The Best Democracy Is Anarchy
"Anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical," wrote the anthropologist David Graeber.
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $32
Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace "democracy," something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world's vast ungovernable spaces.
Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 pirate crew was "a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions," wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged "from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils": a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves "forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state." The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it "the perfect intercultural space" of experiment and improvisation.
For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That's Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized.
Graeber therefore sided with the libertarian anarchists who believe humanity's best future has nothing to do with the state. "Anarchism and democracy," he wrote, "are—or should be—largely identical."
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Many historians accept the thesis that there is no real through line between Athenian democracy and modern Western states. Building on that, Graeber argued that "the West" is more appropriately called the "'North Atlantic system,' which replaced the Mediterranean semi-periphery, and emerged as a world economy of its own, rivaling, and then gradually, slowly, painfully incorporating the older world economy that had centered on the cosmopolitan societies of the Indian Ocean."
This system "was created through almost unimaginable catastrophe"—the rise of trans-Atlantic African slavery, the almost total destruction of Native America, the deaths of "at least a hundred million human beings," and the infusion of racism into science. But it "also produced its own forms of cosmopolitanism, with endless fusions of African, Native American, and European traditions," as in Black Sam Bellamy's crew. Amid those encounters, "a history of mutinies, pirates, rebellions, defections, experimental communities, and every sort of antinomian and populist idea…seems to have played a key role in many of the radical ideas that came to be referred to as 'democracy.'"
Democracy, therefore, was not an invention. It was, and is, an emergent order arising "in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do." It is not structure, control, or even force; it is a social process of building consensus within a specific and identifiable community. "Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision," wrote Graeber, "either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has no interest in or does not tend to intervene in local decision-making."
The U.S. government has never resembled this. Our Framers consistently praised the Roman Republic and trashed Athenian democracy. "At the time, outright democrats…like Tom Paine, for instance—were considered a tiny minority of rabble-rousers even within revolutionary regimes." With time, the word democracy became more acceptable. But in practice, "politicians simply began substituting the word democracy for republic, without any change in meaning."
Real change requires something more. New cultures can form through processes of "conscious refusal" to cooperate with regimes. Graeber gave the example of the Merina in Madagascar.
Modern Merina culture emerged in reaction to the historical monarchy, which to Graeber represented a "heroic society," with the hero-monarch at its head. Modern Merina culture, by contrast, is an "anti-heroic society," where "the only ancient kings who were remembered fondly were those said to have voluntarily abandoned their power." During his fieldwork in Madagascar, Graeber felt "the presence of an ideology that seemed to take every principle of heroic society and explicitly reject it." These modern oral historians thought of ancient kings as egotistical fools engaged in wasteful and corrosive "theatricality, boasting, and self-aggrandizing lying," resulting in undue restrictions on the people—and the Merina had no use for them.
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That brings us to another topic raised in the book: puppets, and why cops seem so scared of them.
Giant puppets played a major role in the Occupy movement of 2011 and in the earlier globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s, turning up to disrupt public proceedings and spaces. As Graeber recalled, one group of protesters "might have the Giant Pig that represents the World Bank," another "a Giant Liberation Puppet whose arms can block an entire highway." Police from Miami to Seattle hunted down puppets like a reverse Chucky film, slaughtering them in imaginative ways. One was held outside the "squad car with the head sticking out and driving so as to smash it against every sign and street post available."
Why? On the most direct level, many cops were convinced that these woke-commie-nonsense papier-mâché public-art pieces were in fact mortal dangers, filled with urine bombs, wrist rockets, bricks, crowbars, acid squirt guns, and other scary fantasies. But Graeber believed something symbolic was afoot as well: that those puppets and those agents of the state were in some sense fundamentally opposed.
Puppets, he suggested, are the opposite of monuments—they are "extraordinarily creative" but also "intentionally ephemeral." They are mobile, larger-than-life symbols of the "endless alternative frameworks" that exist outside of the state. They embody the new cultures that we, like the Merina, could create. They are antiheroic. They are anarchistic.
The "ultimate hidden truth" of this book's title is that history is not a set of cosmological handcuffs. The world belongs to us, the living, to make out of it what we will.
