations to the other, which itself is not entirely consistent with either. The problem with the "instrumentalists" false "practicality" is that the means they choose are the ones that are entirely consistent with the existing relations, hence are doomed, apriori, to simply reproduce them. The problem with the utopians false identity between means and ends, is that means which are entirely consistent with "the next world" cannot engage sufficiently with the here and now to effect any transformation. It's that dialectics-thingy, innit?

[quote was from this article (which I came across via the Viewpoint mag article on the Castoriadis-Pannekoek correspondence, of all places)]

First of all, thank you so much for that link to the Castoriadis-Pannekoek exchange!

I am so glad that we are having this discussion regarding the effectiveness of prefigurative politics because I had always just taken it for granted that organizing ourselves in such prefigurative-political way was the right way to go --- I conflated means with ends. I think you are absolutely correct, ocelot -- how can we pretend that we can organize a strategically effective anarchist organization along the lines of what we'd hope an anarchist society would look like when we don't live in an anarchist society? It's like socialism in one country: how could we possibly organize a socialist economy within a capitalist one?

However, on the other hand, isn't there the danger of moving towards a leninism or trotskyism? Doesn't rejecting prefigurative politics leave us open to co-optation? I understand the sentiment that drives the implementation of consensus based decision making that Graeber apparently supports. On the other hand, as some had expressed above, such implementation of prefigurative political measures could also open us up to co-optation.

aggh...I don't what to think!

Sorel was not an anarchist, he NEVER was. Why all of a sudden this repeating occurence of mentions of Sorel here on this site. He was a confused thinker and it is no surprise that he went to the anti-Semitic Action Francaise of Charles Maurras for a while. He had no influence on the syndicalism of the CGT whatsoever. He appears to be a favourite of some intellectuals but for workers he is and was of no interest whatsoever.

Long time lurker, first time poster, hello comrades.
This is slightly off-topic but I feel that it's worthwhile to examine some thoughts about Sorel... I can say at least from the perspective of comrades in the United States that the new wave of interest in Sorel and his thought has some roots in the renewed interest in class struggle politics and communist thought- many comrades coming out of the sort of confused "post-left"/green radical/insurrectionist and CrimethInc milieu of the late 90s and the 2000s attracted to Sorel because of his uncompromising support for violence, not just "use of force", but violence, something that always gets ex-Black-Blocsters blood pumping (I mean this with affectionate eye-rolling), and a serious theoretical challenge to OWS peace-police and liberals masquerading as "socialists". So they see a "Reflection on Violence" which simultaneously valorizes the use of violence, sneers on rationalist and reformist politics (always a point dear to the hearts of insurrectos), and at the same time resurrects for these comrades the idea of class war.
As a corollary, the idea of class war is extraordinarily powerful for many of these comrades (and for myself as well) coming out of the "post-left"/green milieu, because post-left thought, while high on powerful theory and head rhetoric, lacks a social basis to organize resistance to capital (hence constant blathering about nomads, renegades, tribes, 'affinity groups' and other very groovy but completely indefinable, fluid entities which Capital by its nature erases)- there's no grain of sand for the revolutionary pearl to form around- class war (and especially the apocalyptic Sorelian class war) is the solid ground for the revolution to stand on.

As for Sorel being a confused thinker with no interest to workers, I can think of many workers who are quite interested in him, it seems rather presumptuous of you to say he's of no interest... If nothing else, he's an interesting kook. Of course he was divorced from the workers- he wasn't even trying to influence them- he explicitly states that the workers don't need him or anybody else to theorize for them. "Reflections on Violence" is not really a programmatic work or a blueprint, it's a paean to the revolutionary working class which has no need of Sorel or any other "socialist" intellectual, with a nice sideline of invective heaped upon parliamentary socialists.

CrimeZone

I can say at least from the perspective of comrades in the United States that the new wave of interest in Sorel and his thought has some roots in the renewed interest in class struggle politics and communist thought- many comrades coming out of the sort of confused "post-left"/green radical/insurrectionist and CrimethInc milieu of the late 90s and the 2000s attracted to Sorel because of his uncompromising support for violence, not just "use of force", but violence, something that always gets ex-Black-Blocsters blood pumping (I mean this with affectionate eye-rolling), and a serious theoretical challenge to OWS peace-police and liberals masquerading as "socialists".

So, Sorel's crimes against reason continue to resonate down through the ages and disorient people long past any time he deserved. I'm with Battlescarred on him.

The positive valorisation of violence leads in the direction of Fascism and, as Battlescarred pointed out, that's exactly where Sorel went for a short while. We will overcome the political confusion of the OWS dogmatists, not by taking up a position diametrically opposite to them (which is only a backhanded compliment to them by allowing them to define one's politics as a photographic negative of theirs), but by separating the positive things they have brought to the movement from the negative ones.

The major flaws of the OWS dogmatists are twofold. Firstly, they have been insisting on consensus decision making when the conditions for consensus do not exist and cannot be created. This has the predictable effect of allowing minorities to rule by veto, producting inaction - and thus giving inordinate power to the most conservative elements in the mobilisation.

Secondly, and more importantly, they have lacked a full class analysis. They have not realised that it is the working class, and not an amorphous "99%", which is the agent of change in society and that its power is located in the workplace. And it is the bankruptcy of the OWS strategy for change that has led some people to recoil from it and head in the "other" direction - insurrectionalism.

Insurrectionalism, however, also lacks a full class analysis. The "green" insurrectionalists lack it totally, while the more traditional insurrectionalists use a reasonable class analysis only to identify friends and enemies (i.e. respectively who to hand a molotov to and who to throw it at) - but not to illuminate a strategic approach to building a revolutionary movement.

This debate has been with us since the Chartists in the 1830s, who were split between the "moral force" tendency and the "physical force" tendency. The development of the labour movement as the 19th Century wore on, however, allowed for a third possibility to emerge, one which transcended them both. This is a movement based on the use of economic force, the same force that the capitalists use day to day in maintaining their dominance. By organising in the workplace, workers can not only use economic force on their own behalf, but also deprive the capitalists of this power. It is the field of economic force which is decisive in the class struggle, even to the extent of depriving the capitalists of the ability to use physical force.

A lack of orientation to the workplace leaves activists caught in the Chartists' dilemma - either they adopt some variety of reformism, or they adopt some variety of insurrectionalism. The OWS dogmatists constitute a pressure in the direction of reformism. The activists taking an interest in Sorel are merely looking at the other side of the same dodgy coin.

Secondly, and more importantly, they have lacked a full class analysis. They have not realised that it is the working class, and not an amorphous "99%", which is the agent of change in society and that its power is located in the workplace. And it is the bankruptcy of the OWS strategy for change that has led some people to recoil from it and head in the "other" direction - insurrectionalism.

Insurrectionalism, however, also lacks a full class analysis. The "green" insurrectionalists lack it totally, while the more traditional insurrectionalists use a reasonable class analysis only to identify friends and enemies (i.e. respectively who to hand a molotov to and who to throw it at) - but not to illuminate a strategic approach to building a revolutionary movement.

Which is precisely what I said. I am not proposing insurrectionalism, nor am I attempting to be "pro-Sorel", I am merely attempting to offer possibilities as to why he has suddenly reappeared and why he may be of interest- interest doesn't necessarily mean approval, but there's more to it than just that some confused people don't understand who they should be reading to "get it right"- there are reasons that Sorel appeals to certain anarchists, to certain workers, and yes, to certain intellectuals, fascists, and whoever else.
Perhaps you've read Sorel more recently than me, and if I am wrong correct me. But it doesn't seem to me that Sorel is the "other side of the coin" that you propose- that would be somebody like Blanqui, wouldn't it? Sorel is a proponent of economic power- he's a partisan for the syndicalist laborers against leaders of parties and socialdemocratic politicians; at least in my reading, his upholding of violence is simply the recognition that force will be met with force, and that the capitalists will call proletarian force "violence".
I definitely see what you say about using class analysis to tag "with us/against us" the way insurrectionalists are prone to, and this is certainly an implication in Sorel's writing- though I would argue that he emphasized this aspect of the struggle because economic power was an obvious assumption for the labor movement in his day, while it seems to me that for many anarchist comrades in these times of disoriented/pulverized labor organization in the "developed world", the sense of an economic center of revolutionary action is just starting to be resurrected.
If he ultimately is both a marginal and a unsavory thinker, his "crimes against reason" have at least been a bridge for many of my comrades in the U.S. to move from thinking about revolution in terms of "The People" (or even worse, some vaguely pantheistic vegan idea about "Gaia" or "all sentient life"!) to thinking about revolution in terms of the working class, from thinking about organizing in tiny cults of drop-out squatters or in amorphous mass marches to thinking about organizing in workplaces and production centers where effective force can be used against capitalism- economic force, as you say.

I think that this does tie back to David Graeber. He does good work dredging up countless examples of non-authoritarian societies, "alternatives" to class society- that's a good thing, he's expanding the imagination for a public that thinks of capitalism as natural. But I find that this approach of finding "classless alternatives" in an anthropological analysis seems to take the eye of the camera off the class struggle as it is occurring in our own time and context and abstract our view onto The Alternative, without showing us how The Alternative happens, and once again, we have the "post-left" problem- it is wonderful to see that humans can and should construct a classless society of free people, but right here and now we are in a class society of unfree labor and capital, how do we get there? In fact, in Debt, Graeber frequently shies away from this very question (this may be a symptom of attempting to draw a wider group of interested readers into anarchist orbit).
This is also true in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (and in the nice but questionable Zomia hypothesis of James C. Scott)- for the Tsimihety or inhabitants of upland SE Asia it was once possible to "retreat" away from authority (authority based mainly on military force and not economic persuasion) and form egalitarian communities in their isolated zones. But for millions of people who have been incorporated into a proletariat that's now worldwide, there's no way to "retreat"- "dropping out" just doesn't work, reorganizing "autonomous" living spaces or social relations doesn't work on it's own either, because capital encompasses all of society's structures. Graeber gives his readers only these idyllic pictures of free relations unencumbered by capitalist power, and it seems like the uncareful reader may be led into foolish schemes of trying to create these relations without actually changing capital relations beyond their everyday lives.
Of course, Graeber's goal as an anthropologist has never been to provide revolutionary gumption for workers' councils... But I think as a relatively prominent anarchist it would seem important to at least speak to the importance of economic power, which as a Wob he must certainly have some feelings about.

infektfm

I am so glad that we are having this discussion regarding the effectiveness of prefigurative politics because I had always just taken it for granted that organizing ourselves in such prefigurative-political way was the right way to go --- I conflated means with ends. I think you are absolutely correct, ocelot -- how can we pretend that we can organize a strategically effective anarchist organization along the lines of what we'd hope an anarchist society would look like when we don't live in an anarchist society? It's like socialism in one country: how could we possibly organize a socialist economy within a capitalist one?
.
However, on the other hand, isn't there the danger of moving towards a leninism or trotskyism? Doesn't rejecting prefigurative politics leave us open to co-optation?

What I wrote must not have been clear enough. I am not at all in favour of rejecting prefigurative politics. I think it is vital to reclaim prefigurative politics from people like Graeber who falsely associate it with the utopian equation of means and ends. The means/ends relation is not a binary between instrumentalist and prefigurative, it is a three-way relation between the false binary of instrumentalism versus utopianism on the one hand, and genuine prefigurative means on the other. Here's a short passage of this difference in relation to the meaning of solidarity, as an example:

Egalitarianism must necessarily be the goal of solidarity, if it is not to be charity. But it cannot be the precondition for solidarity, otherwise this would be self-help rather than mutual aid. In other words, egalitarianism is prefigurative and solidarity is the transformational practice that allows us to go from a situation of less equality towards more of it.
.
By prefiguration we mean a transformative philosophy that rejects instrumentalism (“end justifies the means”) on the one hand and utopianism (“be the change you want to see”) on the other.
.
The obvious utopian approach to issues of inequality in solidarity campaigns is to begin by demanding that everyone must act as if they were already equal. The problem with that is that it too easily becomes not acting in the sense of exercising agency, but in the sense of a fictional performance, like acting in a play, whether comedy, tragedy or farce, and often a combination of all three. Worse, when the less empowered participants, inevitably, make an intervention to point out that this charade is not addressing their issues, they then get the blame for bursting the bubble of illusory “all equals together” unity. Victim-blaming comes built-in as a standard with the utopian approach. As a transformative strategy it is a failure because it doesn’t in practice accept that we are not yet at the place we want to get to.
.
The instrumental approach to the problem of inequality amongst participants within campaigns is simply to rely on the goals of the campaign as an alibi. If the success of the campaign is seen in some way as an advance against inequality, then what does it matter if an anti-racist campaign, say, is dominated by middle class white people already holding political and other institutional power, and within it the voices of black participants with little or no such power, are marginalised? Isn’t the campaign against racism a good thing? Stop making trouble and follow the lead of the people who know best how the levers of power work, then.
[...]

from here

Thanks for the clarification, ocelot.

CrimeZone

Which is precisely what I said. I am not proposing insurrectionalism, nor am I attempting to be "pro-Sorel", I am merely attempting to offer possibilities as to why he has suddenly reappeared and why he may be of interest- interest doesn't necessarily mean approval, but there's more to it than just that some confused people don't understand who they should be reading to "get it right"- there are reasons that Sorel appeals to certain anarchists, to certain workers, and yes, to certain intellectuals, fascists, and whoever else.
Perhaps you've read Sorel more recently than me, and if I am wrong correct me. But it doesn't seem to me that Sorel is the "other side of the coin" that you propose- that would be somebody like Blanqui, wouldn't it? Sorel is a proponent of economic power- he's a partisan for the syndicalist laborers against leaders of parties and socialdemocratic politicians; at least in my reading, his upholding of violence is simply the recognition that force will be met with force, and that the capitalists will call proletarian force "violence". .

Certainly, Sorel is in this respect quite a few steps better than Blanqui, who had quite an elitist approach to making a revolution. Most insurrectionists these days support what they call "mass violence" and criticise the substitutionism of modern Blanquists like the Red Brigades.

And if the insurrectionists you describe are using Sorel as a bridge away from insurrectionism towards class struggle, then I'm not so concerned about his current influence. It doesn't detract, however, from my critique of his faulty opinions.

A response to Graeber's guardian-published article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/11/has-the-working-class-really-accepted-austerity/

redsdisease

I think blaming Graeber for Occupy's adoption of consensus is a little over the top. Consensus decision making has been firmly ensconced in activist culture for a while. Honestly, I'd be surprised if there was initially even any debate or discussion over which kind of decision making structure OWS would use.

Of course blaming him solely is over the top, but there for sure was discussion on what decision making process to use in the planning meetings prior to OWS. He was a part of this and they decided 'modified consensus'. OWS also exported materials and even people to other early encampments with directions on how to run their version of 'modified consensus'. He also wrote some articles in the early days of the movement in defense of his version of consensus.

An interview where Graeber discusses his views on wage slavery, markets, guaranteed basic income, etc.: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/why-americas-favorite-anarchist-thinks-most-american-workers-are-slaves/

in his latest book The Democracy Project, Graeber describes the process in which OWS originated, and how the decision for consensus decision making was adopted. He was simply one among a number of advocates of that approach. But his book makes clear Graeber's obsessions here. He has an entire chapter devoted to advocating consensus decision making. He simply identifies democracy with consensus decision making. He mentions in passing at a couple places that revolutionary syndicalist unions used majority vote direct democracy, but ignores that. He says virtually nothing about the experience with direct democracy in the Spanish revolution. In other words, the main form of direct democracy advocated & practiced historically by libertarian influenced mass worker movements are of little interest to him.

You have to hand it to the Quakers really. Through patient work over the decades they managed to make their consensus process hegemonic within the peace movement, and then from there into the NVDA anti-nuclear movement and thence into the anti-globalisation/counter-summit movement. Now you have a bunch of self-styled anarchists running around thinking consensus is some kind of anarchist or libertarian principle, most of whom have probably never even heard of the Quakers. Just goes to show what hegemony a tiny bunch of committed activists can achieve with persistence.

Quakers: platformism done right :D

Now if only they were revolutionaries. Hmmm... (* considers novel entryist strategy*)

Btw. here's a Kittens piece on Occupy's consensus: http://antinational.org/en/occupy-process

Klaus

Btw. here's a Kittens piece on Occupy's consensus: http://antinational.org/en/occupy-process

Yeah, screw collective process - it's all about the programme! (even if that programme is written exclusively by the central committee* and handed down like tablets of stone to our members/drones...).

It does come across as knee-jerk programme-fetishism, tbh.

* or some dead "genius" as interpreted by his (sic) representatives on earth...

More bollox from Graeber today:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/05/political-establishment-momentum-jeremy-corbyn

Graeber

I should emphasise that I am myself very much an outside observer here – but one uniquely positioned, perhaps, to understand what the Corbynistas are trying to do. I’ve spent much of the past two decades working in movements aimed at creating new forms of bottom-up democracy, from the Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street. It was our strong conviction that real, direct democracy, could never be created inside the structures of government. One had to open up a space outside. The Corbynistas are trying to prove us wrong. Will they be successful? ...

The Corbynistas ... say that while so far they have been forced to concentrate on internal party politics, the object is to move from a politics of accountability to one of participation: to create forms of popular education and decision-making that allow community groups and local assemblies made up of citizens of all political stripes to make key decisions affecting their lives. ...
There have already been local experiments: in Thanet, the council recently carried out an exercise in “participatory economic planning” – devolving budgetary and strategic decisions to the community at large – which shadow chancellor John McDonnell has hailed as a potential model for the nation.

So apparently the UKIP-led Thanet Council is leading the way in Corbynist-Bookchinist municipal socialism.