Forum Post: Interesting interview with organizer

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11293836/1/meet-the-man-behind-occupy-wall-street.html

"I'm really a conduit. It's not my ideas," he says before going on to explain just how much his ideas are engrained in the movement. Graeber, a longtime anarchist, joined the protests in the very beginning on a whim and quickly set it on a new course to make government less corrupt. If there is an endgame to the protests, he says it's to "delegitimize" the current political system to make way for the kind of radical change that would create a more open and fair democracy unshackled by the interests of big money. Still, to imply the protest is a means to an end misses much of what Graeber considers to be the big point of the movement today.

"I think that our political structures are corrupt and we need to really think about what a democratic society would be like. People are learning how to do it now," Graeber says. "This is more than a protest, it's a camp to debate an alternative civilization."

TheStreet: What was the movement like before you took control of it that day in terms of its goals and strategy?

Graeber: I think the coalition showed up on Aug. 2 and said they would do a rally and then show up on Wall Street with a list of demands that were total boilerplate -- a massive jobs program, an end to oppression, money for us not for whatever. They were nice people, but it wasn't very radical, just the usual demands.

Adbusters, when they originally threw the idea out there, they were basically marketing guys who changed sides. They thought like marketers and one of their schticks was to come up with one single demand. That makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective, but it doesn't make sense from an organizing perspective. You need to organize people around a list of grievances.

TheStreet: Obviously, many have criticized the movement for not putting out a single demand or list of demands. If the incentive to keep it vague was to make it easier for people to join the movement, why not make the message more specific now that the protests have gained steam?

TheStreet: You seem to have a clearer sense of the purpose of these protests than most and you're certainly credited enough as being the architect behind them, so why not take charge of the movement more?

Graeber: I didn't want to do press stuff in the beginning because I was involved with promoting my book [Debt: The First 5,000 Years] and it seemed like a conflict of interest. We didn't have demands, and I had this book about debt, and I didn't want to make it seem like that's what we were pushing for. But I did do a lot of work with facilitation -- facilitating the first really long meeting at Tompkins Square Park, working with the outreach committee, getting together a training group for legal and medical training.

AWESOME. Just AWESOME!