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Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS

CHICAGO

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Anarchism:

The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satis-faction of the infinite variety of needs and aspira-tions of a civilized being.

Peter Kropotkin ( Encyclopedia Brittanica) Basically, if you’re not a utopianist, you’re a schmuck.

Jonothon Feldman ( Indigenous Planning Times) What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of

© 2004 David Graeber
potential theories, and tiny manifestos—all meant to All rights reserved.

offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC
possibly exist at some point in the future.

5629 South University Avenue

Since there are very good reasons why an Chicago, Il 60637
anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn’t—or, for that matter, www.prickly-paradigm.com
why an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist ISBN: 0-9728196-4-9
political science.

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Why are there so few anarchists in the So are academics just behind the curve here?

It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy will academy?

be overrun by anarchists. But I’m not holding my breath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with It’s a pertinent question because, as a political philos-the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after ophy, anarchism is veritably exploding right now.

all, the only great social movement that was invented Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements are by a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movement growing everywhere; traditional anarchist princi-intending to rally the working class. Most accounts of ples—autonomy, voluntary association, self-organiza-the history of anarchism assume it was basically tion, mutual aid, direct democracy—have gone from similar: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of the basis for organizing within the globalization certain nineteenth-century thinkers—Proudhon, movement, to playing the same role in radical move-Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.—it then went on to inspire ments of all kinds everywhere. Revolutionaries in working-class organizations, became enmeshed in Mexico, Argentina, India, and elsewhere have increas-political struggles, divided into sects... Anarchism, in ingly abandoned even talking about seizing power, the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’s and begun to formulate radically different ideas of poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but what a revolution would even mean. Most, admit-making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and tedly, fall shy of actually using the word “anarchist.”

sincerity. But in fact, the analogy is strained at best.

But as Barbara Epstein has recently pointed out anar-The nineteenth-century “founding figures” did not chism has by now largely taken the place Marxism think of themselves as having invented anything had in the social movements of the ‘60s: even those particularly new. The basic principles of anarchism—
who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—
have to define themselves in relation to it, and draw referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to on its ideas.

have been around about as long as humanity. The Yet all this has found almost no reflection in same goes for the rejection of the state and of all the academy. Most academics seem to have only the forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss (anarchism literally means “without rulers”), even the it with the crudest stereotypes. (“Anarchist organiza-assumption that all these forms are somehow related tion! But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”) In the and reinforce each other. None of it was presented as United States there are thousands of academic some startling new doctrine. And in fact it was not: Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen one can find records of people making similar argu-scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.

ments throughout history, despite the fact there is

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every reason to believe that in most times and places, has become a model for how radical intellectuals, or such opinions were the ones least likely to be written increasingly, all intellectuals, treated one another; down. We are talking less about a body of theory, rather, the two developed somewhat in tandem. From then, than about an attitude, or perhaps one might the perspective of the academy, this led to many salu-even say a faith: the rejection of certain types of social tary results—the feeling there should be some moral relations, the confidence that certain others would be center, that academic concerns should be relevant to much better ones on which to build a livable society, people’s lives—but also, many disastrous ones: turning the belief that such a society could actually exist.

much intellectual debate into a kind of parody of Even if one compares the historical schools of sectarian politics, with everyone trying to reduce each Marxism, and anarchism, one can see we are dealing others’ arguments into ridiculous caricatures so as to with a fundamentally different sort of project. Marxist declare them not only wrong, but also evil and schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the dangerous—even if the debate is usually taking place mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, in language so arcane that no one who could not Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... (Note how afford seven years of grad school would have any way the list starts with heads of state and grades almost of knowing the debate was going on.

seamlessly into French professors.) Pierre Bourdieu Now consider the different schools of anar-once noted that, if the academic field is a game in chism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-which scholars strive for dominance, then you know Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, you have won when other scholars start wondering Individualists, Platformists... None are named after how to make an adjective out of your name. It is, some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning the named either after some kind of practice, or most game that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other, often, organizational principle. (Significantly, those on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man Marxist tendencies which are not named after individ-theories of history they would scoff at in just about uals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are any other context: Foucault’s ideas, like Trotsky’s, are also the ones closest to anarchism.) Anarchists like to never treated as primarily the products of a certain distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they intellectual milieu, as something that emerged from organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed endless conversations and arguments involving this has always been what anarchists have spent most hundreds of people, but always, as if they emerged of their time thinking and arguing about. Anarchists from the genius of a single man (or, very occasionally, have never been much interested in the kinds of broad woman). It’s not quite either that Marxist politics strategic or philosophical questions that have histori-organized itself like an academic discipline or that it cally preoccupied Marxists—questions like: Are the

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peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (Anarchists tice; it insists, before anything else, that one’s means consider this something for the peasants to decide.) must be consonant with one’s ends; one cannot create What is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, freedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as much they tend to argue with each other about what is the as possible, one must oneself, in one’s relations with truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what one’s friends and allies, embody the society one wishes point organization stops being empowering and starts to create. This does not square very well with oper-squelching individual freedom. Or, alternately, about ating within the university, perhaps the only Western the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Is institution other than the Catholic Church and British it necessary (or right) to publicly condemn someone monarchy that has survived in much the same form who assassinates a head of state? Or can assassination, from the Middle Ages, doing intellectual battle at especially if it prevents something terrible, like a war, conferences in expensive hotels, and trying to pretend be a moral act? When is it okay to break a window?

all this somehow furthers revolution. At the very least, To sum up then:

one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities 1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analyt-are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist ical discourse about revolutionary strategy.

studies department, either—and that, of course, is 2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse going to get one in far more trouble than anything about revolutionary practice.

one could ever write.

Obviously, everything I’ve said has been someThis does not mean anarchist theory is impossible.

thing of a caricature (there have been wildly sectarian anarchist groups, and plenty of libertarian, practice-This doesn’t mean anarchists have to be against theory.

oriented Marxists including, arguably, myself). Still, After all, anarchism is, itself, an idea, even if a very old even so stated, this does suggest a great deal of poten-one. It is also a project, which sets out to begin tial complementarity between the two. And indeed creating the institutions of a new society “within the there has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his shell of the old,” to expose, subvert, and undermine endless battles with Marx over practical questions, also structures of domination but always, while doing so, personally translated Marx’s Capital into Russian. But proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which it also makes it easier to understand why there are so itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.

few anarchists in the academy. It’s not just that anar-Clearly any such project has need of the tools of intel-chism does not tend to have much use for high theory.

lectual analysis and understanding. It might not need It’s that it is primarily concerned with forms of prac-

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High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly it individuals have unique and incommensurable views of will not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. That the world means they cannot become friends, or would be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better, lovers, or work on common projects.

I think, something more in the spirit of anarchist deci-Even more than High Theory, what anarchism sion-making processes, employed in anything from tiny needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of affinity groups to gigantic spokescouncils of thousands grappling with those real, immediate questions that of people. Most anarchist groups operate by a emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream consensus process which has been developed, in many social science actually isn’t much help here, because ways, to be the exact opposite of the high-handed, divi-normally in mainstream social science this sort of sive, sectarian style so popular amongst other radical thing is generally classified as “policy issues,” and no groups. Applied to theory, this would mean accepting self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, with these.

united only by certain shared commitments and understandings. In consensus process, everyone agrees from against policy (a tiny manifesto): the start on certain broad principles of unity and The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on purposes for being for the group; but beyond that they others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is also accept as a matter of course that no one is ever by definition something concocted by some form of going to convert another person completely to their elite, which presumes it knows better than others point of view, and probably shouldn’t try; and that how their affairs are to be conducted. By partici-therefore discussion should focus on concrete ques-pating in policy debates the very best one can tions of action, and coming up with a plan that achieve is to limit the damage, since the very everyone can live with and no one feels is in funda-premise is inimical to the idea of people managing mental violation of their principles. One could see a their own affairs.

parallel here: a series of diverse perspectives, joined together by their shared desire to understand the So in this case, the question becomes: What human condition, and move it in the direction of sort of social theory would actually be of interest to greater freedom. Rather than be based on the need to those who are trying to help bring about a world in prove others’ fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks which people are free to govern their own affairs?

to find particular projects on which they reinforce each This is what this pamphlet is mainly about.

other. Just because theories are incommensurable in For starters, I would say any such theory certain respects does not mean they cannot exist or would have to begin with some initial assumptions.

even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that Not many. Probably just two. First, it would have to

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proceed from the assumption that, as the Brazilian certainties. This led them to feel they had a right to folk song puts it, “another world is possible.” That impose their visions through a machinery of violence.

institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male Anarchists are proposing nothing of the sort, on either dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible count. They presume no inevitable course of history to have a world in which these things would not exist, and one can never further the course of freedom by and that we’d all be better off as a result. To commit creating new forms of coercion. In fact all forms of oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, systemic violence are (among other things) assaults on since how can one have certain knowledge of such the role of the imagination as a political principle, and matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world the only way to begin to think about eliminating is not possible. But one could also make the argument systematic violence is by recognizing this.

that it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge And of course one could write very long books which makes a commitment to optimism a moral about the atrocities throughout history carried out by imperative: Since one cannot know a radically better cynics and other pessimists...

world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, So that’s the first proposition. The second, I’d the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re say, is that any anarchist social theory would have to wrong, we might well get a lot closer.

reject self-consciously any trace of vanguardism. The role of intellectuals is most definitively not to form an against anti-utopianism (another tiny mani-elite that can arrive at the correct strategic analyses festo):

and then lead the masses to follow. But if not that, Here of course one has to deal with the inevitable what? This is one reason I’m calling this essay objection: that utopianism has lead to unmitigated

“Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”—because horror, as Stalinists, Maoists, and other idealists this is one area where I think anthropology is particu-tried to carve society into impossible shapes, killing larly well positioned to help. And not only because millions in the process.

most actually-existing self-governing communities, This argument belies a fundamental miscon-and actually-existing non-market economies in the ception: that imagining better worlds was itself the world have been investigated by anthropologists rather problem. Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because than sociologists or historians. It is also because the they dreamed great dreams—actually, Stalinists were practice of ethnography provides at least something of famous for being rather short on imagination—but a model, if a very rough, incipient model, of how non-because they mistook their dreams for scientific vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice might work. When one carries out an ethnography, one

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observes what people do, and then tries to tease out Graves, Brown, Mauss, Sorel the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that underlie their actions; one tries to get at the way It’s not so much that anthropologists embraced anar-people’s habits and actions makes sense in ways that chism, or even, were consciously espousing anarchist they are not themselves completely aware of. One ideas; it’s more that they moved in the same circles, obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely their ideas tended to bounce off one another, that that: to look at those who are creating viable alterna-there was something about anthropological thought in tives, try to figure out what might be the larger impli-particular—its keen awareness of the very range of cations of what they are (already) doing, and then human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to anar-offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as chism from the very beginning.

contributions, possibilities—as gifts. This is more or Let me start with Sir James Frazer, even less what I was trying to do a few paragraphs ago though he was the furthest thing from an anarchist.

when I suggested that social theory could refashion Frazer, chair of anthropology in Cambridge at the itself in the manner of direct democratic process. And turn of the (last) century, was a classic stodgy as that example makes clear, such a project would Victorian who wrote accounts of savage customs, actually have to have two aspects, or moments if you based mainly on the results of questionnaires sent out like: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in a to missionaries and colonial officials. His ostensible constant dialogue.

theoretical attitude was utterly condescending—he believed almost all magic, myth and ritual was based None of this has much to do with what on foolish logical mistakes—but his magnum opus, anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually The Golden Bough, contained such florid, fanciful, and been like over the last hundred years or so. Still, there strangely beautiful descriptions of tree spirits, eunuch has been a strange affinity, over the years, between priests, dying vegetation gods, and the sacrifice of anthropology and anarchism which is in itself signifi-divine kings, that he inspired a generation of poets and cant.

literati. Among them was Robert Graves, a British poet who first became famous for writing bitingly satirical verse from the trenches of World War I. At the end of the war, Graves ended up in a hospital in France where he was cured of shell shock by W. H. R.

Rivers, the British anthropologist famous for the Torres Straits Expedition, who doubled as a psychia-

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trist. Graves was so impressed by Rivers that he was Graves’ books is that he’s obviously having so much later to suggest professional anthropologists be placed fun writing them, throwing out one outrageous thesis in charge of all world governments. Not a particularly after another, that it’s impossible to tell how much of anarchist sentiment, certainly—but Graves tended to it is meant to be taken seriously. Or whether that’s dart about between all sorts of odd political positions.

even a meaningful question. In one essay, written in In the end, he was to abandon “civilization”—indus-the ‘50s, Graves invents the distinction between trial society—entirely and spend the last fifty years or

“reasonableness” and “rationality” later made famous so of his life in a village on the Spanish island of by Stephen Toulmin in the ‘80s, but he does it in the Majorca, supporting himself by writing novels, but course of an essay written to defend Socrates’ wife, also producing numerous books of love poetry, and a Xanthippe, from her reputation as an atrocious nag.

series of some of the most subversive essays ever (His argument: imagine you had been married to written.

Socrates.)

Graves’ thesis was, among other things, that Did Graves really believe that women are greatness was a pathology; “great men” were essen-always superior to men? Did he really expect us to tially destroyers and “great” poets not much better believe he had solved one mythical problem by falling (his arch-enemies were Virgil, Milton and Pound), into an “analeptic trance” and overhearing a conversa-that all real poetry is and has always been a mythic tion about fish between a Greek historian and Roman celebration of an ancient Supreme Goddess, of whom official in Cyprus in 54 CE? It’s worth wondering, Frazer had only confused glimmerings, and whose because for all their current obscurity, in these writ-matriarchal followers were conquered and destroyed ings, Graves essentially invented two different intellec-by Hitler’s beloved Aryan hoards when they emerged tual traditions which were later to become major theo-from the Ukrainian Steppes in the early Bronze Age retical strains in modern anarchism—if admittedly, (though they survived a bit longer in Minoan Crete).

generally considered two of the most outré. On the In a book called The White Goddess: An Historical one hand, the cult of the Great Goddess has been Grammar of Poetic Myth, he claimed to map out the revived and become a direct inspiration for Pagan rudiments of her calendar rites in different parts of Anarchism, hippyish performers of spiral dances who Europe, focusing on the periodic ritual murder of the are always welcome at mass actions because they do Goddess’ royal consorts, among other things a surefire seem to have rather a knack for influencing the way of guaranteeing would-be great men do not get weather; on the other, Primitivists, whose most out of hand, and ending the book with a call for an famous (and extreme) avatar is John Zerzan, who has eventual industrial collapse. I say “claimed” advisedly taken Graves’ rejection of industrial civilization and here. The delightful, if also confusing, thing about hopes for general economic collapse even further,

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arguing that even agriculture was a great historical rary, and the inventor of French anthropology. Mauss mistake. Both the Pagans and the Primitivists, curi-was a child of Orthodox Jewish parents who had the ously, share exactly that ineffable quality which makes mixed blessing of also being the nephew of Emile Graves’ work so distinctive: it’s really impossible to Durkheim, the founder of French sociology. Mauss know on what level one is supposed to read it. It’s was also a revolutionary socialist. For much of his life, both ridiculous self-parody, and terribly serious, at the he managed a consumer coop in Paris, and was same time.

constantly writing screeds for socialist newspapers, There have also been anthropologists—among carrying out projects of research on coops in other them, some of the founding figures of the discipline—
countries, and trying to create links between coops in who have themselves dabbled with anarchist, or anar-order to build an alternative, anti-capitalist, economy.

chistic, politics.

His most famous work was written in response to the The most notorious case was that of a turn of crisis of socialism he saw in Lenin’s reintroduction of the century student named Al Brown, known to his the market in the Soviet Union in the ‘20s: If it was college friends as “Anarchy Brown.” Brown was an impossible to simply legislate the money economy admirer of the famous anarchist Prince (he of course away, even in Russia, the least monetarized society in renounced his title), Peter Kropotkin, arctic explorer Europe, then perhaps revolutionaries needed to start and naturalist, who had thrown social Darwinism into looking at the ethnographic record to see what sort of a tumult from which it still has never quite recovered creature the market really was, and what viable alter-by documenting how the most successful species tend natives to capitalism might look like. Hence his “Essay to be those which cooperate the most effectively.

on the Gift,” written in 1925, which argued (among (Sociobiology for instance was basically an attempt to other things) that the origin of all contracts lies in come up with an answer to Kropotkin.) Later, Brown communism, an unconditional commitment to was to begin affecting a cloak and a monocle, adopting another’s needs, and that despite endless economic a fancy mock-aristocratic hyphenated name (A. R.

textbooks to the contrary, there has never been an Radcliffe-Brown), and ultimately, in the 1920s and economy based on barter: that actually-existing soci-

‘30s, becoming the master theorist of British social eties which do not employ money have instead been anthropology. The older Brown didn’t like to talk too gift economies in which the distinctions we now make much about his youthful politics, but it’s probably no between interest and altruism, person and property, coincidence that his main theoretical interest remained freedom and obligation, simply did not exist.

the maintenance of social order outside the state.

Mauss believed socialism could never be built Perhaps the most intriguing case though is by state fiat but only gradually, from below, that it was that of Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown’s contempo-possible to begin building a new society based on

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mutual aid and self-organization “in the shell of the rings everywhere, it’s understandable why a European old”; he felt that existing popular practices provided radical—especially a Jewish one—might see all this as the basis both for a moral critique of capitalism and just a little creepy. Creepy enough to throw cold water possible glimpses of what that future society would be even on the otherwise rather appealing image of the like. All of these are classic anarchist positions. Still, General Strike—which is after all about the least he did not consider himself an anarchist. In fact, he violent possible way to imagine an apocalyptic revolu-never had anything good to say about them. This was, tion. By the ‘40s, Mauss concluded his suspicions had it appears, because he identified anarchism mainly proved altogether justified.

with the figure of Georges Sorel, an apparently quite To the doctrine of the revolutionary vanguard, personally distasteful French anarcho-syndicalist and he wrote, Sorel added a notion originally culled from anti-Semite, now mainly famous for his essay Mauss’ own uncle Durkheim: a doctrine of corpo-Reflections sur le Violence. Sorel argued that since the ratism, of vertical structures glued together by tech-masses were not fundamentally good or rational, it niques of social solidarity. This he said was a great was foolish to make one’s primary appeal to them influence on Lenin, by Lenin’s own admission. From through reasoned arguments. Politics is the art of there it was adopted by the Right. By the end of his inspiring others with great myths. For revolutionaries, life, Sorel himself had become increasingly sympa-he proposed the myth of an apocalyptic General thetic with fascism; in this he followed the same Strike, a moment of total transformation. To maintain trajectory as Mussolini (another youthful dabbler with it, he added, one would need a revolutionary elite anarcho-syndicalism) and who, Mauss believed, took capable of keeping the myth alive by their willingness these same Durkheimian/Sorelian/Leninist ideas to to engage in symbolic acts of violence—an elite which, their ultimate conclusions. By the end of his life, like the Marxist vanguard party (often somewhat less Mauss became convinced even Hitler’s great ritual symbolic in its violence), Mauss described as a kind of pageants, torch-lit parades with their chants of “Seig perpetual conspiracy, a modern version of the secret Heil! ,” were really inspired by accounts he and his political men’s societies of the ancient world.

uncle had written about totemic rituals of Australian In other words, Mauss saw Sorel, and hence aborigines. “When we were describing how ritual can anarchism, as introducing an element of the irrational, create social solidarity, of submerging the individual in of violence, and of vanguardism. It might seem a bit the mass,” he complained, “it never occurred to us odd that among French revolutionaries of the time, it that anyone would apply such techniques in the should have been the trade unionist emphasizing the modern day!” (In fact, Mauss was mistaken. Modern power of myth, and the anthropologist objecting, but research has shown Nuremberg rallies were actually in the context of the ‘20s and ‘30s, with fascist stir-inspired by Harvard pep rallies. But this is another

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story.) The outbreak of war destroyed Mauss, who had The anarchist anthropology never completely recovered from losing most of his closest friends in the First World War. When the that almost already does exist Nazis took Paris he refused to flee, but sat in his office every day with a pistol in his desk, waiting for the In the end, though, Marcel Mauss has probably had Gestapo to arrive. They never did, but the terror, and more influence on anarchists than all the other ones weight of his feelings of historical complicity, finally combined. This is because he was interested in alter-shattered his sanity.

native moralities, which opened the way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means, because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology do, already, exist, they largely derive from him.

Before Mauss, the universal assumption had been that economies without money or markets had operated by means of “barter”; they were trying to engage in market behavior (acquire useful goods and services at the least cost to themselves, get rich if possible...), they just hadn’t yet developed very sophisticated ways of going about it. Mauss demonstrated that in fact, such economies were really “gift economies.” They were not based on calculation, but on a refusal to calculate; they were rooted in an ethical system which consciously rejected most of what we would consider the basic principles of economics. It was not that they had not yet learned to seek profit through the most efficient means. They would have found the very premise that the point of an economic transaction—at least, one with someone who was not your enemy—was to seek the greatest profit deeply offensive.

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It is significant that the one (of the few) with it. Amazonians might not have literally whacked overtly anarchist anthropologists of recent memory, off the ruler’s head every few years, but it’s not an another Frenchman, Pierre Clastres, became famous entirely inappropriate metaphor.

for making a similar argument on the political level.

By these lights these were all, in a very real He insisted political anthropologists had still not sense, anarchist societies. They were founded on an completely gotten over the old evolutionist perspec-explicit rejection of the logic of the state and of the tives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisti-market.

cated form of organization than what had come before; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian soci-They are, however, extremely imperfect ones.

eties Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to have The most common criticism of Clastres is to ask how attained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But his Amazonians could really be organizing their soci-what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirely eties against the emergence of something they have never actually experienced. A naive question, but it unaware of what the elementary forms of state power points to something equally naive in Clastres’ own might be like—what it would mean to allow some men approach. Clastres manages to talk blithely about the to give everyone else orders which could not be ques-uncompromised egalitarianism of the very same tioned, since they were backed up by the threat of Amazonian societies, for instance, famous for their force—and were for that very reason determined to use of gang rape as a weapon to terrorize women ensure such things never came about? What if they who transgress proper gender roles. It’s a blind spot considered the fundamental premises of our political so glaring one has to wonder how he could possibly science morally objectionable?

miss out on it; especially considering it provides an answer to just that question. Perhaps Amazonian men The parallels between the two arguments are understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, actually quite striking. In gift economies there are, backed by force, would be like because they them-often, venues for enterprising individuals: But every-selves wield that sort of power over their wives and thing is arranged in such a way they could never be daughters. Perhaps for that very reason they would used as a platform for creating permanent inequalities not like to see structures capable of inflicting it on of wealth, since self-aggrandizing types all end up them.

competing to see who can give the most away. In It’s worth pointing out because Clastres is, in Amazonian (or North American) societies, the institu-many ways, a naive romantic. Fom another perspective, though, there’s no mystery here at all. After all, tion of the chief played the same role on a political we are talking about the fact that most Amazonians level: the position was so demanding, and so little don’t want to give others the power to threaten them rewarding, so hedged about by safeguards, that there with physical injury if they don’t do as they are told.

was no way for power-hungry individuals to do much Maybe we should better be asking what it says about

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ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of situations, since few historical states had the means to explanation.

root such institutions out, even assuming that they would have wanted to. But Mauss and Clastres’ argu-toward a theory of imaginary counterpower ment suggests something even more radical. It suggests that counterpower, at least in the most This is what I mean by an alternative ethics, then.

elementary sense, actually exists where the states and Anarchistic societies are no more unaware of human markets are not even present; that in such cases, rather capacities for greed or vainglory than modern than being embodied in popular institutions which Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, pose themselves against the power of lords, or kings, gluttony, or sloth; they would just find them equally or plutocrats, they are embodied in institutions which unappealing as the basis for their civilization. In fact, ensure such types of person never come about. What they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire it is “counter” to, then, is a potential, a latent aspect, they end up organizing much of their social life or dialectical possibility if you prefer, within the around containing them.

society itself.

If this were a purely theoretical essay I would This at least would help explain an otherwise explain that all this suggests an interesting way of peculiar fact; the way in which it is often particularly synthesizing theories of value and theories of resis-the egalitarian societies which are torn by terrible tance. For present purposes, suffice it to say that I inner tensions, or at least, extreme forms of symbolic think Mauss and Clastres have succeeded, somewhat violence.

despite themselves, in laying the groundwork for a Of course, all societies are to some degree at theory of revolutionary counterpower.

war with themselves. There are always clashes I’m afraid this is a somewhat complicated between interests, factions, classes and the like; also, argument. Let me take it one step at a time.

social systems are always based on the pursuit of In typical revolutionary discourse a “counter-different forms of value which pull people in different power” is a collection of social institutions set in directions. In egalitarian societies, which tend to place opposition to the state and capital: from self-an enormous emphasis on creating and maintaining governing communities to radical labor unions to communal consensus, this often appears to spark a popular militias. Sometimes it is also referred to as an kind of equally elaborate reaction formation, a spectral

“anti-power.” When such institutions maintain them-nightworld inhabited by monsters, witches or other selves in the face of the state, this is usually referred to creatures of horror. And it’s the most peaceful societies as a “dual power” situation. By this definition most of which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative human history is actually characterized by dual power constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of

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perennial war. The invisible worlds surrounding them laced with elements of destructive madness.

are literally battlegrounds. It’s as if the endless labor of Similarly, while the Piaroa are famous for their peaceableness—murder is unheard of, the assump-achieving consensus masks a constant inner violence—
tion being that anyone who killed another human or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact the being would be instantly consumed by pollution process by which that inner violence is measured and and die horribly—they inhabit a cosmos of endless contained—and it is precisely this, and the resulting invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in tangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime font fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods of social creativity. It’s not these conflicting principles and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and and contradictory impulses themselves which are the have to be avenged by the magical massacre of ultimate political reality, then; it’s the regulatory whole (distant, unknown) communities.

process which mediates them.

Case 2:

Some examples might help here: The Tiv, another notoriously egalitarian society, make their homes along the Benue River in central Nigeria. Compared to the Piaroa, their Case 1: The Piaroa, a highly egalitarian society domestic life is quite hierarchical: male elders tend living along tributaries of the Orinoco which to have many wives, and exchange with one ethnographer Joanna Overing herself describes as another the rights to younger women’s fertility; anarchists. They place enormous value on indi-younger men are thus reduced to spending most of vidual freedom and autonomy, and are quite self-their lives chilling their heels as unmarried depen-conscious about the importance of ensuring that no dents in their fathers’ compounds. In recent one is ever at another person’s orders, or the need centuries the Tiv were never entirely insulated to ensure no one gains such control over economic from the raids of slave traders; Tivland was also resources that they can use it to constrain others’

dotted with local markets; minor wars between freedom. Yet they also insist that Piaroa culture clans were occasionally fought, though more often itself was the creation of an evil god, a two-headed large disputes were mediated in large communal cannibalistic buffoon. The Piaroa have developed a

“moots.” Still, there were no political institutions moral philosophy which defines the human condi-larger than the compound; in fact, anything that tion as caught between a “world of the senses,” of even began to look like a political institution was wild, pre-social desires, and a “world of thought.”

considered intrinsically suspect, or more precisely, Growing up involves learning to control and seen as surrounded by an aura of occult horror. This channel in the former through thoughtful consider-was, as ethnographer Paul Bohannan succinctly put ation for others, and the cultivation of a sense of it, because of what was seen to be the nature of humor; but this is made infinitely more difficult by power: “men attain power by consuming the the fact that all forms of technical knowledge, substance of others.” Markets were protected, and however necessary for life are, due to their origins,

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market rules enforced by charms which embodied ered wrong for adults to be giving one another diseases and were said to be powered by human orders, especially on an ongoing basis; this was body parts and blood. Enterprising men who considered to make even institutions like wage managed to patch together some sort of fame, labor inherently morally suspect. Or to be more wealth, or clientele were by definition witches.

precise, unmalagasy—this was how the French Their hearts were coated by a substance called tsav, behaved, or wicked kings and slaveholders long which could only be augmented by the eating of ago. Society was overall remarkably peaceable. Yet human flesh. Most tried to avoid doing so, but a once again it was surrounded by invisible warfare; secret society of witches was said to exist which just about everyone had access to dangerous medi-would slip bits of human flesh in their victims’ food, cine or spirits or was willing to let on they might; thus incurring a “flesh debt” and unnatural cravings the night was haunted by witches who danced that would eventually drive those affected to naked on tombs and rode men like horses; just consume their entire families. This imaginary about all sickness was due to envy, hatred, and society of witches was seen as the invisible govern-magical attack. What’s more, witchcraft bore a ment of the country. Power was thus institutional-strange, ambivalent relation to national identity.

ized evil, and every generation, a witch-finding While people made rhetorical reference to movement would arise to expose the culprits, thus, Malagasy as equal and united “like hairs on a head,”

effectively, destroying any emerging structures of ideals of economic equality were rarely, if ever, authority.

invoked; however, it was assumed that anyone who became too rich or powerful would be destroyed by Case 3: Highland Madagascar, where I lived witchcraft, and while witchcraft was the definition between 1989 and 1991, was a rather different place.

of evil, it was also seen as peculiarly Malagasy The area had been the center of a Malagasy state—

(charms were just charms but evil charms were the Merina kingdom—since the early nineteenth called “Malagasy charms”). Insofar as rituals of century, and afterwards endured many years of harsh moral solidarity did occur, and the ideal of equality colonial rule. There was a market economy and, in was invoked, it was largely in the course of rituals theory, a central government—during the time I was held to suppress, expel, or destroy those witches there, largely dominated by what was called the who, perversely, were the twisted embodiment and

“Merina bourgeoisie.” In fact this government had practical enforcement of the egalitarian ethos of the effectively withdrawn from most of the countryside society itself.

and rural communities were effectively governing themselves. In many ways these could also be Note how in each case there’s a striking considered anarchistic: most local decisions were contrast between the cosmological content, which is made by consensus by informal bodies, leadership nothing if not tumultuous, and social process, which was looked on at best with suspicion, it was consid-

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is all about mediation, arriving at consensus. None of degree, I suspect all this turbulence stems from the these societies are entirely egalitarian: there are very nature of the human condition. There would always certain key forms of dominance, at least of appear to be no society which does not see human life men over women, elders over juniors. The nature and as fundamentally a problem. However much they intensity of these forms vary enormously: in Piaroa might differ on what they deem the problem to be, at communities the hierarchies were so modest that the very least, the existence of work, sex, and repro-Overing doubts one can really speak of “male domi-duction are seen as fraught with all sorts of quan-nance” at all (despite the fact that communal leaders daries; human desires are always fickle; and then are invariably male); the Tiv appear to be quite there’s the fact that we’re all going to die. So there’s a another story. Still, structural inequalities invariably lot to be troubled by. None of these dilemmas are exist, and as a result I think it is fair to say that these going to vanish if we eliminate structural inequalities anarchies are not only imperfect, they contain with (much though I think this would radically improve them the seeds of their own destruction. It is hardly a things in just about every other way). Indeed, the coincidence that when larger, more systematically fantasy that it might, that the human condition, violent forms of domination do emerge, they draw on desire, mortality, can all be somehow resolved seems precisely these idioms of age and gender to justify to be an especially dangerous one, an image of utopia themselves.

which always seems to lurk somewhere behind the Still, I think it would be a mistake to see the pretentions of Power and the state. Instead, as I’ve invisible violence and terror as simply a working out suggested, the spectral violence seems to emerge from of the “internal contradictions” created by those the very tensions inherent in the project of main-forms of inequality. One could, perhaps, make the taining an egalitarian society. Otherwise, one would at case that most real, tangible violence is. At least, it is least imagine the Tiv imagination would be more a somewhat notorious thing that, in societies where tumultuous than the Piaroa.

the only notable inequalities are based in gender, the only murders one is likely to observe are men killing That the state emerged from images of an impossible resolution of the human condition was Clastres’ point each other over women. Similarly, it does seem to be as well. He argued that historically, the institution of the the case, generally speaking, that the more state could not have possibly emerged from the polit-pronounced the differences between male and female ical institutions of anarchist societies, which were roles in a society, the more physically violent it tends designed to ensure this never happened. Instead, it to be. But this hardly means that if all inequalities could only have been from religious institutions: he vanished, then everything, even the imagination, pointed to the Tupinamba prophets who led the whole would become placid and untroubled. To some population on a vast migration in search of a “land

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without evil.” Of course, in later contexts, what Peter others like slaves. In the end, all relations of Lamborn Wilson calls “the Clastrian machine,” that set command (military service, wage labor, forced labor) of mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domi-came to be fused together in people’s minds as varianation, what I’m calling the apparatus of counterpower, tions on slavery; the very institutions which had can itself become caught in such apocalyptic fantasies.

previously been seen as beyond challenge were now the definition of illegitimacy, and this, especially Now, at this point the reader may be among those who had the least access to higher objecting, “Sure, but what does any of this have to do education and French Enlightenment ideas. Being with the kind of insurrectionary communities which

“Malagasy” came to be defined as rejecting such revolutionary theorists are normally referring to when foreign ways. If one combines this attitude with they use the word ‘counterpower’?”

constant passive resistance to state institutions, and Here it might be useful to look at the differ-the elaboration of autonomous, and relatively egali-ence between the first two cases and the third—
tarian modes of self-government, one could see what because the Malagasy communities I knew in 1990
happened as a revolution. After the financial crisis of were living in something which in many ways resem-the ‘80s, the state in much of the country effectively bled an insurrectionary situation. Between the nine-collapsed, or anyway devolved into a matter of hollow teenth century and the twentieth, there had been a form without the backing of systematic coercion.

remarkable transformation of popular attitudes. Just Rural people carried on much as they had before, about all reports from the last century insisted that, going to offices periodically to fill out forms even despite widespread resentment against the corrupt though they were no longer paying any real taxes, the and often brutal Malagasy government, no one ques-government was hardly providing services, and in the tioned the legitimacy of the monarchy itself, or event of theft or even murder, police would no longer particularly, their absolute personal loyalty to the come. If a revolution is a matter of people resisting Queen. Neither would anyone explicitly question the some form of power identified as oppressive, identi-legitimacy of slavery. After the French conquest of fying some key aspect of that power as the source of the island in 1895, followed immediately by the aboli-what is fundamentally objectionable about it, and tion of both the monarchy and slavery, all this seems then trying to get rid of one’s oppressors in such a to have changed extremely quickly. Before a genera-way as to try to eliminate that sort of power tion was out, one began to encounter the attitude that completely from daily life, then it is hard to deny I found to be well-nigh universal in the countryside a that, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. It hundred years later: slavery was evil, and monarchs might not have involved an actual uprising, but it was were seen as inherently immoral because they treated a revolution nonetheless.

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How long it would last is another question; it To sum up the argument so far, then: was a very fragile, tenuous sort of freedom. Many such enclaves have collapsed—in Madagascar as else-1) Counterpower is first and foremost rooted in where. Others endure; new ones are being created all the imagination; it emerges from the fact that all social systems are a tangle of contradictions, the time. The contemporary world is riddled with always to some degree at war with themselves.

such anarchic spaces, and the more successful they Or, more precisely, it is rooted in the relation are, the less likely we are to hear about them. It’s only between the practical imagination required to if such a space breaks down into violence that there’s maintain a society based on consensus (as any any chance outsiders will even find out that it exists.

society not based on violence must, ultimately, The puzzling question is how such profound be)—the constant work of imaginative identifi-changes in popular attitudes could happen so fast?

cation with others that makes understanding The likely answer is that they really didn’t; there were possible—and the spectral violence which probably things going on even under the nineteenth-appears to be its constant, perhaps inevitable century kingdom of which foreign observers (even corollary.

those long resident on the island) were simply 2) In egalitarian societies, counterpower might be unaware. But clearly, too, something about the impo-said to be the predominant form of social sition of colonial rule allowed for a rapid reshuffling power. It stands guard over what are seen as of priorities. This, I would argue, is what the ongoing certain frightening possibilities within the existence of deeply embedded forms of counterpower society itself: notably against the emergence of allows. A lot of the ideological work, in fact, of systematic forms of political or economic making a revolution was conducted precisely in the dominance.

spectral nightworld of sorcerers and witches; in redefinitions of the moral implications of different forms 2a) Institutionally, counterpower takes the of magical power. But this only underlines how these form of what we would call institutions of spectral zones are always the fulcrum of the moral direct democracy, consensus and mediation; imagination, a kind of creative reservoir, too, of that is, ways of publicly negotiating and controlling that inevitable internal tumult potential revolutionary change. It’s precisely from and transforming it into those social states these invisible spaces—invisible, most of all, to (or if you like, forms of value) that society power—whence the potential for insurrection, and sees as the most desirable: conviviality, the extraordinary social creativity that seems to unanimity, fertility, prosperity, beauty, emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments, however it may be framed.

actually comes.

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pretty vexed question but I am afraid it can’t be 3) In highly unequal societies, imaginative coun-avoided, since otherwise, many readers might not be terpower often defines itself against certain convinced there’s any reason to have an anarchist aspects of dominance that are seen as particu-anthropology to begin with.

larly obnoxious and can become an attempt to eliminate them from social relations completely. When it does, it becomes revolutionary.

3a) Institutionally, as an imaginative well, it is responsible for the creation of new social forms, and the revalorization or transformation of old ones, and also, 4) in moments of radical transformation—revolutions in the old-fashioned sense—this is precisely what allows for the notorious popular ability to innovate entirely new politics, economic, and social forms. Hence, it is the root of what Antonio Negri has called

“constituent power,” the power to create constitutions.

Most modern constitutional orders see themselves as having been created by rebellions: the American revolution, the French revolution, and so on. This has, of course, not always been the case. But this leads to a very important question, because any really politically engaged anthropology will have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything, really divides what we like to call the

“modern” world from the rest of human history, to which folks like the Piaroa, Tiv or Malagasy are normally relegated. This is as one might imagine a

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Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all Blowing Up Walls
sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; As I remarked, an anarchist anthropology doesn’t economic projects based on the idea of the gift really exist. There are only fragments. In the first part economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organiza-of this essay I tried to gather some of them, and to tions based on consensus and direct democracy...

Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated look for common themes; in this part I want to go examples. I’m talking about whole societies.

further, and imagine a body of social theory that Anarchist: Well, it’s not like people haven’t might exist at some time in the future.

tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain...

obvious objections

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

Before being able to do so I really do need to address The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because the usual objection to any project of this nature: that when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means the study of actually-existing anarchist societies is is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to simply irrelevant to the modern world. After all, aren’t produce an example of an anarchist state—that would we just talking about a bunch of primitives?

be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being For anarchists who do know something about asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A the government somehow plucked away: a situation in typical exchange goes something like this: which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anar-abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but chism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize me a single viable example of a society which has themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this existed without a government?

would never be allowed to happen. In the past, when-Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I ever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the commune and Spanish civil war are excellent exam-Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the ples—the politicians running pretty much every state Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...

in the vicinity have been willing to put their differ-Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primi-ences on hold until those trying to bring such a situa-tives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, tion about had been rounded up and shot.

technological society.

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There is a way out, which is to accept that edging a common set of legal principles...), but which anarchist forms of organization would not look lack a state apparatus (which, following Weber, one anything like a state. That they would involve an can define roughly as: a group of people who claim endless variety of communities, associations, that, at least when they are around and in their offi-networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, over-cial capacity, they are the only ones with the right to lapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, act violently). These, too, one can find, if one is and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite willing to look at relatively small communities far local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in away in time or space. But then one is told they don’t common is that none would involve anyone showing count for just this reason.

up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up So we’re back to the original problem. There and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists is assumed to be an absolute rupture between the are not actually trying to seize power within any world we live in, and the world inhabited by anyone national territory, the process of one system replacing who might be characterized as “primitive,” “tribal,”

the other will not take the form of some sudden revo-or even as “peasants.” Anthropologists are not to lutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the blame here: we have been trying for decades now to seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be convince the public that there’s no such thing as a gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organiza-

“primitive,” that “simple societies” are not really all tion on a world scale, new forms of communication, that simple, that no one ever existed in timeless isola-new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, tion, that it makes no sense to speak of some social eventually, make currently existing forms of power systems as more or less evolved; but so far, we’ve seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would made very little headway. It is almost impossible to mean that there are endless examples of viable anar-convince the average American that a bunch of chism: pretty much any form of organization would Amazonians could possibly have anything to teach count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some them—other than, conceivably, that we should all higher authority, from a klezmer band to the interna-abandon modern civilization and go live in tional postal service.

Amazonia—and this because they are assumed to live Unfortunately, this kind of argument does not in an absolutely different world. Which is, oddly seem to satisfy most skeptics. They want “societies.”

enough, again because of the way we are used to So one is reduced to scouring the historical and thinking about revolutions.

ethnographic record for entities that look like a Let me take up the argument I began to nation-state (one people, speaking a common sketch out in the last section and try to explain why I language, living within a bounded territory, acknowl-think this is true:

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a fairly brief manifesto
national power which then led to rapid industrial-concerning the concept of revolution: ization. As a result almost every twentieth-century The term “revolution” has been so relentlessly government in the global south determined to play cheapened in common usage that it can mean economic catch-up with the industrial powers had almost anything. We have revolutions every week also to claim to be a revolutionary regime.) now: banking revolutions, cybernetic revolutions, If there is one logical error underlying all this, medical revolutions, an internet revolution every it rests on imagining that social or even technolog-time someone invents some clever new piece of ical change takes the same form of what Thomas software.

Kuhn has called “the structure of scientific revolu-This kind of rhetoric is only possible because tions.” Kuhn is referring to events like the shift the commonplace definition of revolution has from a Newtonian to Einsteinian universe: always implied something in the nature of a para-suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough and digm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in afterwards, the universe is different. Applied to the nature of social reality after which everything anything other than scientific revolutions, it works differently, and previous categories no implies that the world really was equivalent to our longer apply. It is this which makes it possible to, knowledge of it, and the moment we change the say, claim that the modern world is derived from principles on which our knowledge is based, reality two “revolutions”: the French revolution and the changes too. This is just the sort of basic intellec-Industrial revolution, despite the fact that the two tual mistake developmental psychologists say we’re had almost nothing else in common other than supposed to get over in early childhood, but it seeming to mark a break with all that came before.

seems few of us really do.

One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood has In fact, the world is under no obligation to live noted, we are in the habit of discussing what we up to our expectations, and insofar as “reality”

call “modernity” as if it involved a combination of refers to anything, it refers to precisely that which English laissez faire economics, and French can never be entirely encompassed by our imagina-Republican government, despite the fact that the tive constructions. Totalities, in particular, are two never really occurred together: the industrial always creatures of the imagination. Nations, soci-revolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated, eties, ideologies, closed systems... none of these still largely medieval English constitution, and really exist. Reality is always infinitely messier than nineteenth-century France was anything but laissez that—even if the belief that they exist is an unde-faire.

niable social force. For one thing, the habit of (The one-time appeal of the Russian revolu-thought which defines the world, or society, as a tion for the “developing world” seems to derive totalizing system (in which every element takes on from the fact it’s the one example where both sorts its significance only in relation to the others) tends of revolution did seem to coincide: a seizure of to lead almost inevitably to a view of revolutions as

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cataclysmic ruptures. Since, after all, how else will almost certainly not be quite such a clean could one totalizing system be replaced by a break as such a phrase implies.

completely different one than by a cataclysmic What will it be, then? I have already made rupture? Human history thus becomes a series of some suggestions. A revolution on a world scale revolutions: the Neolithic revolution, the will take a very long time. But it is also possible to Industrial revolution, the Information revolution, recognize that it is already starting to happen. The etc., and the political dream becomes to somehow easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop take control of the process; to get to the point thinking about revolution as a thing—“the” revo-where we can cause a rupture of this sort, a lution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead momentous breakthrough that will not just happen ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then but result directly from some kind of collective suggest: revolutionary action is any collective will. “The revolution,” properly speaking.

action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some If so it’s not surprising that the moment form of power or domination and in doing so, radical thinkers felt they had to give up this dream, reconstitutes social relations—even within the their first reaction was to redouble their efforts to collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action identify revolutions happening anyway, to the does not necessarily have to aim to topple govern-point where in the eyes of someone like Paul ments. Attempts to create autonomous communi-Virilio, rupture is our permanent state of being, or ties in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ defini-for someone like Jean Baudrillard, the world now tion here: ones that constitute themselves, collec-changes completely every couple years, whenever tively make their own rules or principles of opera-he gets a new idea.

tion, and continually reexamine them), would, for This is not an appeal for a flat-out rejection of instance, be almost by definition revolutionary such imaginary totalities—even assuming this were acts. And history shows us that the continual accu-possible, which it probably isn’t, since they are mulation of such acts can change (almost) every-probably a necessary tool of human thought. It is thing.

an appeal to always bear in mind that they are just that: tools of thought. For instance, it is indeed a I’m hardly the first to have made an argument like very good thing to be able to ask “after the revolu-this—some such vision follows almost necessarily tion, how will we organize mass transportation?,”

once one is no longer thinking in terms of the frame-

“who will fund scientific research?,” or even, “after work of the state and seizure of state power. What I the revolution, do you think there will still be want to emphasize here is what this means for how fashion magazines?” The phrase is a useful mental we look at history.

hinge; even if we also recognize that in reality, unless we are willing to massacre thousands of people (and probably even then), the revolution

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a thought experiment, or, blowing up walls portant. In one sense everyone, every community, every individual for that matter, lives in their own unique universe. By “blowing up walls,” I mean most What I am proposing, essentially, is that we engage in of all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assump-a kind of thought experiment. What if, as a recent title tions which tell us we have nothing in common with put it, “we have never been modern”? What if there 98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really have never was any fundamental break, and therefore, we to think about them. Since, after all, if you assume the are not living in a fundamentally different moral, fundamental break, the only theoretical question you social, or political universe than the Piaroa or Tiv or can ask is some variation on “what makes us so rural Malagasy?

special?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decide There are a million different ways to define to at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite so

“modernity.” According to some it mainly has to do special as we might like to think, we can also begin to with science and technology, for others it’s a matter of think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.

individualism; others, capitalism, or bureaucratic rationality, or alienation, or an ideal of freedom of one sort An example:

or another. However they define it, almost everyone There has long been a related debate over what agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seven-particular advantage “the West,” as Western teenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Europe and its settler colonies have liked to call Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western themselves, had over the rest of the world that Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, allowed them to conquer so much of it in the four we became “modern.” And that once we did, we hundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it a became a fundamentally different sort of creature than more efficient economic system? A superior mili-anything that had come before.

tary tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity, or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?

But what if we kicked this whole apparatus Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did it away? What if we blew up the wall? What if we have to do with more individualistic family accepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco da arrangements? Some combination of all these Gama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us?

factors? To a large extent, Western historical soci-Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vasco ology has been dedicated to solving this problem. It da Gama ever were?

is a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptions I’m not arguing that nothing important has are that it is only quite recently that scholars have changed over the last five hundred years, any more come to even suggest that perhaps, Western than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unim-Europe didn’t really have any fundamental advantage at all. That European technology, economic

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and social arrangements, state organization, and the were right to assume that whatever it was that rest in 1450 were in no way more “advanced” than made it possible for Europeans to dispossess, what prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, or abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of other most any other urbanized part of the Old World at human beings, it was a mark of superiority and that the time. Europe might have been ahead in some therefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting to areas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certain non-Europeans to suggest they didn’t have it too. It forms of banking), but lagged significantly behind seems to me that it is far more insulting to suggest in others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agricultural anyone would ever have behaved like Europeans of technology, techniques of land warfare). Perhaps the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.g., there was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps what depopulating large portions of the Andes or central happened was just a coincidence. Western Europe Mexico by working millions to death in the mines, happened to be located in that part of the Old or kidnapping a significant chunk of the population World where it was easiest to sail to the New; those of Africa to work to death on sugar plantations—
who first did so had the incredible luck to discover unless one has some actual evidence to suggest they lands full of enormous wealth, populated by were so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear to defenseless stone-age peoples who conveniently have been plenty of examples of people in a posi-began dying almost the moment they arrived; the tion to wreak similar havoc on a world scale—say, resultant windfall, and the demographic advantage the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—but from having lands to siphon off excess population who didn’t, not so much because they scrupled to, was more than enough to account for the European so much as because it would never have occurred to powers’ later successes. It was then possible to shut them to act this way to begin with.

down the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industry In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on how and create the space for an industrial revolution, one chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such an authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yet extent that in technological terms—particularly another accomplishment which Westerners arro-industrial and military technology—it fell increas-gantly assume they invented themselves, and there-ingly behind.

fore define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matter A number of authors (Blaut, Goody, of commerce and financial instruments. But that Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been making willingness to put considerations of profit above some variation of this argument in recent years. It any human concern which drove Europeans to is at root a moral argument, an attack on Western depopulate whole regions of the world in order to arrogance. As such it is extremely important. The place the maximum amount of silver or sugar on only problem with it, in moral terms, is that it the market was certainly something else. It seems tends to confuse means and inclination. That is, it to me it deserves a name of its own. For this reason rests on the assumption that Western historians it seems better to me to continue to define capi-

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talism as its opponents prefer, as founded on the be more precise, the West might have introduced connection between a wage system and a principle some new possibilities, but it hasn’t canceled any of of the never-ending pursuit of profit for its own the old ones out.

sake. This in turn makes it possible to argue this The first thing one discovers when one tries to was a strange perversion of normal commercial think this way is that it is extremely difficult to do so.

logic which happened to take hold in one, previ-One has to cut past the endless host of intellectual ously rather barbarous, corner of the world and tricks and gimmicks that create the wall of distance encouraged the inhabitants to engage in what around “modern” societies. Let me give just one might otherwise have been considered unspeakable forms of behavior. Again, all this does not neces-example. It is common to distinguish between what sarily mean that one has to agree with the premise are called “kinship-based societies” and modern ones, that once capitalism came into existence, it which are supposed to be based on impersonal institu-instantly became a totalizing system and that from tions like the market or the state. The societies tradi-that moment, everything else that happened can tionally studied by anthropologists have kinship only be understood in relation to it. But it suggests systems. They are organized into descent groups—
one of the axes on which one can begin to think lineages, or clans, or moieties, or ramages—which about what really is different nowadays.

trace descent to common ancestors, live mainly on ancestral territories, are seen as consisting of similar Let us imagine, then, that the West, however

“kinds” of people—an idea usually expressed through defined, was nothing special, and further, that there physical idioms of common flesh, or bone, or blood, has been no one fundamental break in human history.

or skin. Often kinship systems become a basis of social No one can deny there have been massive quantitative inequality as some groups are seen as higher than changes: the amount of energy consumed, the speed at others, as for example in caste systems; always, kinship which humans can travel, the number of books establishes the terms for sex and marriage and the produced and read, all these numbers have been rising passing of property over the generations.

exponentially. But let us imagine for the sake of argu-The term “kin-based” is often used the way ment that these quantitative changes do not, in them-people used to use the word “primitive”; these are selves, necessarily imply a change in quality: we are exotic societies which are in no way like our own.

not living in a fundamentally different sort of society (That’s why it is assumed we need anthropology to than has ever existed before, we are not living in a study them; entirely different disciplines, like soci-fundamentally different sort of time, the existence of ology and economics, are assumed to be required to factories or microchips do not mean political or social study modern ones.) But then the exact same people possibilities have changed in their basic nature: Or, to who make this argument will usually take it for

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granted that the main social problems in our own, erable class mobility, when asked to adduce examples

“modern” society (or “postmodern”: for present all they can usually come up with is a handful of rags purposes it’s exactly the same thing) revolve around to riches stories. It is almost impossible to find an race, class, and gender. In other words, precisely from example of an American who was born rich and ended the nature of our kinship system.

up a penniless ward of the state. So all we are really After all, what does it mean to say most dealing with then is the fact, familiar to anyone who’s Americans see the world as divided into “races”? It studied history, that ruling elites (unless polygamous) means they believe that it is divided into groups which are never able to reproduce themselves demographi-are presumed to share a common descent and cally, and therefore always need some way to recruit geographical origin, who for this reason are seen as new blood (and if they are polygamous, of course, that different “kinds” of people, that this idea is usually itself becomes a mode of social mobility).

expressed through physical idioms of blood and skin, Gender relations are of course the very fabric and that the resulting system regulates sex, marriage, of kinship.

and the inheritance of property and therefore creates and maintains social inequalities. We are talking about what would it take to knock down these walls?

something very much like a classic clan system, except on a global scale. One might object that there is a lot I’d say a lot. Too many people have too much invested of interracial marriage going on, and even more inter-in maintaining them. This includes anarchists, inci-racial sex, but then, this is only what we should expect.

dentally. At least in the United States, the anarchists Statistical studies always reveal that, even in “tradi-who do take anthropology the most seriously are the tional” societies like the Nambikwara or Arapesh, at Primitivists, a small but very vocal faction who argue least 5-10% of young people marry someone they’re that the only way to get humanity back on track is to not supposed to. Statistically, the phenomena are of shuck off modernity entirely. Inspired by Marshall about equal significance. Social class is slightly more Sahlins’ essay “The Original Affluent Society,” they complicated, since the groups are less clearly bounded.

propose that there was a time when alienation and Still, the difference between a ruling class and a inequality did not exist, when everyone was a hunter-collection of people who happen to have done well is, gathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberation precisely, kinship: the ability to marry one’s children can only come if we abandon “civilization” and return off appropriately, and pass one’s advantages on to one’s to the Upper Paleolithic, or at least the early Iron descendants. People marry across class lines too, but Age. In fact we know almost nothing about life in the rarely very far; and while most Americans seem to be Paleolithic, other than the sort of thing that can be under the impression that this is a country of consid-

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gleaned from studying very old skulls (i.e., in the word literally means “those who do not cut their hair.”

This refers to a Sakalava custom: when a king died, Paleolithic people had much better teeth; they also his male subjects were all expected to crop off their died much more frequently from traumatic head hair as a sign of mourning. The Tsimihety were those wounds). But what we see in the more recent ethno-who refused, and hence rejected the authority of the graphic record is endless variety. There were hunter-Sakalava monarchy; to this day they are marked by gatherer societies with nobles and slaves, there are resolutely egalitarian social organization and prac-agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian. Even in tices. They are, in other words, the anarchists of Clastres’ favored stomping grounds in Amazonia, one northwest Madagascar. To this day they have main-finds some groups who can justly be described as anar-tained a reputation as masters of evasion: under the French, administrators would complain that they chists, like the Piaroa, living alongside others (say, the could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a warlike Sherente) who are clearly anything but. And road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms

“societies” are constantly reforming, skipping back with apparently cooperative elders, and return with and forth between what we think of as different evolu-the equipment a week later only to discover the tionary stages.

village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant I do not think we’re losing much if we admit had moved in with some relative in another part of that humans never really lived in the garden of Eden.

the country.

Knocking the walls down can allow us to see this history as a resource to us in much more interesting What especially interests me here is the principle of ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, in

“ethnogenesis,” as it’s called nowadays. The Tsimihety industrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmolo-are now considered a foko—a people or ethnic group—
gies); other societies have social movements and revo-but their identity emerged as a political project. The lutions. Which means, among other things, that desire to live free of Sakalava domination was trans-radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over lated into a desire—one which came to suffuse all the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary social institutions from village assemblies to mortuary history.

ritual—to live in a society free of markers of hierarchy.

This then became institutionalized as a way of life of a Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the community living together, which then in turn came west coast of Madagascar was divided into a series to be thought of as a particular “kind” of people, an of related kingdoms under the Maroansetra dynasty.

ethnic group—people who also, since they tend to Their subjects were collectively known as the intermarry, come to be seen as united by common Sakalava. In northwest Madagascar there is now an ancestry. It is easier to see this happening in

“ethnic group” ensconced in a somewhat difficult, Madagascar where everyone pretty much speaks the hilly back country referred to as the Tsimihety. The

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same language. But I doubt it is that unusual. The only some ways analogous to Weber’s “routinization of ethnogenesis literature is a fairly new one, but it is charisma,” full of strategies, reversals, diversions of becoming increasingly clear that most of human energy... Social fields which are, in their essence, history was characterized by continual social change.

arenas for the recognition of certain forms of value Rather than timeless groups living for thousands of can become borders to be defended; representations years in their ancestral territories, new groups were or media of value become numinous powers in them-being created, and old ones dissolving, all the time.

selves; creation slips into commemoration; the ossified Many of what we have come to think of as tribes, or remains of liberatory movements can end up, under nations, or ethnic groups were originally collective the grip of states, transformed into what we call projects of some sort. In the Tsimihety case we are

“nationalisms” which are either mobilized to rally talking about a revolutionary project, at least revolu-support for the state machinery or become the basis tionary in that sense I have been developing here: a for new social movements opposed to them.

conscious rejection of certain forms of overarching The critical thing here, it seems to me, is that political power which also causes people to rethink this petrification does not only apply to social projects.

and reorganize the way they deal with one another on It can also happen to the states themselves. This is a an everyday basis. Most are not. Some are egalitarian, phenomenon theorists of social struggle have rarely others are about promoting a certain vision of fully appreciated.

authority or hierarchy. Still, one is dealing with something very much along the lines of what we’d think of When the French colonial administration established itself in Madagascar it duly began dividing the popula-as a social movement; it is just that, in the absence of tion up into a series of “tribes”: Merina, Betsileo, broadsides, rallies and manifestos, the media through Bara, Sakalava, Vezo, Tsimihety, etc. Since there are which one can create and demand new forms of (what few clear distinctions of language, it is easier here, we’d call) social, economic or political life, to pursue than in most places, to discern some of the principles different forms of value, were different: one had to by which these divisions came about. Some are polit-work through literally or figuratively sculpting flesh, ical. The Sakalava are noted subjects of the through music and ritual, food and clothing, and ways Maroantsetra dynasty (which created at least three of disposing of the dead. But in part as a result, over kingdoms along the West coast). The Tsimihety are those who refused allegiance. Those called the time, what were once projects become identities, even

“Merina” are those highland people originally united ones continuous with nature. They ossify and harden by allegiance to a king named Andrianampoinimerina; into self-evident truths or collective properties.

subjects of other highland kingdoms to the south, A whole discipline could no doubt be invented who the Merina conquered almost immediately to understand precisely how this happens: a process in thereafter, are referred to collectively as Betsileo.

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Some names have to do with where people live or school. The Sakalava are quite another story.

how they make a living: the Tanala are “forest Sakalava is still very much a living identity on the people” on the east coast; on the west coast, the West coast, and it continues to mean, followers of Mikea are hunters and foragers and the Vezo, fisher-the Maroantsetra dynasty. But for the last hundred folk. But even here there are usually political and fifty years or so, the primary loyalties of most elements: the Vezo lived alongside the Sakalava Sakalava have been to the members of this dynasty monarchies but like the Tsimihety, they managed to who are dead. While living royalty are largely remain independent of them because, as legend has ignored, the ancient kings’ tombs are still continually it, whenever they learned royal representatives were rebuilt and redecorated in vast communal projects on the way to visit them, they would all get in their and this is what being Sakalava is seen largely to be canoes and wait offshore until they went away.

about. And dead kings still make their wishes Those fishing villages that did succumb became known—through spirit mediums who are usually Sakalava, not Vezo.

elderly women of commoner descent.

The Merina, Sakalava, and Betsileo are by far the most numerous however. So most Malagasy, In many other parts of Madagascar as well, it often then, are defined, not exactly by their political loyal-seems that no one really takes on their full authority ties, but by the loyalties their ancestors had some-until they are dead. So perhaps the Sakalava case is time around 1775 or 1800. The interesting thing is not that extraordinary. But it reveals one very what happened to these identities once the kings common way of avoiding the direct effects of power: were no longer around. Here the Merina and Betsileo seem to represent two opposite possibili-if one cannot simply step out of its path, like the Vezo ties.

or Tsimihety, one can, as it were, try to fossilize it. In Many of these ancient kingdoms were little more the Sakalava case the ossification of the state is quite than institutionalized extortion systems; insofar as literal: the kings who are still worshipped take the ordinary folk actually participated in royal politics, it physical form of royal relics, they are literally teeth was through ritual labor: building royal palaces and and bones. But this approach is probably far more tombs, for example, in which each clan was usually commonplace than we would be given to suspect.

assigned some very specific honorific role. Within Kajsia Eckholm for example has recently made the Merina kingdom this system ended up being so thoroughly abused that by the time the French the intriguing suggestion that the kind of divine king-arrived, it had been almost entirely discredited and ship Sir James Frazer wrote about in The Golden royal rule became, as I mentioned, identified with Bough, in which kings were hedged about with endless slavery and forced labor; as a result, the “Merina”

ritual and taboo (not to touch the earth, not to see the now mainly exist on paper. One never hears anyone sun...), was not, as we normally assume, an archaic in the countryside referring to themselves that way form of kingship, but in most cases, a very late one.

except perhaps in essays they have to write in

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She gives the example of the Kongo monarchy, which mass defection by those wishing to create new forms when the Portugese first showed up in the late of community. One need only glance at the historical fifteenth century doesn’t seem to have been particu-record to confirm that most successful forms of larly more ritualized than the monarchy in Portugal or popular resistance have taken precisely this form.

Spain at the same time. There was a certain amount of They have not involved challenging power head on court ceremonial, but nothing that got in the way of (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, governing. It was only later, as the kingdom collapsed turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the into civil war and broke into tinier and tinier frag-very thing one first challenged) but from one or ments, that its rulers became increasingly sacred another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from beings. Elaborate rituals were created, restrictions flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.

multiplied, until by the end we read about “kings”

One Autonomist historian, Yann Moulier Boutang, has who were confined to small buildings, or literally even argued that the history of capitalism has been a castrated on ascending the throne. As a result they series of attempts to solve the problem of worker ruled very little; most BaKongo had in fact passed to a mobility—hence the endless elaboration of institutions largely self-governing system, though also a very like indenture, slavery, coolie systems, contract tumultuous one, caught in the throes of the slave-workers, guest workers, innumerable forms of border trade.

control—since, if the system ever really came close to Is any of this relevant to contemporary its own fantasy version of itself, in which workers were concerns? Very much so, it seems to me. Autonomist free to hire on and quit their work wherever and thinkers in Italy have, over the last couple decades, whenever they wanted, the entire system would developed a theory of what they call revolutionary collapse. It’s for precisely this reason that the one most

“exodus.” It is inspired in part by particularly Italian consistent demand put forward by the radical elements conditions—the broad refusal of factory work among in the globalization movement—from the Italian young people, the flourishing of squats and occupied Autonomists to North American anarchists—has

“social centers” in so many Italian cities... But in all always been global freedom of movement, “real glob-this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory alization,” the destruction of borders, a general tearing for future social movements, anticipating trends that down of walls.

are now beginning to happen on a global scale.

The kind of tearing down of conceptual walls The theory of exodus proposes that the most I’ve been proposing here makes it possible for us not effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal only to confirm the importance of defection, it state is not through direct confrontation but by means promises an infinitely richer conception of how alter-of what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,”

native forms of revolutionary action might work. This

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is a history which has largely yet to be written, but state apparatus itself, in the absence of a politics of there are glimmerings. Peter Lamborn Wilson has direct confrontation. No doubt some states and corpo-produced the brightest of these, in a series of essays rate elites will collapse of their own dead weight; a few which include reflections, on, among other things, the already have; but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in collapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures which they all will. Here, the Sakalava and BaKongo through much of eastern North America. These were might be able to provide us some useful suggestions.

societies apparently dominated by priestly elites, caste-What cannot be destroyed can, nonetheless, be based social structures, and human sacrifice—which diverted, frozen, transformed, and gradually deprived mysteriously disappeared, being replaced by far more of its substance—which in the case of states, is ulti-egalitarian hunter/gathering or horticultural societies.

mately their capacity to inspire terror. What would He suggests, interestingly enough, that the famous this mean under contemporary conditions? It’s not Native American identification with nature might not entirely clear. Perhaps existing state apparati will grad-really have been a reaction to European values, but to ually be reduced to window-dressing as the substance a dialectical possibility within their own societies from is pulled out of them from above and below: i.e., both which they had quite consciously run away. The story from the growth of international institutions, and continues through the defection of the Jamestown from devolution to local and regional forms of self-settlers, a collection of servants abandoned in the first governance. Perhaps government by media spectacle North American colony in Virginia by their will devolve into spectacle pure and simple (somewhat gentleman patrons, who apparently ended up along the lines of what Paul Lafargue, Marx’s West becoming Indians, to an endless series of “pirate Indian son-in-law and author of The Right to Be Lazy, utopias,” in which British renegades teamed up with implied when he suggested that after the revolution, Muslim corsairs, or joined native communities from politicians would still be able to fulfill a useful social Hispaniola to Madagascar, hidden “triracial” republics function in the entertainment industry). More likely it founded by escaped slaves at the margins of European will happen in ways we cannot even anticipate. But no settlements, Antinomians, and other little-known doubt there are ways in which it is happening already.

libertarian enclaves that riddled the continent even As Neoliberal states move towards new forms of before the Shakers and Fourierists and all the better-feudalism, concentrating their guns increasingly known nineteenth-century “intentional communities.”

around gated communities, insurrectionary spaces Most of these little utopias were even more open up that we don’t even know about. The Merina marginal than the Vezo or Tsimihety were in rice farmers described in the last section understand Madagascar; all of them were eventually gobbled up.

what many would-be revolutionaries do not: that there Which leads to the question of how to neutralize the are times when the stupidest thing one could possibly

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do is raise a red or black flag and issue defiant declara-Tenets of a Non-existent Science tions. Sometimes the sensible thing is just to pretend nothing has changed, allow official state representa-Let me outline a few of the areas of theory an anar-tives to keep their dignity, even show up at their chist anthropology might wish to explore: offices and fill out a form now and then, but otherwise, ignore them.

1) A THEORY OF THE STATE

States have a peculiar dual character. They are at the same time forms of institutionalized raiding or extortion, and utopian projects. The first certainly reflects the way states are actually experienced, by any communities that retain some degree of autonomy; the second however is how they tend to appear in the written record.

In one sense states are the “imaginary totality”

par excellence, and much of the confusion entailed in theories of the state historically lies in an inability or unwillingness to recognize this. For the most part, states were ideas, ways of imagining social order as something one could get a grip on, models of control. This is why the first known works of social theory, whether from Persia, or China, or ancient Greece, were always framed as theories of statecraft. This has had two disastrous effects. One is to give utopianism a bad name. (The word “utopia” first calls to mind the image of an ideal city, usually, with perfect geometry—the image seems to harken back originally to the royal military camp: a geometrical space which is entirely the emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasy of total control.) All this has had dire political consequences, to say the least. The second is that we tend to assume that states, and social order, even societies, largely correspond. In other words, we have a tendency to take the most grandiose,

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even paranoid, claims of world-rulers seriously, touch when it came to the day-to-day control of its assuming that whatever cosmological projects they subjects’ lives, particularly in comparison with the claimed to be pursuing actually did correspond, at degree of control exercised by Athenians over their least roughly, to something on the ground.

slaves or Spartans over the overwhelming majority Whereas it is likely that in many such cases, these of the Laconian population, who were helots.

claims ordinarily only applied fully within a few Whatever the ideals, the reality, for most people dozen yards of the monarch in any direction, and involved, was much the other way around.

most subjects were much more likely to see ruling One of the most striking discoveries of evolu-elites, on a day-to-day basis, as something much tionary anthropology has been that it is perfectly along the lines of predatory raiders.

possible to have kings and nobles and all the exte-An adequate theory of states would then have rior trappings of monarchy without having a state to begin by distinguishing in each case between the in the mechanical sense at all. One should think relevant ideal of rulership (which can be almost this might be of some interest to all those political anything, a need to enforce military style discipline, philosophers who spill so much ink arguing about the ability to provide perfect theatrical representa-theories of “sovereignty”—since it suggests that tion of gracious living which will inspire others, the most sovereigns were not heads of state and that need to provide the gods with endless human their favorite technical term actually is built on a hearts to fend off the apocalypse...), and the near-impossible ideal, in which royal power actually mechanics of rule, without assuming that there is does manage to translate its cosmological preten-necessarily all that much correspondence between sions into genuine bureaucratic control of a given them. (There might be. But this has to be empiri-territorial population. (Something like this started cally established.) For example: much of the happening in Western Europe in the sixteenth and mythology of “the West” goes back to Herodotus’

seventeenth centuries, but almost as soon as it did, description of an epochal clash between the Persian the sovereign’s personal power was replaced by a Empire, based on an ideal of obedience and fictive person called “the people,” allowing the absolute power, and the Greek cities of Athens and bureaucracy to take over almost entirely.) But so far Sparta, based on ideals of civic autonomy, freedom as I’m aware, political philosophers have as yet had and equality. It’s not that these ideas—especially nothing to say on the subject. I suspect this is their vivid representations in poets like Aeschylus largely due to an extremely poor choice of terms.

or historians like Herodotus—are not important.

Evolutionary anthropologists refer to kingdoms One could not possibly understand Western history which lack full-fledged coercive bureaucracies as without them. But their very importance and vivid-

“chiefdoms,” a term which evokes images more of ness long blinded historians to what is becoming Geronimo or Sitting Bull than Solomon, Louis the the increasingly clear reality: that whatever its Pious, or the Yellow Emperor. And of course the ideals, the Achmaenid Empire was a pretty light evolutionist framework itself ensures that such

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structures are seen as something which immediately if one considers the matter historically, it’s hard to precedes the emergence of the state, not an alterna-understand why it should be. Modern Western tive form, or even something a state can turn into.

notions of citizenship and political freedoms are To clarify all this would be a major historical usually seen to derive from two traditions, one orig-project.

inating in ancient Athens, the other primarily stem-ming from medieval England (where it tends to be 2) A THEORY OF POLITICAL ENTITIES
traced back to the assertion of aristocratic privilege THAT ARE NOT STATES
against the Crown in the Magna Carta, Petition of So that’s one project: to reanalyze the state as a rela-Right, etc., and then the gradual extension of these tion between a utopian imaginary, and a messy same rights to the rest of the population). In fact reality involving strategies of flight and evasion, there is no consensus among historians that either predatory elites, and a mechanics of regulation and classical Athens or medieval England were states at control.

all—and moreover, precisely for the reason that citi-All this highlights the pressing need for another zens’ rights in the first, and aristocratic privilege in project: one which will ask, If many political entities the second, were so well established. It is hard to we are used to seeing as states, at least in any think of Athens as a state, with a monopoly of force Weberian sense, are not, then what are they? And by the state apparatus, if one considers that the what does that imply about political possibilities?

minimal government apparatus which did exist In a way it’s kind of amazing that such a theo-consisted entirely of slaves, owned collectively by retical literature doesn’t already exist. It’s yet the citizenry. Athens’ police force consisted of another sign, I guess, of how hard it is for us to Scythian archers imported from what’s now Russia think outside the statist framework. An excellent or Ukraine, and something of their legal standing case in point: one of the most consistent demands of might be gleaned from the fact that, by Athenian

“anti-globalization” activists has been for the elimi-law, a slave’s testimony was not admissible as nation of border restrictions. If we’re to globalize, evidence in court unless it was obtained under we say, let’s get serious about it. Eliminate national torture.

borders. Let people come and go as they please, and So what do we call such entities? “Chiefdoms”?

live wherever they like. The demand is often One might conceivably be able to describe King phrased in terms of some notion of global citizen-John as a “chief” in the technical, evolutionary ship. But this inspires immediate objections: doesn’t sense, but applying the term to Pericles does seem a call for “global citizenship” mean calling for some absurd. Neither can we continue to call ancient kind of global state? Would we really want that? So Athens a “city-state” if it wasn’t a state at all. It then the question becomes how do we theorize a seems we just don’t have the intellectual tools to citizenship outside the state. This is often treated as talk about such things. The same goes for the a profound, perhaps insurmountable, dilemma; but typology of types of state, or state-like entities in

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more recent times: an historian named Spruyt has it. At the very least we need a proper theory of the suggested that in the sixteenth and seventeenth history of wage labor, and relations like it. Since centuries the territorial nation-state was hardly the after all, it is in performing wage labor, not in only game in town; there were other possibilities buying and selling, that most humans now waste (Italian city-states, which actually were states; the away most of their waking hours and it is that Hanseatic league of confederated mercantile which makes them miserable. (Hence the IWW
centers, which involved an entirely different didn’t say they were “anti-capitalist,” much though conception of sovereignty) which didn’t happen to they were; they got right to the point and said they win out—at least, right away—but were no less were “against the wage system.”) The earliest wage intrinsically viable. I have myself suggested that one labor contracts we have on record appear to be reason the territorial nation-state ended up winning really about the rental of slaves. What about a out was because, in this early stage of globalization, model of capitalism that sets out from that? Where Western elites were trying to model themselves on anthropologists like Jonathan Friedman argue that China, the only state in existence at the time which ancient slavery was really just an older version of actually seemed to conform to their ideal of a capitalism, we could just as easily—actually, a lot uniform population, who in Confucian terms were more easily—argue that modern capitalism is really the source of sovereignty, creators of a vernacular just a newer version of slavery. Instead of people literature, subject to a uniform code of laws, selling us or renting us out we rent out ourselves.

administered by bureaucrats chosen by merit, But it’s basically the same sort of arrangement.

trained in that vernacular literature... With the current crisis of the nation-state and rapid increase 4) POWER/IGNORANCE, or
in international institutions which are not exactly POWER/STUPIDITY
states, but in many ways just as obnoxious, juxta-Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that posed against attempts to create international insti-identifies knowledge and power, and insists that tutions which do many of the same things as states brute force is no longer a major factor in social but would be considerably less obnoxious, the lack control. They love it because it flatters them: the of such a body of theory is becoming a genuine perfect formula for people who like to think of crisis.

themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen 3) YET ANOTHER
other people in an institutional environment. Of THEORY OF CAPITALISM
course, if any of these academics were to walk into One is loathe to suggest this but the endless drive their university library to consult some volume of to naturalize capitalism by reducing it to a matter Foucault without having remembered to bring a of commercial calculation, which then allows one valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway, to claim it is as old as Sumer, just screams out for they would soon discover that brute force is really

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not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it.

a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit This is why violence has always been the favored people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of In fact the threat of that man with the stick stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come permeates our world at every moment; most of us up with an intelligent response. It is also of course have given up even thinking of crossing the innu-the basis of the state.

merable lines and barriers he creates, just so we Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If not create stupidity. They are ways of managing you see a hungry woman standing several yards situations that are already inherently stupid because away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason force.

you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the with a big stick will come and very likely hit you.

relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in that the folks on the bottom (the victims of struc-reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter tural violence) are always imagining what it must be community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of struc-have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in tural violence), but it almost never occurs to the Santa suits, take toys from department stores and folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be distribute them to children on the street, partly just on the bottom? Human beings being the sympa-so everyone can relish the images of the cops thetic creatures that they are this tends to become beating down Santa and snatching the toys back one of the main bastions of any system of from crying children.

inequality—the downtrodden actually care about Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a their oppressors, at least, far more than their theory of the relation of power not with knowl-oppressors care about them—but this seems itself edge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because to be an effect of structural violence.

violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you 5) AN ECOLOGY
have the power to hit people over the head when-OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS
ever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself What kinds exist? In what environments do they too much figuring out what they think is going on, thrive? Where did the bizarre notion of the and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence

“corporation” come from anyway?

the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, 6) A THEORY OF POLITICAL HAPPINESS
passions, insights, desires, and mutual understand-Rather than just a theory of why most contempo-ings that human life is really made of, is to make a rary people never experience it. That would be easy.

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7) HIERARCHY
pleasure. If one wishes to emphasize commonality, A theory of how structures of hierarchy, by their the easiest way is to point out that they also feel own logic, necessarily create their own counter-pain.

image or negation. They do, you know.

9) ONE OR SEVERAL THEORIES OF

8) SUFFERING AND PLEASURE: ON THE

ALIENATION

PRIVATIZATION OF DESIRE

This is the ultimate prize: what, precisely, are the It is common wisdom among anarchists, autono-possible dimensions of non-alienated experience?

mists, Situationists, and other new revolutionaries How might its modalities be catalogued, or consid-that the old breed of grim, determined, self-sacri-ered? Any anarchist anthropology worth its salt ficing revolutionary, who sees the world only in would have to pay particular attention to this ques-terms of suffering will ultimately only produce tion because this is precisely what all those punks, more suffering himself. Certainly that’s what has hippies, and activists of every stripe most look to tended to happen in the past. Hence the emphasis anthropology to learn. It’s the anthropologists, so on pleasure, carnival, on creating “temporary terrified of being accused of romanticizing the autonomous zones” where one can live as if one is societies they study that they refuse to even already free. The ideal of the “festival of resistance”

suggest there might be an answer, who leave them with its crazy music and giant puppets is, quite no recourse but to fall into the arms of the real consciously, to return to the late medieval world of romanticizers. Primitivists like John Zerzan, who huge wickerwork giants and dragons, maypoles and in trying to whittle away what seems to divide us morris dancing; the very world the Puritan from pure, unmediated experience, end up whit-pioneers of the “capitalist spirit” hated so much and tling away absolutely everything. Zerzan’s increas-ultimately managed to destroy. The history of capi-ingly popular works end up condemning the very talism moves from attacks on collective, festive existence of language, math, time keeping, music, consumption to the promulgation of highly and all forms of art and representation. They are personal, private, even furtive forms (after all, once all written off as forms of alienation, leaving us they had all those people dedicating all their time with a kind of impossible evolutionary ideal: the to producing stuff instead of partying, they did only truly non-alienated human being was not have to figure out a way to sell it all); a process of even quite human, but more a kind of perfect ape, the privitization of desire. The theoretical question: in some kind of currently-unimaginable telepathic how to reconcile all this with the disturbing ˆ

ˆ
theo-
connection with its fellows, at one with wild retical insight of people like Slavoj Zizek: that if nature, living maybe about a hundred thousand one wishes to inspire ethnic hatred, the easiest way years ago. True revolution could only mean to do so is to concentrate on the bizarre, perverse somehow returning to that. How it is that affi-ways in which the other group is assumed to pursue cionados of this sort of thing still manage to

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engage in effective political action (because it’s been my experience that many do quite remarkable work) is itself a fascinating sociological question.

But surely, an alternative analysis of alienation might be useful here.

We could start with a kind of sociology of micro-utopias, the counterpart of a parallel typology of forms of alienation, alienated and non-alienated forms of action... The moment we stop insisting on viewing all forms of action only by their function in reproducing larger, total, forms of inequality of power, we will also be able to see that anarchist social relations and non-alienated forms of action are all around us. And this is critical Q: How many voters does it take to change a because it already shows that anarchism is, already, light bulb?

and has always been, one of the main bases for A: None. Because voters can’t change anything.

human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have. We also There is of course no single anarchist program—nor engage in artistic creativity, which I think if exam-could there really be—but it might be helpful to end ined would reveal that many of the least alienated by giving the reader some idea about current direc-forms of experience do usually involve an element tions of thought and organizing.

of what a Marxist would call fetishization. It is all the more pressing to develop such a theory if you accept that (as I have frequently argued) revolu-

(1) Globalization and the Elimination of tionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most North-South Inequalities
oppressed.

As I’ve mentioned, the “anti-globalization movement”

is increasingly anarchist in inspiration. In the long run the anarchist position on globalization is obvious: the effacement of nation-states will mean the elimination of national borders. This is genuine globalization. Anything else is just a sham. But for the interim, there are all sorts of concrete suggestions on how the

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situation can be improved right now, without falling The point is that despite the endless rhetoric back on statist, protectionist, approaches. One about “complex, subtle, intractable issues” (justifying example:

decades of expensive research by the rich and their Once during the protests before the World well-paid flunkies), the anarchist program would Economic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corpo-probably have resolved most of them in five or six rate flacks and politicians, networking and sharing years. But, you will say, these demands are entirely cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to be unrealistic! True enough. But why are they unreal-discussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I was istic? Mainly, because those rich guys meeting in the invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their Waldorf would never stand for any of it. This is why representatives. As it happened the task went to we say they are themselves the problem.

another activist but I did get far enough to prepare a three-point program that I think would have taken (2) The Struggle Against Work care of the problem nicely:

The struggle against work has always been central to

• an immediate amnesty on international debt anarchist organizing. By this I mean, not the struggle (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either but it’s a different issue.) for better worker conditions or higher wages, but the

• an immediate cancellation of all patents and struggle to eliminate work, as a relation of domina-other intellectual property rights related to tech-tion, entirely. Hence the IWW slogan “against the nology more than one year old wage system.” This is a long-term goal of course. In

• the elimination of all restrictions on global the shorter term, what can’t be eliminated can at least freedom of travel or residence be reduced. Around the turn of the century, the Wobblies and other anarchists played the central role The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The in winning workers the 5-day week and 8-hour day.

moment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos, In Western Europe social democratic govern-was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or ments are now, for the first time in almost a century, Rotterdam, the government of every rich and once again reducing the working week. They are only powerful country in the world would certainly decide instituting trifling changes (from a 40-hour week to nothing was more important than finding a way to 35), but in the US no one’s even discussing that much.

make sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to Instead they are discussing whether to eliminate time-stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up and-a-half for overtime. This despite the fact that with something?

Americans now spend more hours working than any

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other population in the world, including Japan. So the out a way to find out about. The elimination of Wobblies have reappeared, with what was to be the radical inequalities would mean we would no longer next step in their program, even back in the ‘20s: the require the services of most of the millions currently 16-hour week. (“4-day week, 4-hour day.”) Again, on employed as doormen, private security forces, prison the face of it, this seems completely unrealistic, even guards, or SWAT teams—not to mention the military.

insane. But has anyone carried out a feasibility study?

Beyond that, we’d have to do research. Financiers, After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that a insurers, and investment bankers are all essentially considerable chunk of the hours worked in America parasitic beings, but there might be some useful func-are only actually necessary to compensate for prob-tions in these sectors that could not simply be lems created by the fact that Americans work too replaced with software. All in all we might discover much. (Consider here such jobs as all-night pizza that if we identified the work that really did need to deliveryman or dog-washer, or those women who run be done to maintain a comfortable and ecologically nighttime day care centers for the children of women sustainable standard of living, and redistribute the who have to work nights providing child care for hours, it may turn out that the Wobbly platform is businesswomen...not to mention the endless hours perfectly realistic. Especially if we bear in mind that spent by specialists cleaning up the emotional and it’s not like anyone would be forced to stop working physical damage caused by overwork, the injuries, after four hours if they didn’t feel like it. A lot of suicides, divorces, murderous rampages, producing people do enjoy their jobs, certainly more than they the drugs to pacify the children...) would lounging around doing nothing all day (that’s So what jobs are really necessary?

why in prisons, when they want to punish inmates, Well, for starters, there are lots of jobs whose they take away their right to work), and if one has disappearance, almost everyone would agree, would eliminated the endless indignities and sadomasochistic be a net gain for humanity. Consider here telemar-games that inevitably follow from top-down organiza-keters, stretch-SUV manufacturers, or for that matter, tion, one would expect a lot more would. It might corporate lawyers. We could also eliminate the entire even turn out that no one will have to work more advertising and PR industries, fire all politicians and than they particularly want to.

their staffs, eliminate anyone remotely connected with an HMO, without even beginning to get near essen-minor note:

tial social functions. The elimination of advertising Admittedly, all of this presumes the total reorganization of work, a kind of “after the revolution”

would also reduce the production, shipping, and scenario which I’ve argued is a necessary tool to selling of unnecessary products, since those items even begin to think about human possibilities, even people actually do want or need, they will still figure

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if revolution will probably never take such an apoc-with the Zapatistas’ rejection of the idea of seizing alyptic form. This of course brings up the “who power and their attempt instead to create a model of will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which democratic self-organization to inspire the rest of always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians.

Mexico; their initiation of an international network Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy (People’s Global Action, or PGA) which then put out of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty the calls for days of action against the WTO (in jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant Seattle), IMF (in Washington, Prague...) and so on; tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top and finally, the collapse of the Argentine economy, and scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning the overwhelming popular uprising which, again, kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immedi-rejected the very idea that one could find a solution by ately.

replacing one set of politicians with another. The slogan of the Argentine movement was, from the start, All this is something of an aside though because what que se vayan todas—get rid of the lot of them. Instead I really want to do in this final section is focus on: of a new government they created a vast network of alternative institutions, starting with popular assemblies to govern each urban neighborhood (the only (3) DEMOCRACY
limitation on participation is that one cannot be employed by a political party), hundreds of occupied, This might give the reader a chance to have a glance worker-managed factories, a complex system of at what anarchist, and anarchist-inspired, organizing is

“barter” and newfangled alternative currency system actually like—some of the contours of the new world to keep them in operation—in short, an endless varia-now being built in the shell of the old—and to show tion on the theme of direct democracy.

what the historical-ethnographic perspective I’ve been All of this has happened completely below the trying to develop here, our non-existent science, radar screen of the corporate media, which also missed might be able to contribute to it.

the point of the great mobilizations. The organization The first cycle of the new global uprising—
of these actions was meant to be a living illustration of what the press still insists on referring to, increasingly what a truly democratic world might be like, from the ridiculously, as “the anti-globalization movement”—
festive puppets to the careful organization of affinity began with the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas groups and spokescouncils, all operating without a and came to a head with the asambleas barreales of leadership structure, always based on principles of Buenos Aires, and cities throughout Argentina. There consensus-based direct democracy. It was the kind of is hardly room here to tell the whole story: beginning organization which most people would have, had they

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simply heard it proposed, written off as a pipe-dream; convert others to one’s overall point of view; the point but it worked, and so effectively that the police depart-of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a ments of city after city were completely flummoxed common course of action. Instead of voting proposals with how to deal with them. Of course, this also had up and down, then, proposals are worked and something to do with the unprecedented tactics reworked, scotched or reinvented, until one ends up (hundreds of activists in fairy suits tickling police with with something everyone can live with. When it feather dusters, or padded with so many inflatable comes to the final stage, actually “finding consensus,”

inner tubes and rubber cushions they seemed to roll there are two levels of possible objection: one can along like the Michelin man over barricades, incapable

“stand aside,” which is to say “I don’t like this and of damaging anyone else but also pretty much imper-won’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from vious to police batons...), which completely confused doing it,” or “block,” which has the effect of a veto.

traditional categories of violence and nonviolence.

One can only block if one feels a proposal is in viola-When protesters in Seattle chanted “this is tion of the fundamental principles or reasons for being what democracy looks like,” they meant to be taken of a group. One might say that the function which in literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of only confronted a certain form of power, exposing its striking down legislative decisions that violate consti-mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tutional principles, is here relegated to anyone with tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the courage to actually stand up against the combined the kind of social relations on which it is based were will of the group (though of course there are also ways unnecessary. This is why all the condescending of challenging unprincipled blocks).

remarks about the movement being dominated by a One could go on at length about the elaborate bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology and surprisingly sophisticated methods that have been completely missed the mark. The diversity was a func-developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modi-tion of the decentralized form of organization, and fied consensus required for very large groups; of the this organization was the movement’s ideology.

way consensus itself reinforces the principle of decen-The key term in the new movement is tralization by ensuring one doesn’t really want to

“process,” by which is meant, decision-making bring proposals before very large groups unless one process. In North America, this is almost invariably has to, of means of ensuring gender equity and done through some process of finding consensus. This resolving conflict... The point is this is a form of is as I mentioned much less ideologically stifling than direct democracy which is very different than the kind it may sound because the assumption behind all good we usually associate with the term—or, for that matter, consensus process is that one should not even try to with the kind usually employed by European or North

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American anarchists of earlier generations, or still on the tradition of ancient Greece. Majoritarian employed, say, in urban Argentine asambleas. In democracy, in the formal, Roberts Rules of Order-North America, consensus process emerged more type sense rarely emerges of its own accord. It’s than anything else through the feminist movement, curious that almost no one, anthropologists included, as part of broad backlash against some of the more ever seems to ask oneself why this should be.

obnoxious, self-aggrandizing macho leadership styles of the ‘60s New Left. Much of the procedure was An hypothesis.

originally adopted from the Quakers, and Quaker-Majoritarian democracy was, in its origins, essentially a military institution.

inspired groups; the Quakers, in turn, claim to have Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Western been inspired by Native American practice. How historiography that this is the only sort of democ-much the latter is really true is, in historical terms, racy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all.

difficult to determine. Nonetheless, Native American We are usually told that democracy originated in decision-making did normally work by some form of ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was consensus. Actually, so do most popular assemblies a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what around the world now, from the Tzeltal or Tzotzil or this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to Tojolobal-speaking communities in Chiapas to believe that before the Athenians, it never really Malagasy fokon’olona. After having lived in occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the Madagascar for two years, I was startled, the first members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal time I started attending meetings of the Direct say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have Action Network in New York, by how familiar it all been plenty of egalitarian societies in history—
seemed—the main difference was that the DAN
many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that process was so much more formalized and explicit. It must have existed before 500 BCE—and obviously, had to be, since everyone in DAN was just figuring they must have had some kind of procedure for out how to make decisions this way, and everything coming to decisions for matters of collective had to be spelled out; whereas in Madagascar, importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed everyone had been doing this since they learned to that these procedures, whatever they might have speak.

been, could not have been, properly speaking, In fact, as anthropologists are aware, just

“democratic.”

Even scholars with otherwise impeccable about every known human community which has to radical credentials, promoters of direct democracy, come to group decisions has employed some variation have been known to bend themselves into pretzels of what I’m calling “consensus process”—every one, trying to justify this attitude. Non-Western egali-that is, which is not in some way or another drawing

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tarian communities are “kin-based,” argues The explanation I would propose is this: it is Murray Bookchin. (And Greece was not? Of much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure course the Athenian agora was not itself kin-based out what most members of that community want to but neither is a Malagasy fokon’olona or Balinese do, than to figure out how to convince those who do seka. So what?) “Some might speak of Iroquois or not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making Berber democracy,” argued Cornelius Castoriadis, is typical of societies where there would be no way

“but this is an abuse of the term. These are primi-to compel a minority to agree with a majority deci-tive societies which assume the social order is sion—either because there is no state with a handed to them by gods or spirits, not self-consti-monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has tuted by the people themselves as in Athens.”

nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is (Really? In fact the “League of the Iroquois” was a no way to compel those who find a majority decision treaty organization, seen as a common agreement distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one created in historical times, and subject to constant would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest renegotiation.) The arguments never make sense.

which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be But they don’t really have to because we are not the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, really dealing with arguments at all here, so much resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of as with the brush of a hand.

communities. What is seen as an elaborate and diffi-The real reason for the unwillingness of most cult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council process of making sure no one walks away feeling as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, that their views have been totally ignored.

the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaugh-Majority democracy, we might say, can only tered with such relative impunity were quite on the emerge when two factors coincide: level as Pericles—is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If 1. a feeling that people should have equal say in we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having making group decisions, and
everyone who supports a proposition stand on one 2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the decisions.

other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to For most of human history, it has been extremely anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, unusual to have both at the same time. Where egali-then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we tarian societies exist, it is also usually considered seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a and over, across the world, from Australia to machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing some variation on consensus process. Why?

any sort of popular will.

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It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece This in turn might help explain the term was one of the most competitive societies known

“democracy” itself, which appears to have been to history. It was a society that tended to make coined as something of a slur by its elitist oppo-everything into a public contest, from athletics to nents: it literally means the “force” or even philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything

“violence” of the people. Kratos, not archos. The else. So it might not seem entirely surprising that elitists who coined the term always considered they made political decision-making into a public democracy not too far from simple rioting or mob contest as well. Even more crucial though was the rule; though of course their solution was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in permanent conquest of the people by someone arms. Aristotle, in his Politics, remarks that the else. And ironically, when they did manage to constitution of a Greek city-state will normally suppress democracy for this reason, which was depend on the chief arm of its military: if this is usually, the result was that the only way the cavalry, it will be an aristocracy, since horses are general populace’s will was known was precisely expensive. If hoplite infantry, it will have an through rioting, a practice that became quite insti-oligarchy, as all could not afford the armor and tutionalized in, say, imperial Rome or eighteenth-training. If its power was based in the navy or light century England.

infantry, one could expect a democracy, as anyone All this is not to say that direct democracies—
can row, or use a sling. In other words if a man is as practiced, for example, in medieval cities or New armed, then one pretty much has to take his opin-England town meetings—were not normally ions into account. One can see how this worked at orderly and dignified procedures; though one its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the suspects that here too, in actual practice, there was story of an army of Greek mercenaries who a certain baseline of consensus-seeking going on.

suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the Still, it was this military undertone which allowed middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then the authors of the Federalist Papers, like almost all hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In other literate men of their day, to take it for a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, granted that what they called “democracy”—by everyone could see the balance of forces and what which they meant, direct democracy—was in its would happen if things actually came to blows.

nature the most unstable, tumultuous form of Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.

government, not to mention one which endangers Roman legions could be similarly democratic; the rights of minorities (the specific minority they this was the main reason they were never allowed had in mind in this case being the rich). It was only to enter the city of Rome. And when Machiavelli once the term “democracy” could be almost revived the notion of a democratic republic at the completely transformed to incorporate the prin-dawn of the “modern” era, he immediately ciple of representation—a term which itself has a reverted to the notion of a populace in arms.

very curious history, since as Cornelius Castoriadis

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notes, it originally referred to representatives of the use that very instability to justify their ultimate people before the king, internal ambassadors in monopoly of the means of violence. Finally, the threat fact, rather than those who wielded power in any of this instability becomes an excuse for a form of sense themselves—that it was rehabilitated, in the

“democracy” so minimal that it comes down to eyes of well-born political theorists, and took on nothing more than insisting that ruling elites should the meaning it has today.

occasionally consult with “the public”—in carefully staged contests, replete with rather meaningless jousts In a sense then anarchists think all those right-and tournaments—to reestablish their right to go on wing political theorists who insist that “America is not making their decisions for them.

a democracy; it’s a republic” are quite correct. The It’s a trap. Bouncing back and forth between difference is that anarchists have a problem with that.

the two ensures it will remain extremely unlikely that They think it ought to be a democracy. Though one could ever imagine it would be possible for people increasing numbers have come to accept that the to manage their own lives, without the help of “repre-traditional elitist criticism of majoritarian direct sentatives.” It’s for this reason the new global move-democracy is not entirely baseless either.

ment has begun by reinventing the very meaning of I noted earlier that all social orders are in democracy. To do so ultimately means, once again, some sense at war with themselves. Those unwilling to coming to terms with the fact that “we”—whether as establish an apparatus of violence for enforcing deci-

“the West” (whatever that means), as the “modern sions necessarily have to develop an apparatus for world,” or anything else—are not really as special as creating and maintaining social consensus (at least in we like to think we are; that we’re not the only people that minimal sense of ensuring malcontents can still ever to have practiced democracy; that in fact, rather feel they have freely chosen to go along with bad deci-than disseminating democracy around the world, sions); as an apparent result, the internal war ends up

“Western” governments have been spending at least as projected outwards into endless night battles and much time inserting themselves into the lives of forms of spectral violence. Majoritarian direct democ-people who have been practicing democracy for thou-racy is constantly threatening to make those lines of sands of years, and in one way or another, telling them force explicit. For this reason it does tend to be rather to cut it out.

unstable: or more precisely, if it does last, it’s because One of the most encouraging things about its institutional forms (the medieval city, New England these new, anarchist-inspired movements is that they town council, for that matter gallup polls, referen-propose a new form of internationalism. Older, dums...) are almost invariably ensconced within a communist internationalism had some very beautiful larger framework of governance in which ruling elites ideals, but in organizational terms, everyone basically

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flowed one way. It became a means for regimes ANTHROPOLOGY
outside Europe and its settler colonies to learn Western styles of organization: party structures, (in which the author somewhat reluctantly plenaries, purges, bureaucratic hierarchies, secret bites the hand that feeds him) police... This time—the second wave of internationalism one could call it, or just, anarchist globaliza-The final question—one that I’ve admittedly been tion—the movement of organizational forms has rather avoiding up to now—is why anthropologists largely gone the other way. It’s not just consensus haven’t, so far? I have already described why I think process: the idea of mass non-violent direct action first academics, in general, have rarely felt much affinity developed in South Africa and India; the current with anarchism. I’ve talked a little about the radical network model was first proposed by rebels in inclinations in much early twentieth-century anthro-Chiapas; even the notion of the affinity group came pology, which often showed a very strong affinity with out of Spain and Latin America. The fruits of ethnog-anarchism, but that seemed to largely evaporate over raphy—and the techniques of ethnography—could be time. It’s all a little odd. Anthropologists are after all enormously helpful here if anthropologists can get the only group of scholars who know anything about past their—however understandable—hesitancy, owing actually-existing stateless societies; many have actually to their own often squalid colonial history, and come lived in corners of the world where states have ceased to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty to function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes and secret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and no left, and people are managing their own affairs one else’s) but as the common property of humankind.

autonomously; if nothing else, they are keenly aware that the most commonplace assumptions about what would happen in the absence of a state (“but people would just kill each other!”) are factually untrue.

Why, then?

Well, there are any number of reasons. Some are understandable enough. If anarchism is, essentially, an ethics of practice, then meditating on anthropological practice tends to kick up a lot of unpleasant things. Particularly if one concentrates on the experience of anthropological fieldwork—which is what anthropologists invariably tend to do when they

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become reflexive. The discipline we know today was There’s more to it though. In many ways, made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colo-anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its own nization, and mass murder—much like most modern potential. It is, for example, the only discipline in a academic disciplines, actually, including geography, position to make generalizations about humanity as a and botany, not even to mention ones like mathe-whole—since it is the only discipline that actually matics, linguistics or robotics, which still are, but takes all of humanity into account, and is familiar with anthropologists, since their work tends to involve all the anomalous cases. (“All societies practice getting to know the victims personally, have ended up marriage, you say? Well that depends on how you agonizing over this in ways that the proponents of define ‘marriage.’ Among the Nayar...”) Yet it other disciplines have almost never done. The result resolutely refuses to do so. I don’t think this is to be has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflec-accounted for solely as an understandable reaction to tions on their own culpability has mainly had the the right-wing proclivity to make grand arguments effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not about human nature to justify very particular, and want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of usually, particularly nasty social institutions (rape, war, human experience with a handy two or three sentence free market capitalism)—though certainly that is a big dismissal (you know: all about projecting one’s sense of part of it. Partly it’s just the vastness of the subject Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel matter. Who really has the means, in discussing, say, morally superior to those who do.

conceptions of desire, or imagination, or the self, or For the anthropologists themselves, the results sovereignty, to consider everything Chinese or Indian have been strangely paradoxical as well. While anthro-or Islamic thinkers have had to say on the matter in pologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of addition to the Western canon, let alone folk concep-human experience, of social and political experiments tions prevalent in hundreds of Oceanic or Native no one else really knows about, that very body of American societies as well? It’s just too daunting. As a comparative ethnography is seen as something result, anthropologists no longer produce many broad shameful. As I mentioned, it is treated not as the theoretical generalizations at all—instead, turning common heritage of humankind, but as our dirty little over the work to European philosophers who usually secret. Which is actually convenient, at least insofar as have absolutely no problem discussing desire, or the academic power is largely about establishing ownership imagination, or the self, or sovereignty, as if such rights over a certain form of knowledge and ensuring concepts had been invented by Plato or Aristotle, that others don’t really have much access to it. Because developed by Kant or DeSade, and never meaningfully as I also mentioned, our dirty little secret is still ours.

discussed by anyone outside of elite literary traditions It’s not something one needs to share with others.

in Western Europe or North America. Where once

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anthropologists’ key theoretical terms were words like with the UN—positions within the very apparatus of mana, totem, or taboo, the new buzzwords are invari-global rule—what this really comes down to is a kind ably derived from Latin or Greek, usually via French, of constant, ritualized declaration of disloyalty to that occasionally German.

very global elite of which we ourselves, as academics, So while anthropology might seem perfectly clearly form one (admittedly somewhat marginal) frac-positioned to provide an intellectual forum for all sorts tion.

of planetary conversations, political and otherwise, Now, what form does this populism take in there is a certain built-in reluctance to do so.

practice? Mainly, it means that you must demonstrate Then there’s the question of politics. Most that the people you are studying, the little guys, are anthropologists write as if their work has obvious successfully resisting some form of power or global-political significance, in a tone which suggests they izing influence imposed on them from above. This is, consider what they are doing quite radical, and anyway, what most anthropologists talk about when certainly left of center. But what does this politics the subject turns to globalization—which it usually actually consist of? It’s increasingly hard to say. Do does almost immediately, nowadays, whatever it is you anthropologists tend to be anti-capitalist? Certainly it’s study. Whether it is advertising, or soap operas, or hard to think of one who has much good to say about forms of labor discipline, or state-imposed legal capitalism. Many are in the habit of describing the systems, or anything else that might seem to be current age as one of “late capitalism,” as if by crushing or homogenizing or manipulating one’s declaring it is about to end, they can by the very act of people, one demonstrates that they are not fooled, not doing so hasten its demise. But it’s hard to think of an crushed, not homogenized; indeed they are creatively anthropologist who has, recently, made any sort of appropriating or reinterpreting what is being thrown suggestion of what an alternative to capitalism might at them in ways that its authors would never have be like. So are they liberals? Many can’t pronounce anticipated. Of course, to some extent all this is true. I the word without a snort of contempt. What then? As would certainly not wish to deny it is important to far as I can make out the only real fundamental polit-combat the—still remarkably widespread—popular ical commitment running through the entire field is a assumption that the moment people in Bhutan or kind of broad populism. If nothing else, we are defi-Irian Jaya are exposed to MTV, their civilization is nitely not on the side of whoever, in a given situation, basically over. What’s disturbing, at least to me, is the is or fancies themselves to be the elite. We’re for the degree to which this logic comes to echo that of global little guys. Since in practice, most anthropologists are capitalism. Advertising agencies, after all, do not claim attached to (increasingly global) universities, or if not, to be imposing anything on the public either.

end up in jobs like marketing consultancies or jobs Particularly in this era of market segmentation, they

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claim to be providing material for members of the risk, if they are not careful, becoming yet another cog public to appropriate and make their own in unpre-in a global “identity machine,” a planet-wide apparatus dictable and idiosyncratic ways. The rhetoric of of institutions and assumptions that has, over the last

“creative consumption” in particular could be consid-decade or so, effectively informed the earth’s inhabi-ered the very ideology of the new global market: a tants (or at least, all but the very most elite) that, since world in which all human behavior can be classified as all debates about the nature of political or economic either production, exchange, or consumption; in possibilities are now over, the only way one can now which exchange is assumed to be driven by basic make a political claim is by asserting some group iden-human proclivities for rational pursuit of profit which tity, with all the assumptions about what identity is are the same everywhere, and consumption becomes a (i.e., that group identities are not ways of comparing way to establish one’s particular identity (and produc-one group to each other but constituted by the way a tion is not discussed at all if one can possibly avoid it).

group relates to its own history, that there is no essen-We’re all the same on the trading floor; it’s what we tial difference in this regard between individuals and do with the stuff when we get home that makes us groups...) established in advance. Things have come to different. This market logic has become so deeply such a pass that in countries like Nepal even internalized that, if, say, a woman in Trinidad puts Theravada Buddhists are forced to play identity poli-together some outrageous get-up and goes out tics, a particularly bizarre spectacle since they are dancing, anthropologists will automatically assume essentially basing their identity claims on adherence to that what she’s doing can be defined as “consumption”

a universalistic philosophy that insists identity is an (as opposed to, say, showing off or having a good illusion.

time), as if what’s really important about her evening is Many years ago a French anthropologist the fact that she buys a couple drinks, or maybe, named Gerard Althabe wrote a book about because the anthropologist considers wearing clothes Madagascar called Oppression et Liberation dans itself to be somehow like drinking, or maybe, because l’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might well they just don’t think about it at all and assume that be applied to what ends up happening in a lot of whatever one does that isn’t working is “consumption”

anthropological writing. For the most part, what we because what’s really important about it is that manu-call “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to call factured products are involved. The perspective of the the “over-developed world,” are forced on people. In anthropologist and the global marketing executive the United States, most are the products of ongoing have become almost indistinguishable.

oppression and inequality: someone who is defined as It’s not that different on the political level.

Black is not allowed to forget that during a single Lauren Leve has recently warned that anthropologists moment of their existence; his or her own self-defini-

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tion is of no significance to the banker who will deny cate and intractable problems of the degree to which him credit, or the policeman who will arrest him for one’s own work is part of this very identity machine.

being in the wrong neighborhood, or the doctor who, But it no more makes it true than talking about “late in the case of a damaged limb, will be more likely to capitalism” will itself bring about industrial collapse or recommend amputation. All attempts at individual or further social revolution.

collective self-fashioning or self-invention have to take place entirely within those extremely violent sets of An illustration:

constraints. (The only real way that could change In case it’s not clear what I am saying here, let me return for a moment to the Zapatista rebels of would be to transform the attitudes of those who have Chiapas, whose revolt on New Year’s day, 1994, the privilege of being defined as “White”—ultimately, might be said to have kicked off what came to be probably, by destroying the category of Whiteness known as the globalization movement. The itself.) The fact is though that nobody has any idea Zapatistas were overwhelmingly drawn from how most people in North America would chose to Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Tojolobal Maya-speaking define themselves if institutional racism were to actu-communities that had established themselves in the ally vanish—if everyone really were left free to define Lacandon rain forest—some of the poorest and themselves however they wished. Neither is there most exploited communities in Mexico. The much point in speculating about it. The question is Zapatistas do not call themselves anarchists, quite, how to create a situation where we could find out.

or even, quite autonomists; they represent their own unique strand within that broader tradition; This is what I mean by “liberation in the indeed, they are trying to revolutionize revolu-imaginary.” To think about what it would take to live tionary strategy itself by abandoning any notion of in a world in which everyone really did have the a vanguard party seizing control of the state, but power to decide for themselves, individually and instead battling to create free enclaves that could collectively, what sort of communities they wished to serve as models for autonomous self-government, belong to and what sort of identities they wanted to allowing a general reorganization of Mexican take on—that’s really difficult. To bring about such a society into a complex overlapping network of self-world would be almost unimaginably difficult. It managing groups that could then begin to discuss would require changing almost everything. It also the reinvention of political society. There was, would meet with stubborn, and ultimately violent, apparently, some difference of opinion within the Zapatista movement itself over the forms of demo-opposition from those who benefit the most from cratic practice they wished to promulgate. The existing arrangements. To instead write as if these Maya-speaking base pushed strongly for a form of identities are already freely created—or largely so—is consensus process adopted from their own easy, and it lets one entirely off the hook for the intri-

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communal traditions, but reformulated to be more work that, I pointed out, so much of the rhetoric radically egalitarian; some of the Spanish-speaking about “identity” effectively ignores: trying to work military leadership of the rebellion were highly out what forms of organization, what forms of skeptical of whether this could really be applied on process and deliberation, would be required to the national level. Ultimately, though, they had to create a world in which people and communities defer to the vision of those they “led by obeying,”

are actually free to determine for themselves what as the Zapatista saying went. But the remarkable sort of people and communities they wish to be.

thing was what happened when news of this rebel-And what were they told? Effectively, they were lion spread to the rest of the world. It’s here we can informed that, since they were Maya, they could really see the workings of Leve’s “identity not possibly have anything to say to the world machine.” Rather than a band of rebels with a about the processes through which identity is vision of radical democratic transformation, they constructed; or about the nature of political possi-were immediately redefined as a band of Mayan bilities. As Mayas, the only possible political state-Indians demanding indigenous autonomy. This is ment they could make to non-Mayas would be how the international media portrayed them; this is about their Maya identity itself. They could assert what was considered important about them from the right to continue to be Mayan. They could everyone from humanitarian organizations to demand recognition as Mayan. But for a Maya to Mexican bureaucrats to human rights monitors at say something to the world that was not simply a the UN. As time went on, the Zapatistas—whose comment on their own Maya-ness would be incon-strategy has from the beginning been dependent on ceivable.

gaining allies in the international community—
were increasingly forced to play the indigenous And who was listening to what they really had card as well, except when dealing with their most to say?

committed allies.

Largely, it seems, a collection of teenage anar-This strategy has not been entirely ineffective.

chists in Europe and North America, who soon began Ten years later, the Zapatista Army of National besieging the summits of the very global elite to Liberation is still there, without having hardly had whom anthropologists maintain such an uneasy, to fire a shot, if only because they have been uncomfortable, alliance.

willing, for the time being, to downplay the

“National” part in their name. All I want to empha-But the anarchists were right. I think anthro-size is exactly how patronizing—or, maybe let’s not pologists should make common cause with them. We pull punches here, how completely racist—the have tools at our fingertips that could be of enormous international reaction to the Zapatista rebellion has importance for human freedom. Let’s start taking really been. Because what the Zapatistas were some responsibility for it.

proposing to do was exactly to begin that difficult

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