KatharineDwyer
This seems frighteningly naive: academics and anarchists may prefer no one to be in charge, but endless meetings to discuss what needs to be done will sound a recipe for a disorganised, dysfunctional, Kafkaesque hell to many.
But maybe this misses the point of this impassioned rhetoric. In his own review* of a conference showcasing ‘several of the heavyweights of Italian post-Workerist theory’ Graeber notes:
“I actually do agree that thinkers like these are useful in helping us conceptualize the historical moment. […] The problem is, being prophets, they always have to frame their arguments in apocalyptic terms.”
Wholesale revolution and riddance of the UK parliamentary society seems unlikely. The panel's hyperbole did prompt me to reflect on my own views, but a more balanced and nuanced discussion of the issue would have been so much more powerful.
​
*Graeber, D ’the sadness of post-workerism, or, “art and immaterial labour” conference, a sort of review,’ (Tate Britain, Saturday 19 January, 2008) pp87-103 in ‘An Incomplete Reader for the Ongoing Project “One day, everything will be free”', downloaded from http://saltonline.org/media/files/857.pdf on 31/8/2015
I attended a panel comprised of David Graeber, Professor at London School of Economics, and political and cultural theorists Jeremy Gilbert and Mark Fisher.
Graeber coined the term “bullshit jobs” so it was not surprising that he railed against global elites. Bureaucracy and managerialism are tools to control mobile, communicative and educated populations. To manage the contradiction that they pose a threat as well as an opportunity to the capitalist system.
The panel concluded that like the late Soviet phase, no-one believes in capitalism, but cannot see that there are better options.
I was disappointed that the panel was so homogeneous, and therefore appeared passionate but entrenched and insular in its views.
Despite railing against the status quo, detail of alternatives was sparse: "We could decide together what needed to be done.”
July 1, 2015
Background image courtesy of the ICA