Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe

Academics have become frequent visitors to Zuccotti Park, now the site of Occupy Wall Street. Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have spoken there, many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses nationwide. Critical theorists like Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua, have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves. In Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Adaceme (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 16, 2011), you read how Betafo's "consensus decision-making" became a model for Occupy Wall Street. Graeber observed how residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. "Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously," Graeber says. He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.