Is Anarchism Crazy?

Why some understanding of Anthropology is essential for recognizing what the possibilities of human political organization are

Hey Gang,

Recently, I announced my intention to do a deep dive in the work of the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who died mysteriously in 2020.

David Graeber, prior to his death, was one of the world’s most famous anthropologists, as well as one of the world’s famous most anarchists.

Anarchists, who are forever insisting that human nature does not lead inexorably to dominance hierarchies destined to ossify into bureaucratic institutions, have always taken an interest in anthropology. David Graeber represents a tradition which goes back to people like Robert Graves, Al Brown, and Marcel Mauss.

Now that David Graeber has died, I believe that it is imperative that his ideas are not forgotten. He made major contributions to political theory, and someone needs to pick up where he left off.

Before I go on, I’d like to share a bit of David Graeber’s life story, which I think is important to understanding his life’s work.

David Graeber was born to anarchist, working-class parents in New York City. His father actually fought with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and David grew up in an apartment building he described as “suffused with radical politics”. He became an anarchist at the age of 16.

Those of you who know Graeber’s work will not be surprised that his genius showed itself at a young age. He won a scholarship to a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts after some archaeologists discovered his hobby of translating Mayan hieroglyphics.

On his father’s encouragement, Graeber entered the academy. He got his B.A. in anthropology in New York before moving to the University of Chicago, where he did his master’s degree and PhD.

As part of his PhD program, he conducted ethnographic field research for 20 months in Betafo, in the Arivonimamo district of central Madagascar, which he wrote about in Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.

It should be noted here his PhD supervisor was Marshall Sahlins, is a big name in the world of anthropology. Sahlins wrote a classic book called Stone Age Economics, as well as The Original Affluent Society, an essay which had a huge influence on green anarchism.

Graeber then became a professor at Yale, where he wrote Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001), and a short book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004).

(Isn’t it crazy to think of David Graeber teaching at Yale, of all places?? That’s the home of the Skull and Bones Society!)

Eventually, Yale decided not to renew his contract before he would have become eligible for tenure, and it was widely believed that this was due to his radical politics. He eventually moved on to the London School of Economics.

(Which is the home of the Fabian Society! Weird!)

Later, Graeber became a major figure in the Occupy Movement. He is credited with coming up with the slogan “We are the 99%”.

David Graeber will be best remembered for Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, which is an absolute masterpiece and a major contribution to the fields of politics, economics, anthropology, and history.

He will also be remembered for his critiques of bureaucracy and his support for the people of Rojava, but personally, I am most interested in David Graeber’s contributions to anarchist theory.

I am convinced that the anarchist tradition has something to offer the world in this regard. For as long as there have been anarchists, there have been people insisting that things don’t need to be the way they are, and that another world is possible.

David Graeber embodied the belief that another world is possible. I can’t think of another political thinker as optimistic as he was. He was an unabashed utopian, and it was kind of gloriously charming at times.

I share his belief that we are limited primarily by our own imaginations, and the possible solutions to our problems are infinite. There’s no reason that things have to be the way they are.

Most people are unable to imagine a completely free society, and that is why anarchists are forever insisting that freedom is the natural condition for human beings.

As David Graeber once put it:

“Most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea. They think it’s insane.”

Despite the fact that anatomically modern human beings have apparently existed for over 200 thousand years, and evidence for the practice of statecraft only goes back 5000 years or so, and despite the fact that many stateless societies are described in the anthropological and historical record, most people simply cannot bring themselves to imagine a society without armed goons to keep everyone in line.

This is why I think it’s so important to understand that every culture has certain mythological and metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and what is possible, desirable, or forbidden. The dominant culture, within which we have lived our entire lives, tells us that we must be controlled for our own good, and because people are used to things being this way, it’s seen as normal and acceptable for others to have power over us.

The reason for this is because it’s very difficult to explain water to fish. It is simply the reality they inhabit, and their nervous systems are calibrated to help them navigate it.

But the reality is that human beings haven’t always lived in a secular-materialist industrial-capitalist society, and it is simply false to assume that this is the only way that we could live. According to scientists, anatomically modern humans have been around for over 200 hundred thousand years, yet as far as we know the practice of statecraft only goes back some five thousand years. That means that human beings have lived in anarchist societies for the vast majority of our existence as a species. To claim that statecraft somehow results from our primate instincts is simply false.

Anarchists know this. We don’t believe it or think that it is probable or that it is likelier than not possible that human beings could theoretically live in stateless societies. We insist that it is true, and that people deserve to be free.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber wrote a great passage about this:

For anarchists who do know something about anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A typical exchange goes something like this:

Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?

Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...

Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.

Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy...

Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. I’m talking about whole societies.

Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain...

Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!

Elsewhere in Fragments, Graeber bemoans the lack of political engagement of the part of his anthropologist colleagues, saying:

In many ways, anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its own potential. It is, for example, the only discipline in a position to make generalizations about humanity as a whole—since it is the only discipline that actually takes all of humanity into account, and is familiar with all the anomalous cases… Yet it resolutely refuses to do so.

Graeber is quite humble in Fragments. He is not offering it as a manifesto, introducing the book (which he calls an essay) as:

[A] series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos—all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future.

He acknowledged how daunted he was by the “vastness of the subject matter”, asking:

Who really has the means, in discussing, say, conceptions of desire, or imagination, or the self, or sovereignty, to consider everything Chinese or Indian or Islamic thinkers have had to say on the matter in addition to the Western canon, let alone folk conceptions prevalent in hundreds of Oceanic or Native American societies as well?

Rather than a manifesto, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is really just David Graeber thinking aloud about a much paradigm shift in contemporary political theory. He is clearly convinced that anthropology provides certain important insights which could then be applied to political organizing.

Years later, after teaming up with the archaeologist David Wengrow, Graeber wrote an essay basically calling for a complete overhaul of human history.

For ten years, Graeber and Wengrow studided the anthropological and archaeological records, aiming to basically recast the story of humanity.

After Graeber died, some of this research wound up in The Dawn of Everything, which was published a year after his death. The book is subtitled A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY, and was meant to be the first volume of several, in which the two authors aimed to revolutionize the World-Story.

Soon, I will begin a detailed study of this book, which I have a lot to say about, but I think that The Dawn of Everything is best understood as a continuation of the project Graeber started in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, so I will be review that book first.

The Dawn of Everything has attracted feverish praise as well as scathing condemnation, and I have my doubts about whether or not the book is really the book that Graeber actually meant to write. Remember, it was published a year after his mysterious death. Although parts of The Dawn of Everything are absolutely brilliant, at other points it reads like an anti-anarchist-polemic. For instance, there is a whole chapter called “Why the State has no Origin”.

Furthermore, there is absolutely shoddy scholarship, with errors that it is very difficult to believe that someone such as Graeber would have made.

Many people have commented on certain bizarre omissions as well, such as how the book completely ignores immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, seemingly because to do so would go against the book’s absurd claim that egalitarian societies don’t actually exist.

MANY other people have commented on this, and I refer you to the What is Politics? YouTube Channel if you are interested in bringing up to speed about why The Dawn of Everything is so controversial amongst anthropologists.

Honestly, I hesitate to recommend The Dawn of Everything, because unless you already know quite a bit about anthropology and archaeology, you may have difficulty figuring out what’s true and what’s not.

The whole thing is quite the enigma, and I’m still not sure how to feel about certain things, but I think that it would be well worth picking up where David Graeber left off.

I am convinced that David Graeber was really onto something about the importance of anthropology. I think that he was aiming to overthrow a disempowering narrative which has been promoted for hundreds of years - that oppression is inevitable because human beings are nasty, brutal savages who would all kill and rape each other if it weren’t for cops keeping us in line.

I believe Graeber really, truly had faith in humanity, and that it something which is all too rare these days.

I think Graeber wanted to convince us that we are better than we think we are, and that we can solve our problems if we put our minds to it.

Is that crazy? I don’t think so. No crazier than having faith in humanity, anyway.

I think that Graeber was a true idealist, someone who believed in the power of ideas. I believe that he believed that ideas could save the world. And I believe that he felt that those ideas were within reach, and that anthropology was key.

I agree wholeheartedly with all of this. Although I’m not quite a utopian, I do believe that we are capable, as human beings, of creating the reality that we want to experience, and that we can look to anthropology for examples of cultures who created realities that we can learn from.

To a certain extent, the political reality that we create is basically is reflection of our beliefs about the world. Equally, our subconscious minds reflect the cultural influences that surround us.

In order to create something in the world, one must first create it in one’s mind. And in order to change one’s culture, one must change oneself, and in order to change oneself, one must change one’s beliefs.

Despite what Marxists would have you believe, revolution is about how killing the bad guys and taking over. Revolution is the process of transforming one’s culture. This is a frame shift that the world really needs to make, in my humble opinion.

Really, what revolutionaries wish to do is to create a better reality, and if we wish to learn from other cultures, we must ask ourselves how cultural beliefs are connected to forms of political organization, and how these things are reinforced by customs.

Anthropology is full of ideas about human beings could organize themselves, and contains a wealth of examples of solutions that past cultures have developed to solve their problems. Some of these examples could potentially be reverse-engineered and applied to our own lives.

As I continue this study, you’ll come to see what I mean. For now, I would ask you to tuck that idea about revolution being a matter of transforming culture into the back of your mind, and to think about the following three questions:

1. What reality do we want to create?

2. How best might we express that desire through stories and art?

3. How might we then take steps towards creating a culture based upon those wishes and desires?

TO BE CONTINUED…

I hope that you have found this interesting! As always, your comments are highly appreciated!