(photo from a Drift Report video of David Graeber talking about the origins of Democracy in the United States at Occupy Democracy on Parliament Square, Westminster. Shot and edited by John Rogers)*
I love this from the late David Graeber's article, "Fetishism As Social Creativity," and having it put this way is something anti-Marxists clearly don't have a handle on:
"... the revolutionary, according to Marx, must never proceed in the same manner as the architect. It was not the task of the revolutionary to come up with blueprints for a future society and then try to bring them into being, or, indeed, to try to imagine details of the future society at all. That would be utopianism, which for Marx is a foolish bourgeois mistake. So the two forms of creativity – the creation of houses, or other material objects, and the creation of new social institutions (which is, after all, what revolution actually consists of) – should not work in at all the same way."
David was a fan of both “my” theater company, Theater Oobleck, and the podcast I contribute to, This Is Hell! radio (and a guest on the latter), both, in my opinion, productive organisms developed in a revolutionary (i.e. socially creative) way. Which was also how Occupy Wall Street (a project Graeber was heavily involved in) should be characterized. No matter what can be said about its failures, there's no denying the social creativity (in Graeber's terms) inherent in its manifestation.
The rightwing critics of Saul Alinsky don't understand this about his Rules for Radicals, either, but that is no surprise since most rightwing pseudo-intellectuals spout off without having done anymore investigation than hearing some other fascist say Alinsky's name in a derogatory context.
*Graeber’s survey of research on indigenous sources for the enlightenment and democracy are threaded throughout his posthumous masterpiece, with archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, which I strongly urge everyone to read.
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