A Tribute to David Graeber: Museum of Care in Rojava with Debbie Bookchin & Nika Dubrovsky
This special one-hour show is a tribute to anarchist, anthropologist, and activist, David Graeber, hosted by SWANA collective members Nyma Ardalan, David Lloyd, and Hamoud Salhi. They are joined by journalist, author and activist, Debbie Bookchin, Murray Bookchin’s daughter, for a round-table discussion with David Graeber’s partner, author and activist Nika Dubrovsky, on David’s work and commitment to the people of Rojava, the Rojavan revolution and the cultural and feminist experiments being explored there, and the Museum of Care in Rojava that combines off-line residencies and on-line projects.
In September 2020, we received the devastating news that David Graeber had passed away in his beloved Venice. Graeber was probably best known for two books that have been widely discussed on Pacifica stations and even on some of the mainstream media, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018). He was a leading light in the Occupy Movement and a lifelong anarchist, a fact that may have cost him a job at Yale University, though at the time of his death he was a professor at the London School of Economics.
Our show today is dedicated to recalling an important aspect of his life and commitments: his strong solidarity with and vocal support for the democratic confederalist experiment that has emerged in liberated Rojava, that part of Northern Syria that makes up the western part of the region that the Kurds have historically inhabited. Today we consider Rojava's groundbreaking experiment in what they call democratic confederalism, a communally organized democracy that is fiercely anti-capitalist and committed to female equality, while rejecting reactionary nationalist ideologies.
Debbie Bookchin is an investigative journalist, author, and former press secretary to U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders. She has published in The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and many other venues. She is coauthor of The Virus and the Vaccine(St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and recently coedited and introduced a new book of essays by her father, Murray Bookchin, called The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy(Verso Books, 2015).
Nika Dubrovsky was born in 1967 in Leningrad, USSR. She grew up among the late USSR's artistic bohemia within the unofficial cultural scenes of squats and samizdat. She immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989. In 2006, Nika met David Graeber in New York, and a few years later, the Anthropology forKids educational art project emerged. After her husband, David Graeber’s, unexpected death in 2020, Nika and friends organized Carnival4David to celebrate his life and mourn his death, which took place in 250 places worldwide. Carnival4David was transformed into an informal community: Museum of Care that combines off-line residencies and on-line projects.
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