During the first big demonstrations against the tuition raise, students actually surrounded Tory headquarters, smashed in all the windows, and occupied it. There was a great outcry in the press, predictably. I was interviewed by a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, the Tory paper, and I said, “Yeah, they broke some glass, and they’re going to be represented as vandals, as barbarians, but if you really think about it, who are the barbarians here? These students might’ve broken something but they did it in the name of the principle that there are things that have a value beyond money.” When we think about the Goths and the Vandals and the Visigoths (the Romans broke a lot of stuff too), the reason why they were considered barbarians isn’t because they broke stuff; it’s because they had no appreciation for the art, culture, and philosophy of the civilization they were overrunning. They were only interested in money and power.David Graeber, “What We Owe to Each Other (Part 2 of interview with Boston Review)”
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Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, independent and nonprofit. We cover lots of ground—politics, poetry, film, fiction, book reviews, and criticism. But a few premises tie it all together: that democracy depends on public discussion; that sometimes understanding means going deep; that vast inequalities are unjust; that human imagination breaks free from neat political categories; and that powerful images are worth piles of words.
