The latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers a profile of David Graeber, one of the instigators of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.
This reminds me of John Hood’s recent observations about the Occupy movement:
Once you pierce its artifice of ambiguity, you find the usual left-wing tropes. Protesters insist on the right to the fruits of other people’s labor – not the right to trade their own labor for food, clothing, shelter, and health care but the right to take what they want. They insist that corporate executives, employees, and shareholders have no constitutional rights to freedom of speech or petition, and can thus be muzzled by the Bolshe… sorry, I mean the “99 percenters.”
In short, the Occupy movement is little more than a new name for an old, discredited brand of radical politics. It is about rage, hatred, envy, and larceny, not liberty, respect, and equal treatment under the law. It is a manifestation of the hard Left’s ongoing attempts to mask an unpopular agenda with populist appeals.
