> Here's where the anarchist obsession with ethics comes in:
> taxing/hiring only reinforces the commodity-money-wage relation.
> Taking over the school would challenge it. So I asked David what
> happens when the cops come in? How would he deal with Jay Gould's bit
> of wisdom - he could always hire half the working class to kill the
> other half. David's answer was that the hope was the cops could be
> persuaded to drop their weapons and join the occupiers. This is the
> logic behind the occupation of Zuccotti too.
The weird thing is, if you ask any Stalinist, Maoist, whatever, how the state can be physically overthrown, they'll tell you the exact same thing: there has to come a time when the cops drop their guns and join the opposition. Only they at least have the realism to understand that that won't happen until years of mass struggle have brought things to the point where huge sections of the population have become sympathetic to revolutionary politics. And that can only happen after revolutionary, or at least radical politics has shown itself to benefit people in their daily lives. Graeber just drops the realism condition and says - hey, maybe the cops will give in without all of that.
SA