ABSTRACT
The democracy project: a history, a crisis, a movement, by D. Graeber, New York, Allen Lane, 2013, xxi + 326 pp., £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781846146633
Review
Lasse Thomassen
The Democracy Project is a book about big issues and big words like democracy, revolution, capitalism and anarchism. It is also a book about the nitty-gritty of how to organise direct action in an anarchist fashion. One of the attractions of the book is that its author, David Graeber, understands well the connections, and potential tensions between the ideals and the micro-level organisational issues of direct action. Another plus is that, like other contemporary anarchists such as Todd May, Graeber is concerned with the question of organisation. This goes to show that, like everybody else, anarchists are concerned with organisational issues, if only in a different way. It takes the joke out of the old joke about anarchists: ‘that all sounds very well, but now tell me: how do you organise yourselves’!?
