Autonomies

From the PM Press Blog …

In loving memory of our friend, comrade, and mentor…David Graeber

Andrej Grubacic shares some thoughts on David’s sudden passing.

David Graeber was my mentor and my closest friend for the last twenty years. We have participated in dozens of political projects and wrote several things together. He was by far the most brilliant person I have ever met. We all have a good idea or two, but David was always able to come up with many, sometimes in the same sentence. I have no doubt that he was the most significant anarchist thinker of my generation.

From the CrimethInc. Collective …

The Shock Of Victory: An Essay by David Graeber—and a Short Eulogy for Him

Today, we mourn the passing of our friend and comrade, David Graeber, a tireless, insightful, and wide-ranging thinker. In his honor, we present his essay, “The Shock of Victory,” which he composed for the fifth issue of our journal, Rolling Thunder, exploring how anarchists can set long-term goals so as not to be caught off guard by our victories.

David’s unexpected passing takes us by surprise. Only days ago, we were corresponding with him about Facebook’s decision to ban anarchist pages to placate the Trump administration. David was among the first to respond with a support statement, charging that “Nothing could conceivably be more violent than to tell us—and particularly our young people—we are forbidden to even dream of a peaceful, caring, world.”

This was in character for David. He was not just an intellectual—he was always eager to take a stand, putting himself in the thick of things. He participated in the Direct Action Network in New York City leading up to the massive demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in Quebec City in April 2001 at the high point of the so-called “anti-globalization” movement. He was an instrumental participant in the founding of Occupy Wall Street and engaged in the debates about “violence” that followed, confronting the same self-righteous pundits that other anarchists did. He was one of the first to direct international attention to the revolutionary experiment in Rojava when it was threatened by the Islamic State, and joined us a year ago in calling for solidarity when Turkey invaded.

He put his body on the line along with his reputation, braving tear gas as well as academic retaliation. After Yale forced him out for his political beliefs, David was compelled to move overseas to find a university position commensurate with his abilities. He got a corporate publishing deal, yes, but he got it by refusing to compromise, not by watering down his politics.

David wrote—and thought, and said, and did—more than we could possibly summarize here. We hope that others will compose a proper eulogy to him, recounting all of his activities and contributions across a wide range of fields. Even when we disagreed—our analysis of democracy is in part a response to David’s account of democracy in essays such as “There Never Was a West“—we always learned from him. He was a stalwart friend and a worthy adversary.

In Graeber’s most transcendent work, such as the essay “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, he grapples with the basic ontological questions about freedom and the cosmos. This is how we remember him, weaving together different threads to present a vision of self-determination that extends from subatomic particles to entire societies and ecosystems:

“Is it meaningful to say an electron ‘chooses’ to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.”

He passed away at the young age of 59. Our hearts go out to everyone who survives him. We mourn his passing and grieve for all the things that David had yet to share with us.

The essay we share here emerged from a discussion about the legacy of anti-capitalist struggles at the turn of the century, during the protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and proposed “free” trade initiatives such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Anarchists and other anti-capitalist protesters played a major role in delegitimizing the WTO and World Bank and even succeeded in blocking the passing of the FTAA agreement—yet afterwards, many of the participants in the movement were dejected, dismayed that we had not succeeded in abolishing capitalism entirely.

Following this discussion, we invited David to expand his thoughts in an essay for Rolling Thunder, and the result was the following essay, “The Shock of Victory.”

If anything, David’s argument that anarchists are often unprepared for our victories is more timely today than it was when it appeared at the beginning of 2008. In the past few years, anarchists and other proponents of the abolition of police, prisons, and the existing criminal justice system have succeeded in popularizing the notion that all of these are unjust institutions with no legitimacy to govern our lives. Unsurprisingly, authoritarians and police have lashed out with tremendous violence. Caught in a war of attrition involving nightly clashes, it’s easy for demonstrators to feel that we are losing—when on a historic level, we have already achieved some goals that seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. The question—in 2008 as today—is how we can strategize on a long enough timeframe to make the most of our victories, rather than collapsing in despair in the face of the desperate blows of the reaction.

We urge everyone to read David’s work and take up whichever of David’s projects resonate with you. He should be with us in our movements, speaking to us, continuing to live in the actions we take and the visions we share.

The greatest homage that we can be pay to David Graeber – even if this language is probably not one that he would appreciate – is to learn from his work and his life (which were never separate), and to take these lessons into the struggle that was his, that of freedom and equality, or what he understood as democracy.

Graeber’s anarchism was always generous, and it was his historical sensitivity and openness to different forms of militancy, whether ostensibly anarchist or not, that sustained his contagious enthusiasm for rebellion.

David Graeber died yesterday, September 2nd. With his passing, his writings will remain a source for thinking through our world.

In memoriam, we share one short piece by Graeber, among the so many that we could …