Authored by: davidgraeber on Sunday, October 14 2007 @ 07:39 PM CDT

well if you read it all the way through, Bill, you're a remarkably poor
reader, since all you seemed to get out of it was the impression I was
claiming that "we" are "winning" in some grand overall strugge (which
struggle - against capitalism? against the state? the class struggle in
general? I don't even know), despite the fact that I had obviously
argued no such thing. What's more you continued to aggressively insist
that's what I had said, even when some posters tried to gently point out
some of my actual arguments.

if I were you I'd be genuinely embarrassed - you've made a total fool of
yourself, turning what could have been a useful discussion into a vitriolic
rant about an argument that the author never even made. But anyway
what I was mainly concerned with was the fact that it served so
effectively to steer debate away from any of the issues that actually
were raised in the article. For this reason I see no reason to encourage
you to continue this so I will ignore any further posts you make to this
forum.

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Authored by: Bill Not Bored on Sunday, October 14 2007 @ 08:03 PM CDT

and so, other than weak insults and a pompous, holier-than-thou
attitude (so well-suited to academic "discourse"), Dr. Graeber has no
response whatsoever to my criticism (repeated twice, ignored each
time) of his preposterous and very self-serving idea that the wars
against Afghanistan and Iraq were started to "distract" attention away
from the "anti-globalization" movement!

It would appear that his arrogant refusal to respond is not a matter of
taste or decorum (hurumph), but a simple inability to directly face and
answer someone who dares to point out how and why he is wrong.

I can imagine what it would be like if this was Nanterre in 1966: Dr.
Graeber onstage, pontificating at his podium, while I and other Enrages
pelt him with tomatoes . . .

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Authored by: Admin on Sunday, October 14 2007 @ 10:18 PM CDT

David is right, Bill. You need to cool it and let other people have a say in this thread. I'll do the same, which I've had to do be default this weekend because I have more important priorities.

Chuck

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Authored by: davidgraeber on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 06:34 AM CDT

yes, it's kind of sad, really, especially his inability to notice which way the
audience's tomatoes are actually flying (and hence need to revert to
fantasies set in the distant past), or why, if an author writes something
on the need to preserve natural resources, and you write an angry reply
starting "how dare you write what you did about the preservation of our
natural racehorses - what's natural about racehorses anyway?" - that
author might not find it worth his while to engage in further exchange.

On a more interesting note - it's a good question the degree to which
the neoliberal project is still standing. (This apart from the bizarre
conclusion on the part of that one other poster that, if we set out to
destroy the IMF, WTO, FTAA, etc, it is somehow irresponsible of us to
feel we have been in any way successful if we do, in fact, end up
destroying the IMF, WTO, FTAA, etc.) For me, the neoliberal project
was a kind of reverse Stalinism, an assumption that there is only one
way forward in human history and there's a scientific elite that
understands it and therefore it must be imposed on the masses whether
they like it or not by a vast coercive bureaucracy staffed by "experts"
trained in this science, because whatever massive damage it does in the
present, someday, we're not quite sure when, it will all lead to a
paradise of peace and prosperity. The result was this weird double-think
where you create the world's first global bureaucratic administration, and
then claim you are doing it to encourage an ideology of extreme
individualism. What we did was go after the flagship institutions of this
new bureaucracy, to expose and de-legitimate them, and this worked
very well. But of course the bureaucracy is still there. And the ideology is
no longer the only game in town, as it was in say, 1997, but obviously it
has very strong institutional roots. It's an interesting question whether
neoliberalism is simply regrouping in a somewhat more apparently
palatable form, or whether the ruling classes - being divided as never
before - are stumbling towards an entirely different strategy of rule.

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Authored by: Bill Not Bored on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 10:51 AM CDT

well you guys have got a nice little club here, seems pretty exclusive
though, only people who say "You're right" and "I agree" get in, everyone
else (it appears clear) is intentionally misunderstood, condescended to,
maligned, summarily dismissed . . . . But I have complete confidence that
the people who understood my objections straight away and didn't need to
have them explained over and over again will draw the same lessons from
this sad display of closing ranks that I have.

I now I must away: the tomatoes are ripe for picking.

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Authored by: davidgraeber on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 11:22 AM CDT

actually, it strikes me it might be helpful, Chuck, to include with the log-
in page a basic quizz on elementary logic, which would-be posters will
have to pass in order to be able to post. Anyway it would radically
improve the quality of debate. For example, Bill might be interested to
know - since at least in practice he doesn't seem to be aware - that
while a common example of syllogistic logic might proceed as follows

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal

a common example of a logic fallacy is:

All apes are mortal
Socrates is mortal
Therefore, Socrates is an ape

In his claim that my argument (that periods of democratic mobilization
in the US tend to be followed by the government ratcheting up militarism
overseas) can be proved wrong by the fact that the government is now
ratcheting up threats against Iran despite the lack of mass mobilization,
he is effectively arguing that since Socrates is not an ape, we have
therefore proved that apes are not mortal.
David

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Authored by: Patrokolos on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 02:36 PM CDT

While I do not agree with Bill comments concerning this article I see where he is coming from and I feel he has been mistreated and unfairly ridiculed.

Arguably there have been victories on specific campaigns. However, overall the world is still in pretty dismal shape and I'm not sure how important reaching medium-term goals are. Do I struggle against the IMF/World Bank to achieve short-term goals or do I struggle against it because I see it as a possible avenue to attack the misery of our social constructions? Bill was addressing this question, I think, when talking about whether or not neoliberalism was a distraction. Sorry if the very idea that there may be a tactical error, or a different weakness in the structure that could be exploited, makes some jaws drop.

Graeber was correct concerning Bill's idea of a "huge hole." Just because Graeber argued that wars are used as a distraction does not mean that all wars are a result of that need for distraction. However, Graeber did not address the statement that the government has been planning these wars eight years before the Seattle actions.

I disagree with Bill's statements because he is addressing side issues within the article, not the actual issue it attempts to raise. It is clear to me that anarchists are not winning the fight for a new world. This article was not about winning that fight though; it was about how we always fail to "smash the state and destroy capitalism" because we always achieve the medium-term goals and the nonradicals we are associated with are satisfied. We hit the state or capitalism and it flexes, giving a little, but does not break. We must find ways to go beyond it and push through.

I do not think that the biggest problem facing anarchists is that we "don't know how to handle victory" but this may be the biggest problem with "direct action movements." The biggest problem facing anarchists is that the "direct action movements" are addressing specific issues and are willing to compromise. The problem is that "direct action movements" are not composed of anarchists.

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Authored by: CaseyFord on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 03:44 PM CDT

I think what the author was just saying tho is that Bill is pissed about arguments that the author didn't make. It's kind like if David had written that the black bloc won at some particular action (like this coming weekend in DC) and then Bill got pissed and started talking about how much the black bloc tactic sucks because they lost at these other actions, and then other people got pissed at Bill because they think the black bloc is a good tactic and that it did well at some of those events.

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Authored by: Patrokolos on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 04:47 PM CDT

<i> I think what the author was just saying tho is that Bill is pissed about arguments that the author didn't make. </I></br></br>That is what i meant by Bill addressing "side issues" that arose from his reading of the article, not the actual points of discussion that the article was raising. Perhaps that was not clear.

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Authored by: davidgraeber on Monday, October 15 2007 @ 04:02 PM CDT

>However, Graeber did not address the statement that the government
>has been planning these wars eight years before the Seattle actions.

my reply would be that the government plans all sorts of things. Only a
small proportion of those plans does it actually end up carrying out.

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