Reading Notes: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

*Graeber starts by pointing out that Marxism is much more popular than anarchism, and much more accepted in academia. There are many more self-identified Marxist professors than anarchist professors. This reflects the fact that Marxism is less advanced towards true and lasting liberation than anarchism – Marxism successfully identifies the problems with the global capitalist political economy, but its proposed solution of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the eventual withering away of the state is incomplete. How will the state wither away? One cannot answer this question through a Marxist lens, but one can likely get much closer to answering this question using anarchist theory and anthropological analysis.

*Furthermore, anarchism focuses much more on how to organize and what the goals of such organizing are, whereas many Marxist thinkers are much more focused on broad theories that may not be as accessible to individuals without significant education. In short, anarchism is more focused on praxis than traditional Marxism.

*Graeber conducts his analysis using two assumptions. The first assumption is that a better, anarchist world is possible. This can be analyzed using anthropological analysis. The second assumption is the rejection of vanguardism. It is already clear from the start of this pamphlet that Graeber believes in radical democracy as the best method for a group of individuals to make a decision. In decision-making, Graeber feels it is unimportant for one individual to try to convince another that their position is correct. Rather, what is important is finding common ground where practical steps can be taken without violating the fundamental principles or morals of either individual. This type of radical democracy only makes sense in small-scale organizations, it does not make sense in the context of the state or a large group of individuals where for the most part one individual will never interact with the vast majority of other individuals in said group. Rejecting vanguardism means that one subset of individuals will not take power over the new state or the world (or over the new, progressed position of the revolutionary group). Radical democratic decision making must be able to continue in each successive state of the world, which definitionally means that a state or mass-organization of individuals cannot exist in a truly revolutionary framework.

*Some of the early Anarchist Anthropologist influences that Graeber considers did not wish to fully do away with society – rather, they wished to build a society that looked different from the one based around the market.

*At least in how he describes previous anarchist anthropologists, Graeber seems to focus more of his critique on the structures created during the revolutionary period (or, rather, the hypothetical structures during the hypothetical revolutionary period). At least in this initial section of the manifesto, Graeber seems skeptical of any sort of structure that could appear during the revolutionary period (i.e., vanguardism), and seems to focus less attention on the structure of the resulting world after the revolution is completed. On one hand, this is understandable given the history of vanguard parties in any number of revolutionary and post-revolutionary states in the twentieth century. On the other hand, the more important (or at least equally important) area to focus on is the state of the world following the revolution (or at least following the violent phase of the revolution, if one feels that the revolution should be permanent). Where other revolutions have failed is that they do not consider the state of the world following the violent phase of the revolution – this is obviously true in the USSR, which completely lost sight of its revolutionary ideals after Stalin rose to power. How will the world function in a stateless society? How does the world get to such a society? These seem to be questions that Graeber doesn’t consider, at least in this initial consideration of anarchist anthropologist influences. Whether or not a vanguard party arises does not seem as important, as long as the initial goal of overthrowing the global capitalist world order is completed. One of the strongest critiques of the turmoil that stirred the early twenty first century, including the Occupy Wallstreet movement in the United States, is that the participants in this turmoil were much more focused on ensuring the correct process for their respective movements, instead of focusing on the end goal. (Vincent Bevins “If We Burn” is a great overview of the movements across the world during the 2010s). In a way, the mass movements of the early twenty first century got the order of operations wrong – first, they needed to succeed in overthrowing the global capitalist world order, then they needed to determine how to operate in the post-revolutionary world. Instead, since they did not even clearly define their goal, alt-right and neo-fascist movements were able to co-opt the popular turmoil and temporarily strengthen the global capitalist world order.

*While considering pre-market economies, what Graeber calls “gift economies,” he argues that such organizations would have considered economic transactions (based on deriving a profit) offensive. Graeber also points out that it is possible that some such organizations were aware that other, more state-like organizations based on economic transactions centered on earning profit, existed, but that they may have avoided developing a state-like organization because they worried about the problems that could be presented form the hierarchy that exists in such organizations. One is still curious how the possibility of a state-like economy would arise. It is hard to believe that state-like economies arose simply because individuals realized that they could make a profit from economic transactions, and therefore decided to do so. This was an elementary realization, but the more important question is: how did the material conditions arise for individuals to have the opportunity to make a profit, and therefore start consolidating power in the first place? Individuals may or may not choose to act in a way that consolidates power, but if the potential is there for individuals to consolidate power permanently, then some individuals will choose to do so. At least so far in this work, Graeber has not identified how these material conditions arose.

*Graeber reviews a handful of case studies concerning modern tribal communities. In each of the three case studies he considers, there are internal mechanisms which prevent individuals from becoming too powerful within each tribal community – the mechanisms are not formally defined or articulated in each community, but it is understood by the individuals in the communities that those mechanisms exist and therefore, Graeber argues, no one individual has taken too much power in any of the communities. Understanding the various mechanisms that communities use to maintain equilibrium, from a standpoint of power, needs to be understood before passing judgements on the efficacy of such mechanisms. However, the question of how human organizations move from individual communities to the state level still has not been answered. At what point does a community collectively decide that it will no longer obey the mechanisms which prevent individuals from gaining power, and thus move the organization to the state-level?

*Graeber also points out that each of the communities from the case studies he considers contain forms of hierarchy which are at least similar to the forms of hierarchy that exist in larger state organizations (for example, men dominate over women in each of the examples). This at least suggests that some new form of organization would need to be considered going forward – a form of organization that avoids permanent, oppressive hierarchies based on arbitrary distinctions between groups of individuals.

*In one of the case studies Graeber considers – his time in communities in Madagascar in the late 1980s and early 1990s – he points out that the more anarchic forms of community organization came about following open resistance to the colonially-imposed government structures that existed on the island during the previous decades in the 1900s. Graeber suggests that an important aspect of the communal mechanisms which maintained stability and prevented individuals from gathering too much power was that they were a reaction to the oppressive institutions which existed under the French Colonial government. Generalizing this idea, it might be suggested that in order for communities to become truly anarchic and avoid the formation of states, they must organize in response to states and their institutions which existed previously. This thought would fit with the idea that history is a dialectical process, and that post-industrial anarchic communities would need to look different from those that existed before states arose.

*Graeber articulates the idea of “counter power,” which must exist in communities which seek to avoid becoming states. Graeber points out that any social organization will be a tangle of contradictions, whether or not the social organization is a state, an institution within a state, or a community is not a state. He argues that counter power is an ideological construction which exists in the collective imagination of the community, and must be constantly defined and re defined to keep the community healthy. Once again, we still must uncover the material conditions that must exist (or which must be avoided), should a state be permanently avoided. However, what Graeber has articulated is a helpful endpoint to aim for.

*Graeber contends that the true anarchist “revolution” will not actually be a revolution, but will be a gradual transition away from state authority to more localized organizations. This thought feels similar to the Marxist tradition that the state will eventually wither away following the communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is difficult to see this as a feasible possibility. Perhaps, if time and space were unlimited, this is what the world and future would look like. But that is not the case, as we have a finite amount of space and resources to work with on planet earth, and a finite amount of time. Although it may at times feel like governments and states in our modern world are losing control, they have more power now than ever before in human history. There have been moments in the recent past where states’ power did not feel guaranteed – specifically during the world wars. However, the result was the emergence of even more powerful superstates like the USSR and the United States. State power will not let itself be abolished by passive means.

*Graeber frames revolution as an accumulation of revolutionary acts, and not a mass violent action that changes the shape of the world in one moment. He also states that he does not think of a revolution in terms of the state or state power. The framing of revolution in terms of revolutionary acts makes sense – individuals need to learn how to live in a revolutionary way in order to even make change possible. However, how is it possible to think of a revolution without considering the state or state power? These things will likely not cease to exist unless they are compelled to, through some sort of mass organizing effort.

*Graeber points out that throughout history social groups are continually forming and changing. This is a helpful characterization of social groups on one hand, because it shows that creating new social groupings is not necessarily a difficult thing to do. However, it does not address the fact that for a large period of time an increasing portion of the world population was creating these social groupings under a state, which put significant limits on the actions that these social groupings could perform. Further examination must be performed to understand how these social groupings are limited by the state, and how they can be organized to avoid the creation of states in the future.

*Graeber argues that one of the most effective ways to resist state power is to simply remove oneself into communities which can be created from within the state, but exist outside the state. Graeber points to the example of Italy, where an increasing number of young people have been refusing to work in factories. Similar forms of passive removal from the state, into more localized communities, seems to now be happening in many places around the world, though still probably on a relatively small scale. In other words, the liberal capitalist state is currently decaying, and it will continue to decay at an increasing rate. Regardless of whether this is happening to a degree which will make the liberal capitalist state eventually dissolve completely, we still need to understand how a new state will be avoided in the future.

*Graeber does claim that he does not have a proposal for how to dismantle the state, but one suggestion he has is simply refusing to listen to the state when individuals come in contact with it (he gives the example of an individual filling out a required state form, but besides that acting as though the state does not exist). This is a lot easier said than done – most individuals come in contact with the state on a daily, almost hourly basis. And the number of individuals where this is the state is increasing (i.e., the conditions for the proletariat are continually getting worse, and the size of the proletariat is continually increasing).

*Graeber argues that most historical states did not in fact control the day-to-day lives of individuals, but were instead utopian ideals mixed with a complicated structure of interconnected communities. However, at least in the modern sense this does not explain why states have evolved which are able to control the day-to-day lives of a vast majority of individuals (i.e., capitalist states). Although of course the lives of individuals will be endlessly varied, they share many similarities in terms of how they are oppressed by capitalist institutions.

*Graeber identifies the flaw in the arguments of primitivists, particularly John Zerzan, as being that they do not identify anything positive in the human experience. Primitivists tend to strip away everything that shapes the human experience, even seemingly elementary concepts such as language and mathematics. Graeber finds that the solution to this flaw is to identify positive communal experiences and structures which do exist, even in the modern global capitalist world. This makes the problem of a stateless world more complicated, because it means that we cannot simply return to a world that has already existed as the primitivists argue. However, it also begins to answer the question of what to do with all of the technology (broadly speaking, which includes advances in any field such as aesthetics, philosophy, or science) that humans have developed to date.

*Graeber points out that many non-western communities around the world prefer consensus-making as the way to make decisions as a group. If one wishes to use this to define what communities would look like in a post-state world, then the only question is how to shape the material conditions of the world to get to that point. Graeber speaks very highly of the anti-global social movements of the early 2000s, which makes sense given their strict egalitarian decision-making process. Unfortunately, aside from perhaps influencing future movements, these movements failed to achieve any material changes in the global capitalist world order.