> THE GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT: SOME POINTS OF CLARIFICATION -- By David
> Graeber
>
> could look at this another way. In the late-19th century people honestly
> believed that war had been made obsolete between industrialized powers;
> colonial adventures were a constant, but a war between France and
> England on French or English soil seemed as unthinkable as it would
> today.
Not true. War scares were a regular features of late 19th century life, and major wars did break out (Franco-Prussian War, the US Civil War, the Turkish-Russian War, plus endless wars in the colonial territories). Militarism ran rife in every major culture -- even the US had the Wild Wild West.
> The 20th century (which appears to have begun in 1914 and ended sometime
> around 1989 or '91) was by contrast the most violent in human history.
> It was a century almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world
> wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, as the ultimate
> measure of political effectiveness became the ability to create and
> maintain huge mechanized killing machines, that anarchism quickly came
> to seem irrelevant.
Violence is a social, not a moral, category. To say that the 20th century was the most violent in history is nonsense. It was the most *productive* in history: all the deaths of all the wars didn't come close to reducing global population growth, and the sum economic output of the 20th century was far vaster than anything in human history (and most of that output was civilian, not military).
> all forms of structure or organization. It's distressing that, two years
> after Seattle, I should even have to write this, but someone obviously
> should: in North America especially, this is a movement about
> reinventing democracy.
And that highlights the terrible weakness of the Northam Left, which has to contend with a rotting ex-Empire, an 18th century electoral system, and an economy about to be structurally adjusted into the ground.
> Over the past 10 years in particular, activists in North America have
> been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups' own
> internal processes to create a viable model of what functioning direct
> democracy could look like, drawing particularly, as I've noted, on
> examples from outside the Western tradition.
Much of what Graeber describes in terms of a new culture of dissent is Silicon Valley Management 101 -- decentralized networks, organizations which learn, and a Toyotist production model which has brought the research, production, and consumption spheres of multinational capitalism into close proximity. The difference is, working people are beginning to turn the instruments of their administration into tools of liberation -- an entirely good thing, but realistically, this is just the first stage in a long struggle against the multis.
-- Dennis