A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse – David Graeber

It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolution- aries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

Politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of security—are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity. But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre.

Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast—whether it took the form it did in China, of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution; or in Berkeley and New Y

The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliber- alism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military plan- ners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What hap- pens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of thos

for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the momen

Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle? What if those currently running the system, most of whom witnessed t