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Title: Hope in Common
Author: David Graeber
Date: 2008
Language: en
Topics: anti-globalization, economics
Source: Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 from http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11569
Notes: This also appeared in “Adbusters”, #82, volume 17, number 2. March/April 2009. Under the title of “Tactical Briefing”

David Graeber

Hope in Common

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to

be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble,

there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered

and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self.

There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism

will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to

maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced

with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of “progressives” — is,

often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an

alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it

normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world

would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want

to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the

last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic

apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of

giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense

of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the

part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements

cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those

who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any

circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast

apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security

firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines

of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives

directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic

conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the

world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more

important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any

sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance,

what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined

the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army

and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was

precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what

has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead

weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are

extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result,

it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly,

the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles

we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no

coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major

military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities.

This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to

destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result,

the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals

entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money

whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the

proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in

turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and

once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity,

the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is

equally free to invest in the market — to grab their own piece in the

game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these

profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the

right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it

collapsed there appeared to be — at least for the moment — simply

nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global

justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to

be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring

forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it

looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace.

In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any

possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence

of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action

and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of

political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in

the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a

planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend

to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement

was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in

and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals

so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in

Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere

three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free

trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that

every new trade pact they threw at us — from the MIA to Free Trade Areas

of the Americas act — would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled,

the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively

destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is

particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by

now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited,

reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a

new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of

this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global

resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first

discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and

especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call

the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the

movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really

considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of

the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger

of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins

to emerge — particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience

and direct action — the reaction is the same; the government makes

immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then

starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then

forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much

invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights

movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy

wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the

“War on Terror.”

But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the

flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its

peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative

financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten

architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in

part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a

movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911,

combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial

success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.

We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular

imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are

already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted

into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to

see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to

be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less

unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and

this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply

“doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only

remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation

where people act according to the principle of “from each according to

their abilities, to each according to their needs” — which is the way

pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get

something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me

the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is,

if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen

to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of

communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also

the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of

rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic

collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and

hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more

creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given

task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to

be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to

innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives.

It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring — as on production

lines — that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even

fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private

companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. The question is how to further

democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of

managing communism — and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a

disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one:

preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each

others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing

to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness.

Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a

notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it

does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone — and most of

all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and

insurance claims adjustors — that there is really no choice but to

dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the

original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up

doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much,

and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own

innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to

be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any

plausible-seeming alternative — even one so dubious as the Soviet Union

in the 1930s — can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble

political crisis.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter

experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade

has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid

association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the

global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast

anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in

Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries

in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in

Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters,

neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where

state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other

way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even

aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to

break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning

to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at

least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin

to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global

level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine

insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system

must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form — this is why it

became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or,

when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To

become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a

new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a

common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without

recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make

something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s

true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just

beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand

years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt —

this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for

this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations

that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to

make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no

longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown

itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point

where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless

opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or

debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so — but at the very least we can start with a pledge against

evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each

other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not

just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of

capitalism — its moral foundation — now revealed to be a collection of

broken promises — but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all

is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises

that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by

the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own

affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of

the promise offered by capitalism — that we could live like kings if we

were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of

this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise

one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political

bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do

free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we

begin to make another world?