'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility': Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/kaleidoscopic-sense-possibility-interview-david-graeber-democracy-america
Lynn Parramore: How has the Occupy movement illustrated and shaped your notion of democracy? What changes sparked by Occupy can be seen now in our political and economic systems?
David Graeber: I was first introduced to new forms of radical democracy in the global justice movement back in 2000, and that certainly transformed my own sense of political possibility. Most of us who were involved at the time felt we had finally come up with a powerful revolutionary formula: to begin to create institutions that could exist in a free society (that is, one that wasn't based on systematic violence or the threat of violence to create order), to juxtapose that to the profoundly undemocratic structures of power that currently exist... Of course then came 911 and the war on terror, and the terms of engagement for American social movements changed dramatically. We felt we were nipped in the bud.
Finally, in 2011, a new generation of young activists -- helped out, certainly, by people like me from the last time around, but actually surprisingly few -- managed to pull it off, briefly, on a mass scale. I think it's thrown open an almost kaleidoscopic sense of possibility, from alternative banking systems and mutual aid projects to communal assemblies as a potential form of self-governance. We have no idea yet where it all might lead if the democratic culture we're trying to build really does take root. The main thing Occupy did was to throw open the imagination, to get us to start thinking on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times.
LP: You note that democracy was contested during America's founding. Who were the proponents of democracy and how did they manifest their views?
DG: Actually, there were almost none. In the writings of the patriots and leaders of the revolution, word "democracy" was used almost interchangeably with "anarchy" or even "mob rule." Everyone opposed it. By democracy, they meant, either rule through popular assemblies like in ancient Greece -- which they saw a little during the big mobilizations they called out during the revolution -- or by extension, any system where ordinary people held the power of governance themselves. So it wasn't really contested among the political classes. They were uniformly opposed to it. You just have to read the opening remarks of the constitutional convention of 1789: it begins, 'we have a problem. There's far too much democracy in this country. State constitutions cannot contain it. We need to set up something stronger.'