nerd teacher [books] reviewed The Democracy Project by David Graeber
Okay but ahistorical and neglects a lot.
3 stars
People, including anarchists, often hold David Graeber up as some bright light of philosophy. He's not horrible, but he's always got a lot of glaring holes.
In this particular book, he has some really frustrating points where he applies a regional history to an entire movement or moment (e.g., applies a lens of NYC's way of doing OWS while neglecting to recognise how OWS operated in other places). This is something he always does, and it's really to the detriment of whatever he's developed to share. It's pretty ahistorical because it just neglects that many other areas have our own needs, even while stating otherwise. It also acts as if OWS was a primarily anarchist movement, which is something that I feel is very context dependent. Perhaps it was in some places, but others? Not so much. If that were true, I feel like it wouldn't have been very welcoming …
People, including anarchists, often hold David Graeber up as some bright light of philosophy. He's not horrible, but he's always got a lot of glaring holes.
In this particular book, he has some really frustrating points where he applies a regional history to an entire movement or moment (e.g., applies a lens of NYC's way of doing OWS while neglecting to recognise how OWS operated in other places). This is something he always does, and it's really to the detriment of whatever he's developed to share. It's pretty ahistorical because it just neglects that many other areas have our own needs, even while stating otherwise. It also acts as if OWS was a primarily anarchist movement, which is something that I feel is very context dependent. Perhaps it was in some places, but others? Not so much. If that were true, I feel like it wouldn't have been very welcoming to US-liberals and right-libertarians, and it very much was.
It's very odd.
The beginning of this book also sets a tone that is constant throughout Graeber's work: Despite pointing to feminisms (scarcely, as he only ever seems to have referenced them when specifically engaging with feminism and never any other moment), he often plays into the same patriarchal structures and attitudes. A very clear example of this is the desire to call things "drama" or "infighting," as if there can't possibly be any other reason for there to be tension between people in a group; he points to "low numbers" of cases of reported sexual assault as being an indicator that it wasn't common, but he neglects to recognise that most people aren't reporting it because it's not taken serious (and in a movement that he claims as primarily anarchist, it's understandable that they wouldn't report to the police at all).
Even if the tensions weren't from any form of abuse, he neglects the ways in which a lot of manarchists often try to push other people out and retain the same hierarchies they're supposed to be fighting against. This isn't "drama," and it's not "infighting." It's actually holding people accountable, and that was rarely (if ever) done by people of hegemonic demographics.
It's not bad, but these are the things that annoyed me most.
