David Harvey is the Marxist; David Graeber is the anarchist. Harvey's is a georgrapher; Graeber is an anthropologist. Harvey's masterpiece is The Limits of Capital; Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.


In this conversation, Graeber says the most startling things.

1) In this moment of radical intervention, what links the students to the working class is the nature of their debt. Students, like working-class homeowners, have a debt they can't remove or reduce. The unrelated groups, therefore, are bonded by the stubbornness of their debt.

2) Democracy has its roots in the aristocratic classes. In this way, you must see democracy as a kind of shark fin soup—something that was once for the rich and is now available to larger and larger sections of the public. The implication of this? Democracy as it's currently practiced might be bad as a whole because it's bad to begin with. (Graeber makes a similar argument for the state, whose root is violence.) The solution? A democracy that is like a lottery or jury duty.

3) This comment is made at the very end of the conversation: The police officers who faced and repressed Occupy protestors in New York were actually worried about being identified because they feared their credit cards and bank accounts would be hacked by activists. Maybe American cops can learn a thing or two from drug enforcers in Mexico.