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toward a theory of imaginary counterpower
IN WHICH WE ASK WHAT, PRECISELY, IS EQUALIZED IN ‘EGALITARIAN’ SOCIETIES?
‘inequality’ is a slippery term, so slippery, in fact, that it’s not entirely clear what the term ‘egalitarian society’ should even mean. Usually, it’s defined negatively: as the absence of hierarchies (the belief that certain people or types of people are superior to others), or as the absence of relations of domination or exploitation. This is already quite complex, and the moment we try to define egalitarianism in positive terms everything becomes much more so. On the one hand, ‘egalitarianism’ (as opposed to ‘equality’, let alone ‘uniformity’ or ‘homogeneity’) seems to refer to the presence of some kind of ideal. It’s not just that an outside observer would tend to see all members of, say, a Semang hunting party as pretty much interchangeable, like the cannon-fodder minions of some alien overlord in a science fiction movie (this would, in fact, be rather offensive); but rather, that Semang themselves feel they ought to be the same – not in every way, since that would be ridiculous, but in the ways that really matter. It also implies that this ideal is, largely, realized. So, as a first approximation, we can speak of an egalitarian society if (1) most people in a given society feel they really ought to be the same in some specific way, or ways, that are agreed to be particularly important; and (2) that ideal can be said to be largely achieved in practice.
Another way to put this might be as follows. If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ‘egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally. If wealth is what’s considered the most important thing in life, then everyone is more or less equally wealthy. If learning is most valued, then everyone has equal access to knowledge. If what’s most important is one’s relationship with the gods, then a society is egalitarian if there are no priests and everyone has equal access to places of worship. You may have noticed an obvious problem here. Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one – or at least, what everyone insists is most important in one – might have very little to do with what’s important in another. Imagine a society in which everyone is equal before the gods, but 50 per cent of the population are sharecroppers with no property and therefore no legal or political rights. Does it really make sense to call this an ‘egalitarian society’ – even if everyone, including the sharecroppers, insists that it’s really only one’s relation to the gods that is ultimately important? There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on property arrangements. As we’ve seen, it was only at this point, in the mid to late eighteenth century, that European philosophers first came up with the idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence, and therefore that hunter-gatherers should be treated as a distinct variety of human being. As we’ve also seen, this idea is very much still with us. But so is Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else. Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus (or, in the case of warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other); and before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow. These new elites will, as Rousseau emphasized, band together to protect their assets, so the advent of private property will be followed, inexorably, by the rise of ‘the state’. We will scrutinize this conventional wisdom in more detail later. For now, suffice to say that while there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power. For sure, only cereal-farming and grain storage made possible bureaucratic regimes like those of Pharaonic Egypt, the Maurya Empire or Han China. But to say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb. It is true that without calculus atomic weaponry would never have been possible. One might even make a case that the invention of calculus set off a chain of events that made it likely someone, somewhere, would eventually create nuclear weapons. But to assert that Al-Tusi’s work on polynomials in the 1100s caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly absurd. Similarly, with agriculture. Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.7 At this juncture, we need to focus on the very notion of a surplus, and the much broader – almost existential – questions it raises. As philosophers realized long ago, this is a concept that poses fundamental questions about what it means to be human. One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements. In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion (this is what he envisioned as being the norm under ‘primitive communism’, and what he thought could once again be possible in the revolutionary future), but contemporary thinkers tend to be more sceptical. In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (pp.125-128). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Edizione del Kindle.
We are not so much trapped in an infinite maze as we are trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we are unable to see beyond the walls of this maze, or even to recognise the very existence of these walls. First and foremost, we are trapped in the delusion that the labyrinth in which we wander helplessly is the whole reality, and the walls we keep banging into nothing else than the reality principle.
We can experiment and play with ideas and possibilities as much as we like, we can also sing along the whole summer like the fable cicada, or dream of returning to a bucolic garden of Eden, but, we believe, when going back to the real world, when it comes to the hard, material reality of things, what counts is production, development, growth.
This is why we need the ethnographic insight and its capacity to bring in new perspectives and allow us to look at what is the closest, even at ourselves, as if we were looking at an alien thing: not just because it allows us to see the so many other possible forms of social existence, but first and foremost because it allows us to ask ourselves: is that true, that to deal with the hard, material reality of things means to focus on production – and not just production, but production of material objects, as detached from use value and from care and reproduction of human beings?
The ethnographic, alien insight allows us to look back at what Max Weber said and ask ourselves: is it that true, that the civilization that developed itself in Europe and in European colonies has such an universal value? Is that true, that the way in which what we call “Western civilization” does science, organises social reproduction and power, does revolutions, etc... , is the only possible and the most rational one, at least if you want civilization and you prefer not to live in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers? Or it is possible that this civilization, just like all others, is a historical formation with its own characteristics and peculiarities that can be investigated as such? And if it is so, is it possible that the course of history in the last few centuries, along with the way we take care of ourselves and produce and reproduce ourselves, has been determined by these characteristics and peculiarities, and present day’s dominant civilization is neither an universal one or the pre-determined, natural result of the march of civilization?
Asking such questions is, actually, what Max Weber himself did in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: even if in his opinion it has ended up in bringing about achievements that are valid for humanity as a whole, there is something very specific in European civilization, that is Capitalism, and Capitalism is not any way of producing or accumulating goods, but a specific way that separates wealth from its enjoyment, and constantly redirects it towards the production of more wealth.
Capitalism has by now played such an all-encompassing role in shaping our reality and “our fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings, human desires, and the very possibilities for human social relations” that these unchallenged assumptions have come to look for us like the only reality.
Like in Rilke’s poem “The Panther”, the unchallenged assumptions that form our common sense are bars through which we cannot see any world: David Graeber’s endeavour was to tear them down,
If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
We are not so much trapped in an infinite maze as we are trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we are unable to see beyond the walls of this maze, or even to recognise the very existence of these walls. First and foremost, we are trapped in the delusion that the labyrinth in which we wander helplessly is the whole reality, and the walls we keep banging into nothing else than the reality principle.
We can experiment and play with ideas and possibilities as much as we like, we can also sing along the whole summer like the fable cicada, or dream of returning to a bucolic garden of Eden, but, we believe, when going back to the real world, when it comes to the hard, material reality of things, what counts is production, development, growth.
This is why we need the ethnographic insight and its capacity to bring in new perspectives and allow us to look at what is the closest, even at ourselves, as if we were looking at an alien thing: not just because it allows us to see the so many other possible forms of social existence, but first and foremost because it allows us to ask ourselves: is that true, that to deal with the hard, material reality of things means to focus on production – and not just production, but production the way we have it in contemporary world, as detached from use value and from care and reproduction of human beings?
The ethnographic, alien insight allows us to to look back at what Max Weber said and ask ourselves: is it that true, that the civilization that developed itself in Europe and in European colonies has such an universal value? Is that true, that the way in which what we call “Western civilization” does science, organises social reproduction and power, does revolutions, etc... , is the only possible and the most rational one, at least if you want civilization and you prefer not to live in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers? Or it is possible that this civilization, just like all others, is a historical formation with its own characteristics and peculiarities that can be investigated as such? And if it is so, is it possible that the course of history in the last few centuries, along with the way we take care of ourselves and produce and reproduce ourselves, has been determined by these characteristics and peculiarities, and not by a universal and natural necessity?
What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first. In this sense, the Western philosophical tradition has taken a rather unusual direction over the last few centuries. Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere.
#possessive_individualism
sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion. Much of this is implicit – if never clearly stated or developed – in Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning ‘not to be touched’. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects? As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same. To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson meant by ‘possessive individualism’. Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on.53 As we’ve seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned – and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.54 For most Native American societies, this kind of attitude was profoundly alien. If it applied anywhere at all, then it was only with regard to sacred objects,
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (pp.158-160). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Edizione del Kindle.
To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms.
individual freedom as private #property DoE 66-7
What’s specific of western political tradition is not, as we like to believe, democracy or the idea that we can self-consciously negotiate and reinvent our social arrangements – something that was given for granted by human beings long before Enlightenment, but the very peculiar obsession with property rights of European civilisation (DoE 362): as MacPherson pointed out, the sacred, negative quality of private property is western paradigm for all human rights and freedoms . We own our body just in the sense we own our land, or a State owns its territory: inasmuch we have a right to exclude everybody else from it.
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The constitution of property
It is this kind of obsession that led Engels to describe communism as a property regime
Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere.
he transition from the world of Rabelais to that of Queen Victoria, Elias' manners, puritan and controriformist war on popular culture are part of the same historical process that led to absolute private property and commercialization of everyday life
To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms.
DoE pp. 66-67 The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves. In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others. What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control). Rousseau, who always insisted he wished to live without being dependent on others’ help (even as he had all his needs attended to by mistresses and servants), played out this very same logic in the conduct of his own life.
Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one – or at least, what everyone insists is most important in one – might have very little to do with what’s important in another. Imagine a society in which everyone is equal before the gods, but 50 per cent of the population are sharecroppers with no property and therefore no legal or political rights. Does it really make sense to call this an ‘egalitarian society’ – even if everyone, including the sharecroppers, insists that it’s really only one’s relation to the gods that is ultimately important? There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on #property arrangements.
We stick to the current predicament because we cannot imagine alternatives. Yet these alternatives do exist. They existed in the past, they still exist in other present-day civilizations, and they exist in the very inside of our western world, in forms that go unnoticed, because our common sense makes them look trivial and unimportant, or simply puts them in a blind spot. More importantly, we are able – collectively – to imagine and create alternatives:
Is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human. That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom?
We are projects of mutual self-creation, and it can be argued that the very essence of human beings is imagination (see Utopia of rules), and the ability to imagine and reinvent ourselves and to collectively reshape or social relationships.
If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? [1]
If it is so then the essential endeavour of our times is to abandon the illusions that produce such a blindness, and reclaim our capacity to reinvent ourselves and collectively shape our future. Our capacity to imagine alternatives and self-consciously translate what we’ve imagined in reality.
This endeavour was David Graeber’s, and he pursued it in two ways: challenging the myths and the common sense assumptions that prevent us from imagining alternatives, and showing the possibilities and the alternatives that already exist in our very reality
If we still participate in this march, it is because we cannot imagine alternatives.
We feel that even if the one we live in is far from being the best of the worlds, it is nevertheless the best of those that are possible. While we live mostly unhappy lives in polluted cities, while we work in underpaid jobs, or in jobs whose contribution to the wellbeing of humanity we doubt, or both, while we head towards the climate catastrophe, the stress in “the best of possible worlds” goes on "possible". Pursuing an infinite growth of production on our finite planet, as crazy and suicidal it can be, is the only line of action that we can imagine, as the despairing comedy of COP26 showed recently, because we believe that the only way to stop this inevitable march would be an impossible one: It would be to renounce civilization, and we cannot renounce civilization and technology, as we are very aware that our very survival depends on it.
We can't stop making capitalism, we believe. All we can do is putting patchs on the worst consequences of it: natural disasters, raising inequalities and overwhelming misery, forced migrations and wars. And this is what we are doing: putting larger and larger patchs, half hoping that this will avert the final catastrophe.
There’s only one alternative that we are able to imagine to this appalling perspective: a strict and comprehensive technical planning not only of production, but of all aspects of our lives, and a strict social control of individual compliance to the dictamens of this planning. : a bureaucratic nightmare that would at least allow humanity “to go on living, and partly living”
In many countries, given the management of the pandemic, it seems that we will have both capitalism and the bureaucratic nightmare.
David Graeber, Unblocking human possibilities
“The demand to abandon the illusions about people's condition is the demand to abandon a condition that needs illusions”. (Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)
“One of David's books is titled Possibilities. It is an apt description of all his work. It is an even better description of his life. Offering unimagined possibilities of freedom was his gift to us.” Marshall Sahlins
One century ago, we believed in a future of development and progress towards a better world, a world of scientific and technological achievements and of shared prosperity for the whole humanity, and we (the Western countries, that is) liked to think that European civilization, even if through violence and genocide, had brought in this progress.
European civilization did so, following Max Weber, thanks to the development of rational forms of reasoning and universal values that only appeared on European soil: “what concatenation of circumstances”, he asked “have led to the fact that on the soil of the Occident, and only here, cultural phenomena have appeared which — at least as we like to think - lay in a direction of development of universal significance and validity?”. Only in the West, argues Max Weber, "science" exists in the stage of development that we recognise as valid today, since in other civilizations like ancient Babylonian astronomy, Indian geometry or Indian natural sciences and medicine, it either lacked the mathematical foundation and the rational proof, that are born from the Hellenic brain, or the rational experimentation which is essentially a product of the Renaissance. At the same time, he says, outside the West we cannot find rational concepts of politics, or a rational doctrine of law, or a rational and bureaucratic organisation of the State and of scientific research. Finally, it’s only in the West that we can find that kind of rational organization of work and production, based on measurability and on profit-oriented action that we call Capitalism[1].
Despite the disasters of the first and second world war, and the liberation movements that, at the middle of the XX century, shred off colonial domination, under many aspects this perspective has not changed much until today. We still believe in the universal significance and validity of Western civilization. We still believe in the historical task of western countries to bring civilization, democracy and universal human values to the whole of humanity - in case of necessity, through war. We also still believe that our present-day civilization is the ultimate product of a march started when we first developed our first technology, farming, which inevitably led to the development of cities and of hierarchical government.
Yet something essential has changed: we feel that something has gone terribly wrong with civilization. We do not anymore think of this march as progress towards a better world. On the very contrary, we think of it as an inevitable march towards catastrophe, since we are all aware that an infinite growth on a finite planet cannot but lead us to collapse, and perhaps to extinction.
If we still participate in this march, it is only because we can’t imagine alternatives.
[1] Max Weber, 1920 Vorbemerkung zu den »Gesammelten Aufsätzen zur Religionssoziologie«
A methodological caveat: “The Dawn of Everything” was co-written over a period of ten year with the archaeologist David Wengrow, and this co-writing was not of the kind where each author works on her chapter: it was a decade of exchanges and conversations in which the boundary between the ideas of one and the other not only blurred but became irrelevant. It may seem strange, therefore, and maybe even slightly unfair towards David Wengrow to start from this work to illustrate the thought of only one of the two authors, but what Graeber and Wengrow write in their book can help in justifying this choice: thinking is inherently dialogical, by its very nature, and it is only in recent times that European civilization “began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere”.
There is no such a thing as Great isolated thinkers: an author is somebody who does the “interpretive labor” of giving her peculiar synthesis of the debates that are “going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms)”: if we are talking about David Graeber, and following the unfolding of his thoughts, not in order to celebrate the intellectual property of a Great Man, but to better understand and use the intellectual tools he provided, in full knowledge that these tools were developed in endless conversations with others, be it David Wengrow, or the responders to the Bullshit Jobs provocation, or Graeber’s interlocutors in Madagascar.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, David Graeber is a renowned author. His last book, "The Dawn of Everything", written together with the archaeologist David Wengrow and published posthumous in November 2021, is now a best-seller in UK and in the USA, just as it happened in 2011 with "Debt, the first 5000 years" and in 2017 with "Bullshit Jobs".
It would be very reductive, though, to think of Graeber just as a best-seller author: his books are so popular because he dared to write the sort of books that are most needed in our times, and people don’t write any more: big books, “asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate”, nevertheless he was everything but a "journalistic" kind of author, or just a magnificent and creative utopian and moralist detached from reality.
Graeber dared to ask the big questions that have to be asked in our times, like: “what is it that keeps society together? What are promises? What is debt?” (like in Debt, the first 5000 years), or “is what most of us are doing for a job actually producing value for our fellow human beings?” (like in Bullshit Jobs), or, like in the book he wrote with David Wengrow, “is there a way out of the wreckage, or has technology, starting with agriculture in the dawn of time, determined the course of history once and for all?”, and dared to challenge and dismantle one by one all the common sense assumptions that underlie our present day's ideology, but he did so without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor and always bringing empirical evidences to back his theories.
A common feature of his writings, and particularly of The Dawn of Everything, is to expose common sense assumptions, like: "the adoption of agriculture immediately and necessarily led to private property and the loss of freedom and equality", and show all the evidences that prove that this common sense assumption is simply not true. What is indeed remarkable in this process is that Graeber consistently chooses to carry it out without, under any circumstances, taking the shortcut of referring to authority: it’s evidences that disprove the common sense assumption, and if we can suggest a possible answer to our questions, or state something about human nature or society, it is always because we have got evidences that let in this direction from anthropology, archaeology, or other social sciences, and never because it is something that a Great Man also suggested.
An example of this ethical and methodological choice is in Bullshit Jobs, when Graeber illustrates the concept, that is key for his argument, of “the pleasure of being a cause”. According to classical economic theory, he says, human beings are assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits, and therefore one on a bullshit job should be content of being paid for doing nothing, that is of getting benefits for virtually zero expenditure of resources and energy. Yet, says Graeber, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this assumption, that has come to shape much of our economical common sense, is simply false. On the very contrary, evidence shows that people generally prefer working for no rewards than not working at all, and being paid for doing nothing (which is not the same as being paid for doing whatever one wants) is pure violence, because to exist is to be a cause, and the very definition of the self of human beings lies in the joyful experience of being able to produce effects: “to take away that joy entirely is to squash a human like a bug”. These are unmistakably core Spinozist concepts, and Graeber ranked Spinoza amongst his top favourite authors, yet there is no reference whatsoever to the great philosopher or to the idea of conatus, and Graeber chooses instead to support his argument with the empirical discoveries of German psychologist Karl Groos (BJ, ch.3, 3), who showed that children “come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that “they” are the thing which just caused something to happen”
This methodological choice is coherent with Graeber’s scientific and political endeavour: that of unfreezing imagination, and allowing everyone to delve into human possibilities and into our ability to invent and reinvent ourselves and our social arrangements, by dismantling the unchecked (and often ideological) assumptions that form our common sense. There is quite a lot of general statements on human nature, in his work, but there is no place in it for general statements not backed by evidence, and each statement is offered to the reader as a proposal that she is totally free to accept or reject on the basis of the evidence offered.
Graeber was a leading figure in his field, anthropology, a discipline that he revitalized by bringing it back to what he called its "Grand Tradition". The Grand tradition was that of the early history of anthropology, that of daring to "upend all accepted verities about the nature of the human condition, about life, knowledge, sociality, wealth, love, power, justice, possibility", as Graeber and Paolo da Col wrote in 2011 when launching HAU, the open source ethnographic revue that they founded together and that marked a veritable revolution in recent anthropological studies.
The very choice of the name "HAU" for the revue was a manifesto of a method: that of being unsettled, of taking risks, of daring to make connections, of getting out of the frames of thought of which we are a part. The name was inspired by Marcel Mauss’ reading of the Maori term “hau” as “Spirit of the Gift”. This reading of the term, in Graeber and Da Col’s opinion, is "the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts".
Such alien concepts, it must be noted, are not just those driven from far, strange and romantic places: the potential of ethnographic insight that Graeber aimed to revive is that of allowing us to look with new eyes, as if it was a new and strange thing, at what is the closest to us.
The Grand Tradition of Anthropology, as he wrote in 2007 in the Introduction to Possibilities, was "full of moments of recognition and confusion, and resultant desperate efforts to make sense of what seemed utterly alien ways of defining material and social reality". These moments of confusion, the sense of dissonance (Sclavi, 2003), that anthropologists feel when faced with cultural features that are so different from ours that they even lack of the words to describe them, are what gives to the ethnographical insight its creative theoretical potential and its almost infinite capacity to generate new knowledge and new perspectives.
When they are obliged to adopt other culture's terms, like "hau" or "tabu", or “totem”, or to assign a different meaning to western terms, like "joking" or "avoidance", to describe phenomena that they never saw in their original culture, anthropologists do create new concepts (exactly the way Gilles Deleuze said philosophers do), and make it possible for us to look back at our culture from a new perspective, and see that, for instance, phenomena like totemism are at work in our armies or schools (without going too far, you can think of Harry Potter’s “houses” as totems).
"if it is possible to say anything true of human beings or human societies in general", he said in "Possibilities", "then one has to start with the most apparently anomalous cases": this process of making the theoretical effort to interpret and make sense of alien cultural features, and then coming back and watch at our own culture with alien eyes is what gave the Grand Tradition its "almost infinite capacity to generate new political perspectives - perspectives that are, at their best, radical in the sense of delving to the very roots of forms of power and domination”.
David Graeber was a leading figure of anthropology, an academic a renowned scholar, and also a bestseller author, for sure. Bur first and foremost he was an anarchist.
His refusal of any form of coercion, his absolute respect for everybody’s freedom and his willingness to make space for it, his love for the intelligent, creative and playful nature of each and every human being: this is what everybody perceived when meeting him, what he defended in his theoretical work, and also something that transpires from his writings and his method, as we have already seen. Graeber was deeply involved in radical activism, in Global Justice Movement as well as in Occupy Wall Street, and he outlined his intellectual program in a book titled “Fragments of an anarchist anthropology” – which, by the way, is the best introduction to his thought.
Indeed, all of his work can be seen as an inquiry into the possibility of a society where harmony is obtained not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups. He explored “one by one and in detail all the theoretical areas in which to prefigure a society of free people” (Portelli, 2021), and a revitalizing effect of reading his works is that they allow you to see how much of this society of free people is already there: how many groups and personal relationships are already working on anarchist principles like autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy.
Yet I refrain from calling him an anarchist, and was undecided whether to dive on this subject, for two reasons. The first is that Graeber himself wrote in his self-description on twitter: “I see anarchism as something you do not an identity so don't call me the anarchist anthropologist” – but this has to do with his criticism towards identities, more than else. The second is that labelling him as “the anarchist anthropologist” is a good way to dismiss his ideas, and I prefer that you pay attention to what Graeber has to say, rather than pay attention to a label or to how and why the definition of “anarchist” applies well or poorly to him, or, even worse, to whether he said this or that because he was an anarchist: of course he was! But this neither adds anything to or detract anything from the validity of what he said.
So, following David Graeber’s request, let’s forget about his identity, and let us instead deal with what he did and said.
escaping the colonialist traps of the great tradition, and evolution too
The very choice of the name "HAU" for the revue was a manifesto of a method: of being unsettled, of taking risks, of daring to make connections. The name, in fact, was inspired by Marcel Mauss’ reading of the Maori term hau as “Spirit of the Gift”, described as "the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts? But take note (they continued): when we say “alien” we are speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places: HAU is a call to revive the theoretical potential of all ethnographic insight, wherever it is brought to bear, to bring it back to its leading role in generating new knowledge. Above all, we see ethnography as a pragmatic inquiry into conceptual disjunctures.". “Foreword: The Return of Ethnographic Theory”, HAU I, 1 (2011), pp. vi-xxxv,
"it’s only by returning to the past, and drawing on our own hoariest traditions, that we can revive the radical promise of anthropology to upend all accepted verities about the nature of the human condition, about life, knowledge, sociality, wealth, love, power, justice, possibility.
, and informs his very method, as we have already seen. In 20… he published “Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology”, that is both a political manifesto and a work program that outlines most of his successive works, and beyond any doubt anarchism is something that informed not only all of his works, but also all of his life.
BJ an arrow ...
and daring "to cast one's intellectual net wider" and connect evidences and knowledges from different fields to get the answers and - above all - to generate new knowledge and new perspectives.
Graeber's endeavor
a big book, asking big questions, , but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor
and daring "to cast one's intellectual net wider" and connect evidences and knowledges from different fields to get the answers and - above all - to generate new knowledge and new perspectives.
Commenting on the draft of David Graeber's "Debt, the first 5000 years", his friend Keith Hart said: "I don’t think anyone has written a book like this in a hundred years". This was the spirit of David Graeber's work: to write big books daring to ask the big questions that we need asking, books meant to be read widely and spark public debate, books that dismantle the myths and unchecked assumptions that lie unchallenged at the bottom of our common sense.
"I was drawn to the discipline", he wrote in 2007 in the Introduction of Possibilities, "because it opens windows on other possible forms of human social existence; because it served as a constant reminder that most of what we assume to be immutable has been, in other times and places, arranged quite differently, and therefore, that human possibilities are in almost every way greater than we ordinarily imagine. Anthropology also affords us new possible perspectives on familiar problems: ways of thinking about the rise of capitalism from the perspective of West Africa, European manners from the perspective of Amazonia, or, for that matter, West African or Amazonian masquerades from the perspective of Chinese festivals or Medieval European carnival".
