Interview with David Graeber[1st part]
by Gianni Aktimon from Void Network
Dear David Graeber, good afternoon from Exarchia area, Athens Greece. Here there are some questions that you might try to answer for the special Bfest issue of antiauthoritarian newspaper Babylonia. So ;How can you define the antiauthoritarian,movement and attitude of today? Do you think that we are facing a major turning point that somehow is showing the limits, of ideology in contradiction with an antiauthauritarian view,free from ideological obstacles?
If by “ideology” you mean the idea that one needs to establish a global analysis before taking action (which inevitably leads to the assumption that an intellectual vanguard must necessarily play leadership role in any popular political movement) then I think, yes, we do see a gradual movement away from that. Much of my last ten years of intellectual life has been trying to think about ways in which intellectuals can play a useful role without descending into ideologists. There are no obvious answers though. I think we have come to a broad consensus about the fact that a diversity of perspectives, even incommensurable perspectives, is not a problem but actually a resource for our movements – since if the operative question is not “how do we define the situation” but “how shall we act together to further our common goals?” – that is, if it’s practical problem-solving, then obviously a group of people with diverse perspectives will have more useful insights and ideas than a group of people who all think exactly the same. This is an important breakthrough. But it still leaves some questions unanswered: you can’t just start, as John Holloway says, with “the scream”, the instinctive feeling that capitalism isn’t right, and then move to action – the very fact that you identify “capitalism” as the problem means there is some shared analysis, or else, there’d be no reason for us not to be working with fascists, nationalists, sexists, or for that matter the capitalists themselves. No one has quite resolved all of these questions but my impression is we’ve made a lot of progress – much more, in fact, in the last ten years than in whole fifty years previous to that.
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Εισήγηση στα πλαίσια του B-fest, 2010
