the political ontology of the imagination is, i think, a long explanation of what graeber means by his controversializing statement that small a anarchists operate *as if* they were already free. this is not to say that, by pretending that the cops won't beat them bloody during protests, they are somehow free and that social structures can come tumbling down simply by Thinking Differently.
I have a suspicion that it only makes sense if you have a good grasp of a more sociological or anthropolotical understanding of the world. Someone here, a few months ago, poo pooed the idea that it matters, for example, that people felt transformed by the experience of direct democracy. they saw it as crazy and cultish that rational human beings might get caught up in something as silly as the effervescent excitement what was going on around them. This does make little sense to the manly man approach to politics as one where individuals make rational decisions about self-interest and public interest.
Anyway, at this point in the book, Graeber ties together all the reading I'd done a couple of months ago on the situationist roots of direct action. He started pointing to some scholars in a french tradition of sociological inquiry which, for me, threaded together an intellectual tradition that hadn't been explored elsewhere.
At 10:47 AM 2/24/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Shag on Graeber on the run-up to wa:
>
>1. the anti-capitalist insurrections throughout the 90s and very early 00s
>were successful.
>
>2. global elites were challenged and terrified at this successful global
>resistance.
>
>3. Afghanistan, Iraq was the response for a global elite terrified that
>movements had successful rewritten neo-liberal hegemony.
>
> ---------
>Some rambling responses.
>
>It's possible. And the "global elites" are (often) rather easily terrified.
>"Business Confidence" is the label in Vulgar economics. And both the
>businessmen and their lapdog ideologists yatter a lot about how easily
>shaken it is, for example by having their state taxes increased by a few
>pennies. And the stuff Ted Morgan quotes from various ideologues (e.g. Louis
>Powell) shows that by the late '60s they were indeed terrified; hence the
>establishment of the Conservative Think Tanks, for example.
>
>But despite this, I don't quite buy the direct link Graeber draws between
>the demos and the War, though those incipient uprisings may have been a
>contributory factor. Usually, that 'terror' of resistance becomes actively
>aggressive is when it puts downward pressure on profits, with a consequent
>determination to decrease the wage share. The "Golden Age of Capitalism" was
>becoming too fucking golden for working people, both in wages and in free
>time (which increased for both those in the work force and those in school
>during the '50s and early 1960s. Faculty & students, black house servants,
>etc had too much fucking time to talk to each other. Even a minority (but a
>dangerous one) of social workers began to talk to each other about whether
>their job really called for them being cops. Faculty & grad students chatted
>about "education" not only in formal committees but in coffee-shop chatter,
>partly free for a few moments from their "professional" standards. Fewer
>students were desperately "working their way" through college: they too
>could (and some did) loaf and invite their souls. (Some phrase from Whitman
>I vaguely remember.) The pundits began to call it a revolution of rising
>expectations. Did that 'cause' the Vietnam War. I don't think so, though
>there is undoubtedly a linkage.
>
>And Graeber's points are not incompatible with Wood's analysis of the need
>for Endless War in a world in which capitalism had become 'global,' and
>"old-style" imperialism no longer existed as a center of international
>affairs.
>
>I do wish I could read Graeber's book; he sems to have a pretty good grasp
>on how mass action, in fact, works and must work. But I think it possible
>that in this arguing a direct causal link between the Anti-cap demos of the
>'90s he is putting too much emphasis on Power. Roughly, I would see Power as
>always the dependent variable in politics; capitalist needs the independent
>variable. (That formulation won't hold water; take it as a gesture towards
>something to be worked out.)
>
>Carrol
>
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