> a public school is not a capitalist relation
>
A public school in America, under capitalism, IS a capitalist relation. This argument is so fruitless because we have little understanding of the sheer depth of social relations. The bourgeois relations of social production permeate EVERYTHING we do. For Graeber--and many Marxists--this is not sexy enough. Too bad. Sleep IS a capitalist relation. Insofar as we go to sleep exhausted from working, can't fall asleep because we're stressed, and sleep poorly because of sleep apnea, snoring, anxiety, or whatever else, sleep is a thoroughly capitalist relation. Hell, the reason we do it is to make it through another awful work day. Public schools are also absolutely not outside the realm of capitalism. In fact, they are for capitalism--that is, capitalism understood as the expansion of private value in itself. Even the so-called "public" domain is subservient to capital, insofar as it maintains its conditions of possibility.
This view is not, in any sense, totalizing or deterministic. There is another abstract path in which value can travel. This is social value in itself. It makes up the other side of the dialectic of the production of social value under capitalism. My claim is that this was the intended subject matter of the book on Wage Labor that Marx either never got to write, or more likely, was puzzled on exactly his such a book would proceed.
The contradictions of capitalism are such that there are two counter-posed movements of value going on at the same time--at least in essence. Generally, only one appears, but they both exist. Small, tangible victories (such as increased worker control, public funding, large-scale union victories) can begin to make quantitative changes which lead to qualitative changes--where the logic of social value in itself reigns supreme. This is the side the class struggle of the worker that is mostly absent in Capital--the subject of which is not capital, but rather the movement of private value in itself.
This is a dissertation project, in itself (mine, actually) so it can't be argued here. I am thankful, however, that Graeber is generously providing so much theoretical ammo.
But the blindness to social relations resides not only with the anarchists, but with most of the left, in general.
-Adam