This is important stuff to understand for a civil society. It's what makes the interweb interesting as a place for consensus-based decision making to blossom. Stop being stupid, you haters!
Did any of you actually read the article? No, you just want to sneer and snark and keep your simple little views, don't you? Graeber is too smart for you.
Disagree all you want, but anyone who can't articulate a position and only responds with scorn deserves no respect.
@8 - Practitioners of the sort of Anarchism described here are firmly in control of OWS.
They are the people who planned the Direct Action, they comprised the vanguard who initiated the Occupation on September 17th, and they are the ones who set up and continue to socially enforce the General Assembly system of internal control.
When you assume the consensus-only process governing the protests is an incidental side-effect of a broad, disorganized group that doesn't have its shit together, you are very much mistaken. And if you assume someone will be able to come along and "help" the protests move to a "better" system of internal control, you are even more mistaken.
The question is not whether or not the New Anarchists can be "useful idiots" for the larger purpose of the protest; the question is whether or not everyone outside the organizing core is instead learning this sort of Anarchism by doing it (or serving as "useful idiots", if you already have strong feelings about it).
If you scale it up, you gots ta rep-re-SENT.
"Which is better - to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?"
~ Mather Byles (a Royalist who spent the American revolution under house arrest, but he did have a point.)
Sorry, but there's no getting around that.
Maybe they need a better decision making process.
Disagree all you want, but anyone who can't articulate a position and only responds with scorn deserves no respect.
They are the people who planned the Direct Action, they comprised the vanguard who initiated the Occupation on September 17th, and they are the ones who set up and continue to socially enforce the General Assembly system of internal control.
When you assume the consensus-only process governing the protests is an incidental side-effect of a broad, disorganized group that doesn't have its shit together, you are very much mistaken. And if you assume someone will be able to come along and "help" the protests move to a "better" system of internal control, you are even more mistaken.
The question is not whether or not the New Anarchists can be "useful idiots" for the larger purpose of the protest; the question is whether or not everyone outside the organizing core is instead learning this sort of Anarchism by doing it (or serving as "useful idiots", if you already have strong feelings about it).