Social Imagination 101: we need more accessible works that do not solely critique the status quo but also build social imagination for alternatives; how do we change the world if we cannot even imagine it? The Good:1) Revolutions as Transformations in Collective Common Sense:--Nuanced analysis of history reveals the ebbs and flows of history instead of listing random events. Thus, we should appreciate that revolutions begin not on the fateful day(s) of uprising but much earlier the organizing in...

This is an important work and I will review it over the weekend. In the meantime, I will leave this twitter conversation with David Graeber here. Should be useful.Link to Conversation: https://twitter.com/RenegadeTramP/sta...

I asked my friends for a recommendation for a book with big and smart ideas. This is what someone sent me and boy were there some big and smart ideas in here. At first, it reads like a history of the OWS movement so I almost gave up on it, but I am so glad I made it to the end. Just like his first book, Debt, this is a big idea rethinking of how the world works. Or more accurately, Debt is a rethinking of how the world has been run and this book rethinks how it could or should be run. He throws

This might be my favorite popular work on direct democracy. Graeber is a scholar-activist who was one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street. The book uses the Occupy movement, during the time it had camps all over the country, as a springboard for discussions about democracy itself. I wish I could underline everything in this book. Every page is replete with insights. The third chapter alone is worth the price of the book, which establishes the Founding Fathers as anti-democratic elitsts. Wash...

This book was not at all what I expected it to be, judging from its title and description. Based on what little I’ve heard from him in radio interviews and podcasts, David Graeber struck me as an intelligent scholar who challenges and proposes alternatives to our dysfunctional political system. Having grown disillusioned with the status quo (like most Americans), I hoped this book might offer pointed but thorough critiques of the American political system from an anthropologist’s perspective and...

David Graeber has written an extremely accessible book about, not only the origins and inner workings of the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy movement, but about the issues it brought to the fore. What exactly is democracy and what are the origins of the concept? What myths have we held about "freedoms"? What is equality? What are alternatives to our current repressive debacle of a political/economic system? The book also delineates strategies used by protest movements around the world.This book affirm...

*airhorn* david gruber: WELCOME to democrarcy RELOADED (people's mic: reloaded... reloaded... reloaded...) *suddenly youre mind is blown by the sickest and most unexpeceted dubstep drop ever*

Ok, so I was deliberating between 2 or 3 stars and ultimately settled on 3. Mostly because a lot of the issues I had with this book was simply disagreeing with Graeber’s arguments rather than having an issue with how the argument is laid out. That is, Graeber is a very effective writer.Graeber is at his strongest when he talks about economics and global finance. His discussions, while brief, about organizations like the IMF, as well as the role of Wall Street and finance in politics, is fairly s...

Back in the day I half followed the Occupy movement, and then it suddenly just... disappeared from news coverage. There one day, gone the next. This book helps explain why. It also looks at the development of democracy in the West and different forms of democracy. A lot of it is reassuringly common-sensical. The most interesting thing I took away from this is that elections/voting are essentially a public contest/spectacle and ought to be avoided in situations which require earnest cooperation a...

Graeber’s entire bibliography forms a single coherent book, one of the structural analysis of the mundane inanities of violence and a vision for an anarchic future free from all of that. RIP to a true comrade

Finally a book that deals with the history and broader reach of the occupy movement the deconstruction of misconceptions surrounding occupy and the idea of democracy. RIP David.

An enthralling book. The occupy movement was given more clarity, direct democracy and consensus assemblies were made tangible and replicable, and my desire to be a part of the American experiment has been intensely invigorated. A must read if you feel confused and startled by our present political situation.

Quick frame of reference: this is the guy who came up with the "99 percent" bit of the "We are the 99 percent". ¹Unexpectedly enthralling. I nearly quit in the first chapter, when Graeber was all:I'd begun reengaging with the New York activist scene when I'd visited the city during my spring break in late April. My old friend Priya Reddy, a onetime tree sitter and veteran eco-activist, invited me to see two of the founders of the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement . . . the most important thing tha...

I really enjoyed this book. It's almost like two books in one.First, you get a fascinating inside account of the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, along with David's insights as to why the movement happened when it did, why it happened on the scale that it did, why the major public occupations ended when they did, and what the future may hold.Along with that, you get a history and radical analysis of the roots of democracy that serves to shed light on some of the vexing questions ab...

Compared to his monumental tome, Debt, David Graeber's The Democracy Project brings to light his weaknesses as a writer. For one, he is not one to sit down at a table with allusion nor metaphor. It is a slow slog through the opening chapter as it's merely exposition: "I did this, then she did that, which made this happen." It is more Occupy Sweet Valley High than engaging reportage. Graeber neither builds a mood, nor hones in on the essential facts. A reader may stay with it, as I did, both out

A fascinating account of Occupy Wall Street from someone who was often incorrectly labeled its leader. David Graeber takes us from the early meetings that would eventually lead to direct actions that would, somewhat unintentionally, begin the Occupy Wall Street movement. He then theorises on why this social anarchist movement became so widespread and popular, whereas so many previous ones failed. His answers there are surprising in that, in many ways, he sort of shrugs, though he does point to s...

In critiquing the depressing history of central governments and their basis in claiming monopoly on the use of violence, Graeber excels. But the good is interspersed among inexplicably detailed descriptions of call and response tactics, hard to parse personal anecdotes of extremely specific figures within the circles he happens to be a part of, aggrandized accounts of how important it was that he was able to form a non-hierarchical general assembly within the general assembly of some hierarchica...