David Graeber's Anarchist Attack on the Democratic West

I just discovered a 2007 essay by David Graeber titled "There Never Was a West" that lays out his ideas in a clear and reasonably concise way. I consider Graeber to be one of the most important and interesting anarchist thinkers in the world, and I think anarchism of this sort does have an interesting critique of liberal democracy. So let's take a look at what Graeber says. I am going to group Graeber's ideas under three headings.

Against the West

Graeber hated, and I really mean hated, any insinuation that the West invented freedom and democracy. He has a good time in this essay picking apart lists of western virtues like this one from Samuel Huntington, which Huntington seems to think applies to a tradition that stretches from ancient Athens to America in the 1990s:

individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state. . . .

It takes a special way of seeing to spot human rights on the slave plantations or democracy in the Roman Empire. As Graeber says, for most of that time span "democracy" was a dirty word, and it did not really become a thing people defended or wanted to have until the nineteenth century.

Graeber does not fall into the trap of arguing that the West was uniquely bad; he can be equally scathing about the rest of the world. But he wants to undermine arguments like Huntington's because he thinks the modern, western synthesis of strong states, representative government, and capitalism is a disaster for humanity, and he hates for concepts he cares about, like human rights, to be associated with that system.

I am with Graeber in his attack on sloppy narratives of western virtue. But that's partly because I believe the Enlightenment was a truly revolutionary event, and that all our modern philosophies of government derive from Enlightenment ideas. Enlightened thinkers drew from the classical tradition but also from many other sources, because by the eighteenth century the elite of the Atlantic world knew far more about the planet and its history than anyone ever had before. Graeber recognized the Enlightenment and is quite good on its diverse sources of inspiration. But he does not want to accord it much importance because the kind of system he is looking for is closer to traditional village life than it is to anything that emerged from the American or French Revolution.

Where Freedom Comes From

Graeber thinks "freedom" is what people have living in small-scale societies where state power is effectively absent. Democracy to Graeber means that all the people in the community meet together to discuss what ought to be done. Representation, he thinks, is a sham, a lie, and nothing to do with real democracy.

Most people, he says, don't want to call those village discussions "democracy" because they don't count votes. Instead they work very hard, sometimes in repeated all-day meetings, to reach a consensus. But voting, he says, was not something that ever had to be invented, so if people did not use it that was because they did not want to. Why not?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to change the minds of those who don’t want to do it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision; 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. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee the sort of humiliations, resentments, and hatreds that ultimately lead the destruction of communities. . . . It is not that everyone has to agree. Most forms of consensus include a variety of graded forms of disagreement. The point is to ensure that no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored and, therefore, that even those who think the group came to a bad decision are willing to offer their passive acquiescence.

Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide:

1. a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and
2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.

For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will. 

I find this quite compelling, although incomplete. I agree that something like democracy has prevailed in many small-scale societies. But not in large ones; pre-modern states were basically all ruled by some combination of monarchy and aristocracy. No state larger than a single town was any sort of democracy until the introduction of defined constitutions, representation, and majority voting.

Where I disagree with Graeber is in seeing all consensus-seeking discussions as democratic. Among the people I have studied, such meetings were always dominated by a class of leaders. Everyone may theoretically be allowed to speak, but in practice most of the speaking was done by clan chiefs, war leaders, elders, and so on. In some American Indian groups rule by large councils was mixed with hereditary aristocracy in a way that Graeber's model does not account for.

Graeber thinks that larger experiments in democracy have mostly sprung up in what he calls "places between," situations where older orders had been demolished and groups of ethnically mixed people found ways to get along. He is fascinated by the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, who did indeed engage in a wide range of experiments in governance. The Zapatistas of Mexico, who launched a famous revolt in 1994, arose when people from several different Indian communities, many of them former plantation workers, mingled in a rain forest zone that had been newly opened for settlement. He thinks the United States is such an experiment, and he writes eloquently about the mixing that took place on the frontier. He has no trouble finding contemporary witnesses who said Americans had learned to love freedom from Indians.

So democracy emerges, in this model, not from any philosophical tradition, but from diverse people working together to survive.

A Stateless World

Graeber hated states, because he associated states with coercion and violence; the goal, he thought, was to live without ever practicing or endorsing coercion. Graeber believed that this was possible, that modern people could live without states. And this is where I always lose the thread of anarchist thought. Graeber and his friend James Scott have been, I think, enlightening about the many different ways humans have found to get along without states or formal markets. But only some people.

Graber quotes Walter Mignolo on why the Zapatistas had some success in establishing stateless communities:

Democracy for the Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of Maya social organization based on reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom rather than epistemology, and so forth...

Graeber corrects Graeber in a passage that will give you a good taste of his style and subject matter:

In fact, Zapatismo is not simply an emanation of traditional Maya practices: its origins have to be sought in a prolonged confrontation between those practices and, among other things, the ideas of local Maya intellectuals (many, presumably, not entirely unfamiliar with the work of Kant), liberation theologists (who drew inspiration from prophetic texts written in ancient Palestine), and mestizo revolutionaries (who drew inspiration from the works of Chairman Mao, who lived in China).

Which is fair. But I think Mignolo was right to point out that Zapatismo works, to the extent that it does work (the Zapatistas are still there), because the people are peasants raised in village communities. I suspect that communal decision-making is extremely difficult for people who did not grow up with it. Evidence comes from the myriad communes that have been founded in North America and Europe since the 1960s, only a few of which are still around.

And the second thing about village-style decision-making is that it only works in villages. In a traditional village, everybody shares the common culture, which makes it much easier to agree. Also, people in villages do a very limited range of things, compared to people in cities, so their governments don't have to deal with anything like the range of problems faced by a city, let alone a state. 

The richer the community, the wider the range of problems it faces, and less the average citizen knows about them. Would you like for your neighbors to be in charge of running a subway, a sewer system or an electrical grid? Count me out. There is a grotesque mismatch between the means Graeber and other anarchists propose to fix our problems and the kind of world we actually live in. Unless we are prepared to jettison airplanes, trains, modern medicine, the internet, and a million other things –plus a few billion people – we're not going to live in a stateless society.

In some of his moods Graeber understood this. His work with the Occupy project was less about changing the rest of the world than it was about living freely in one moment and building a community to share it with. He wrote, "We are already anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require physical threats as a means of enforcement."

But Occupy faded away, like almost all other such movements, leaving nothing behind by bitter memories and jokes. 

I am attracted to anarchism because I think many things about our world are horrible, starting with the amount of violence and the vast system of coercion we have built to control it. So I keep reading, keep trying to understand. What always stops me is thinking about the astonishing complexity of our world, which I do not think could possibly be managed without hierarchies and bureaucracies, and my desire to live in a rich and varied world rather than a peasant village.