Reddit mentions of The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

I recommend reading his book "The Democracy Project" and "Debt: The First 5000 Years"

Paraphrased from "The Democracy Project":

There is conventional wisdom I think we should challenge:

• The nature of money and debt (global debt jubilee?);
  
  
• The assumption that work is necessarily good. There is plenty of work being done we'd all probably be better off without, and workaholics are not necessarily better human beings. And this is true even if we don't take into account ecological concerns;
  
  
• Submitting oneself to labor discipline - supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed - does not make one a better person. What actually is virtuous labor about? Labor is virtuous if it helps others. Technological development should be directed less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely;
  
  
• The amount of bureaucracy (mostly corporate, financial, and educational);
  
  
• Communism. All societies are communistic at base, and capitalism is best viewed as a bad way of organizing communism.
  
  Here's another bit I like:
  
  > Normally, when one challenges the conventional wisdom - that the current economic and political system is the only possible one - the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, one is likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.
  
  > Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves.

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Movements-Suzanne-Staggenborg/dp/0199363595/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524116263&sr=1-1&keywords=Social+Movements

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Project-History-Crisis-Movement/dp/081299356X

https://www.amazon.com/Occupy-Occupied-Media-Pamphlet-Chomsky/dp/1884519016

https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Nonviolence-Peter-Gelderloos/dp/0939306042/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TA9JFMNZ6P9YJBESCE21

> people on the fence didn't see reports of violence and say "I want to join them", and people opposed to it used violence to legitimize their own oppression.

People also didn't see MLK on TV and think "Oh, those poor black people are getting beat up by cops, maybe they should have the same rights as white people", no, instead they said "Thank god those cops are puting those damn uppity n*ggers in their place." Its really kinda taboo to talk about since nobody wants to admit to being on the obviously losing side of the civil rights fight, but that's basically what it was like. By the time the protest kicked off most people were already so diametrically opposed that nobody had a chance of "winning over the other people". A protest acts more as a reckoning. By the time people are so fed up they hit the streets its too late to try to gather public support. The numbers you have at that point are basically what you're gonna get. The flow of addition people isn't from switching sides on the issue, its going from feeling hopeless to believing there's actually a shot of having change. When it comes to protest, continued action actually depletes numbers. The longer you have a protest, the more fairweather people get annoyed bit it and the more people think positive outcome is more and more unlikely. Its like dominoes, by the time the first one topples its only a matter of time until all of them do and you damn better hope you have enough lined up to knock over whatever you're trying to topple. Ok, that metaphor doesn't really work but I hope you get the idea.

I haven't read this one yet but I'm working my way through David Graeber's other books and I'm pretty sure this is the one on Occupy: http://www.amazon.com/The-Democracy-Project-History-Movement/dp/081299356X

David Graeber The Democracy Project

It reads easy. It's got some action, real life organizing experiences.

https://www.akpress.org/the-democracy-project.html

http://www.amazon.com/The-Democracy-Project-History-Movement/dp/081299356X