Reading: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (David Graeber) — from page 38 To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.
This really is just what happens all the time. Perhaps one should try to crowbar separate the concepts of 'state' and 'society', forcing people to argue from the positions they very much are willing to ignore.
So we’re back to the original problem. There is assumed to be an absolute rupture between the world we live in, and the world inhabited by anyone who might be characterized as “primitive,” “tribal,” or even as “peasants.” Anthropologists are not to blame here: we have been trying for decades now to convince the public that there’s no such thing as a “primitive,” that “simple societies” are not really all that simple, that no one ever existed in timeless isolation, that it makes no sense to speak of some social systems as more or less evolved; but so far, we’ve made very little headway.
I think what this highlights is that people refuse to give up their racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism. This should also be particularly enlightening when we work with non-anarchist people (who are otherwise leftists). If they are unwilling to engage with things that are “primitive” or “tribal” or “like peasants,” then they aren't our allies.
I disagree that anthropologists aren't to blame here. This neglects the history of the field and its persistent weaponisation within the state. Many anthropologists are, indeed, responsible for this simply based on how they present their information and engaged with the people they were researching; they are also responsible for working with the state and giving their research to people who could use it to further oppress the peoples they researched. That cannot be ignored. (It's also weird to see Graeber say this somewhere when he was a student of Marshall Sahlins and also worked with him; Sahlins notoriously was vocal about his disdain for the NAS doing research for the military.)
This kind of rhetoric is only possible because the commonplace definition of revolution has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply. It is this which makes it possible to, say, claim that the modern world is derived from two “revolutions”: the French revolution and the Industrial revolution, despite the fact that the two had almost nothing else in common other than seeming to mark a break with all that came before. One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood has noted, we are in the habit of discussing what we call “modernity” as if it involved a combination of English laissez faire economics, and French Republican government, despite the fact that the two never really occurred together: the industrial revolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated, still largely medieval English constitution, and nineteenth-century France was anything but laissez faire.
This makes me wonder what the etymological reasoning is for 'revolution' in things like the Industrial revolution. Is it that one of the two would benefit from better terminology?
Also keeping this to look into Ellen Meskins Wood.
If there is one logical error underlying all this, it rests on imagining that social or even technological change takes the same form of what Thomas Kuhn has called “the structure of scientific revolutions.” Kuhn is referring to events like the shift from a Newtonian to Einsteinian universe: suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough and afterwards, the universe is different. Applied to anything other than scientific revolutions, it implies that the world really was equivalent to our knowledge of it, and the moment we change the principles on which our knowledge is based, reality changes too. This is just the sort of basic intellectual mistake developmental psychologists say we’re supposed to get over in early childhood, but it seems few of us really do.
Putting this here to come back to it, too. Both for the developmental psychology aspect and also the rest.
I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that humans never really lived in the garden of Eden. Knocking the walls down can allow us to see this history as a resource to us in much more interesting ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, in industrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmologies); other societies have social movements and revolutions. Which means, among other things, that radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history.
I like this, and I especially like that he doesn't discount anarchists from benefitting and not doing enough to knock down the walls that enable this.
Peter Lamborn Wilson has produced the brightest of these, in a series of essays which include reflections, on, among other things, the collapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures through much of eastern North America.
Couldn't restrain himself to just one citation of this creep, I see.
Paul Lafargue, Marx’s West Indian son-in-law and author of The Right to Be Lazy
Reminder for myself again.
In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.
This is actually a good point and also something I want to come back to. Much like the rest of the section.
Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.
Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force.
Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it that the folks on the bottom (the victims of structural violence) are always imagining what it must be like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of structural violence), but it almost never occurs to the folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures that they are this tends to become one of the main bastions of any system of inequality—the downtrodden actually care about their oppressors, at least, far more than their oppressors care about them—but this seems itself to be an effect of structural violence.
A lot of this might actually give me a direction to go with the project I want to undertake on why people will believe things that are just wrong, especially because the literature available (cognitive dissonance, in-group/out-group, indoctrination from childhood) don't seem to have answers to other questions I have. Why is it that people won't unlearn something? Why is it that it's possible for some to unlearn but others just won't?
After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that a considerable chunk of the hours worked in America are only actually necessary to compensate for problems created by the fact that Americans work too much. (Consider here such jobs as all-night pizza deliveryman or dog-washer, or those women who run nighttime day care centers for the children of women who have to work nights providing child care for businesswomen...not to mention the endless hours spent by specialists cleaning up the emotional and physical damage caused by overwork, the injuries, suicides, divorces, murderous rampages, producing the drugs to pacify the children...)
So what jobs are really necessary?
Here we can see the beginnings of Bullshit Jobs, but it also has one of the problems that I routinely recognise. There's a lot of inherent ableism in Graeber's own work, whether he acknowledged it or not. This also plays into his “what jobs are necessary.”
All-night services are good for people who do not exist on the 24-hour time, like people with N24. There are people for whom our schedules simply do not match what the social expectation is, like people with DSPD.
The assumption that the world should work on one standard time is an inherently ableist structure, and it's also worth noting that most (not all) people with sleep disorders that impact our waking times wouldn't be as impacted if our world accommodated them with having 24-hour availability of many things (and you know who could run those things? people who are awake at that time).
Part of what keeps people with these sleep disorders from getting rest is the rest of the world.
Some people need help with washing their dogs (do all dogwashers hate their job? I'd rather be a dogwasher than a tutor, tbh).
Childcare is a thing we all need to think about and in better ways, but even Graeber ignores this and his points barely explore any of the issues related either for children or for the women/parents... He only goes so far as to highlight its uselessness in a capitalistic sense.
The elimination of radical inequalities would mean we would no longer require the services of most of the millions currently employed as doormen, private security forces, prison guards, or SWAT teams—not to mention the military.
Doormen feel like an odd-one-out sometimes. They are context-dependent, as I've lived in buildings where the doormen lived in the building and were there primarily to help take care of package delivery and (in one case) helping residents sort their trash and also learn about where they could take things to recycle or ensure their reuse. Their job was occasionally mixed with “grounds keeper” or “building manager,” so they were frequently problem-solvers that you could go to if you had a problem (locked out? they know the best locksmith to help you! pipe leaking? they often knew where to go for repairs). If we removed the 'security' aspect from their job and also ensured that they lived in the building they worked in (and also shared responsibilities with others in the building), it'd still be a helpful role.
Not quite like the SWAT teams and prison guards and security forces. This is the same problem in Bullshit Jobs, but it's interesting to see him quite literally rehash his own work from here.
All in all we might discover that if we identified the work that really did need to be done to maintain a comfortable and ecologically sustainable standard of living, and redistribute the hours, it may turn out that the Wobbly platform is perfectly realistic.
The irony of this is that there are enough people on the planet to deal with even what we're dealing with now, despite a good chunk of it being pointless bureaucracy or absolute nonsense. We could easily have these hours being realistic without changing anything (and that's part of why Wobbly work gets co-opted easily, especially since it's less an anarchist union now than it ever had been prior).
This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately.
This is nonsense? I mean, the end of it is nonsense. The beginning is fine. Also, if people just... cleaned up after themselves? It wouldn't take that long. And if we all had to figure out what to do with the waste, well... It wouldn't take long before “Wow, landfills are gross” would suddenly drive people back into learning things like composting.
We don't need self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots (do we necessarily need coal-mining? even in 2004, this sounds weird). If we could live in ways where we help take care of each other, we'd all be able to get this shit done. And probably have less waste, too.
The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles—is that they do not vote.
Finally?! Like, yeah. It's mostly the racism.
I’ve talked a little about the radical inclinations in much early twentieth-century anthropology, which often showed a very strong affinity with anarchism, but that seemed to largely evaporate over time. It’s all a little odd. Anthropologists are after all the only group of scholars who know anything about actually-existing stateless societies; many have actually lived in corners of the world where states have ceased to function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes and left, and people are managing their own affairs 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.
... Because most of them are uh... still agents of colonialism? And imperialism. Like, that much was obvious to me when I was doing a BA in Anthropology in the early 2000s. Even the “progressive” anthropologists I encountered still failed to recognise their own bigotries, with some often falling into the fetishising and co-opting of cultures (rather than the actual appreciation for or understanding of).
Then there’s the question of politics. Most anthropologists write as if their work has obvious political significance, in a tone which suggests they consider what they are doing quite radical, and certainly left of center. But what does this politics actually consist of? It’s increasingly hard to say. Do anthropologists tend to be anti-capitalist? Certainly it’s hard to think of one who has much good to say about capitalism. Many are in the habit of describing the current age as one of “late capitalism,” as if by declaring it is about to end, they can by the very act of doing so hasten its demise. But it’s hard to think of an anthropologist who has, recently, made any sort of suggestion of what an alternative to capitalism might be like. So are they liberals? Many can’t pronounce the word without a snort of contempt. What then? As far as I can make out the only real fundamental political commitment running through the entire field is a kind of broad populism. If nothing else, we are definitely not on the side of whoever, in a given situation, is or fancies themselves to be the elite. We’re for the little guys. Since in practice, most anthropologists are attached to (increasingly global) universities, or if not, end up in jobs like marketing consultancies or jobs with the UN—positions within the very apparatus of global rule—what this really comes down to is a kind of constant, ritualized declaration of disloyalty to that very global elite of which we ourselves, as academics, clearly form one (admittedly somewhat marginal) fraction.
This paragraph really needed to be hit with a “just because you are like this and are labelled an anarchist anthropologist... doesn't mean the others are.” Again, if anthropologists have a disdain for the elite classes, why are they consultants to the UN? Why are they working for intelligence agencies? Why are there anthropologists who weaponise their knowledge in marketing and PR, especially when it comes to being against those who most need support (and in favour of that elite oppressor class)? Why are they hiding their research in universities? Why aren't they fighting for more open sharing of information?
This whole thing is like he's trying to avoid what the field really is, even as his mentor literally was fighting against Napoleon Chagnon and the NAS... because they willingly worked with the military. It ignores the history of ethnography being done in the name of empire! How could a field that invaded the most vulnerable aspects of a people and then turned around to hand it off to empire to help them destroy those people... ever truly be against the elite? That's rubbish.
It’s not that different on the political level. Lauren Leve has recently warned that anthropologists risk, if they are not careful, becoming yet another cog in a global “identity machine,” a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions that has, over the last decade or so, effectively informed the earth’s inhabitants (or at least, all but the very most elite) that, since all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are now over, the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is (i.e., that group identities are not ways of comparing one group to each other but constituted by the way a group relates to its own history, that there is no essential difference in this regard between individuals and groups...) established in advance. Things have come to such a pass that in countries like Nepal even Theravada Buddhists are forced to play identity politics, a particularly bizarre spectacle since they are essentially basing their identity claims on adherence to a universalistic philosophy that insists identity is an illusion.
Come back to this. Especially figuring out who Lauren Leve is.
Many years ago a French anthropologist named Gerard Althabe wrote a book about Madagascar called Oppression et Liberation dans l’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might well be applied to what ends up happening in a lot of anthropological writing. For the most part, what we call “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to call the “over-developed world,” are forced on people.
Same here. Kept for my own reference.
Largely, it seems, a collection of teenage anarchists in Europe and North America, who soon began besieging the summits of the very global elite to whom anthropologists maintain such an uneasy, uncomfortable, alliance.
Bullshit on the uneasy, uncomfortable alliance. This is so annoying.