I have just finished reading David Graeber's immensely interesting and much commented upon book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I thought I'd pull out some passages and post them now and again. Here's the first one, from page 382, on what else did you expect?, political affect:
the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world--in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s--with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win[35]. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and ... propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that rends any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.
[35] Graber's note on p 453 reads: "I have observed this first hand on any number of occasions in my work as an activist: police are happy to effectively shut down trade summits, for example, just to ensure that there's no possible chance that protestors can feel they have succeeded in doing so themselves."
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