[WS:] Can you summarize what the drawbacks discussed by Graeber are? I ordered the book, but it will be the some time before I can read it.
My general sense is that discussing drawbacks in abstraction is not very productive - it all depends for whom, under what conditions, and to what end. It makes sense, in this context, to defer to Gramsci on this subject, since he had direct experience of direct action ("Biennio Rosso" or two "red" years of factory occupations between 1919 and 1920) at a much larger scale than what we have been witnessing today. He compares direct action to a commando operation - it can be successful when it secures advanced positions for the army that follows, but it can be quite futile if it is not backed by an army. Consequently, he preferred mobilizing the "army" (i.e. building a mass CP) over direct commando actions.
It seems, however, that direct action can be very productive even in the absence of the "army" that backs it up, when it can facilitate mobilizing such an "army." The Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 - which was largely a symbolic act to the point that the famed cruiser "Aurora" credited with starting the operation was firing blanks instead of live rounds - could be considered an example.
This direct action helped to mobilize large segments of the Russian population as well as the military for the revolution. However, this was only possible thanks to the very specific circumstances that existed in 1917 - Russian army's defeat in WW1, the February Revolution that dismantled the 'ancien regime', the widely unpopular decision of the Kerensky government to continue fighting the war (at the request of France and England) and the widely spread dissent in the army. These conditions - the relative absence of legitimate authority and widely spread dissent were very favorable for revolutionary mobilization - and the direct action of storming the Winter Palace was the catalyst for that mobilization.
It does not seem, however, that such conditions exist today in the Etats Unis or Europe, or for that matter even in many Arab countries. Contrasting Egypt and Libya may illustrate this. Both countries experienced wide popular dissent over the status quo that led to direct action (protests.) However, Egypt has the professional and unified military that is THE major institutional force in the country (the blueprint pioneered by Ataturk in Turkey.) In Libya, by contrast, the military was divided along ethnic identities, just as the entire Libyan society was. This led to very different outcomes of the initial direct action - in Egypt the military took over and sidelined the protesters, but in Libya the initial protest catalyzed the split in the military and eventually a successful insurrection.
One final comment - I think that the left in the Etats Unis had a rare chance of mobilizing the military in the final stages of the Vietnam War. The dissent in the army ranks was widely spread, as evidenced by the incidence of fragging desertion and general disillusionment about the objectives of the war. Another favorable factor was the fact that the army was mostly conscript. For some reason, however, the mobilization of the military for the revolutionary cause did not materialize. One possible reason was the distance - the demoralized army was "at arms" in the remote Indochina, but it became just discharged veterans upon arrival in the Etats Unis. It might have been a different story if the war had been fought in, say, the neighboring Canada (the "Canadian Bacon" trope ;)). But I am not sure if any serious effort of mobilizing these folks was even attempted. Or perhaps the Black soldiers returning from Korea and Vietnam where they were taught to combat far superior fighters than fat Southern Bubbas with shotguns saw that they had a better chance with Democrats (who did, in fact, dismantled Jim Crow and launched the Great Society programs) than with the sectarian left. Just a conjecture.
Wojtek