Democracy May Not Exist: Astra Taylor and David Graeber

‘Banks get bailed out, slave owners get bailed out, the people get sold out.’

In her latest book, Astra Taylor – ‘a rare public intellectual, utterly committed to asking humanity’s most profound questions yet entirely devoid of pretensions’ (Naomi Klein) – argues that democracy is not just in crisis, but that  real democracy, inclusive and egalitarian, has never existed. Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Verso) aims to re-examine what we mean by democracy, what we want from it, and understand why it is so hard to realise.

Taylor was in conversation with David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs and Professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.