Reading: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (David Graeber) — to page 37 To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
Why are there so few anarchists in the academy?
I mean, the basic assumption would be that the principles of free association and non-hierarchical have something to do with it. Anarchists aren't typically found in places where they'll be stifled to death.
So are academics just behind the curve here? It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy will be overrun by anarchists. But I’m not holding my breath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class.
I mean, Marxism lends itself to an institution where people organise themselves hierarchically and believe that they have the answers to pass downward to the masses. Anarchism doesn't.
At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.
Which is also why I don't really trust most anarchist academics. Many have no intention of dislodging themselves from the comfort to do the necessary challenging. While this was published in 2004, it's going to be interesting to see any of the folks at the Anarchist Research Group (ARG) in Loughborough challenge the fact that their university is working with the UK's Ministry of Defense.
But they won't do that, at least not most of them. Because they're too fucking comfortable and 'anarchist' is an aesthetic or niche to study for them.
Pierre Clastres
This is a note to self to possibly come back to him. This is because:
He insisted political anthropologists had still not completely gotten over the old evolutionist perspectives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisticated form of organization than what had come before; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian societies Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to have attained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirely unaware of what the elementary forms of state power might be like—what it would mean to allow some men to give everyone else orders which could not be questioned, since they were backed up by the threat of force—and were for that very reason determined to ensure such things never came about? What if they considered the fundamental premises of our political science morally objectionable?
Is interesting to see included, and I don't know much about Clastres. (Though, he was apparently naive about the power wielded against, for example, women by men.)
... This pamphlet has a lot of errors in sentences. It's kind of annoying.
In typical revolutionary discourse a “counterpower” is a collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias. Sometimes it is also referred to as an “anti-power.” When such institutions maintain themselves in the face of the state, this is usually referred to as a “dual power” situation. By this definition most of human history is actually characterized by dual power situations, since few historical states had the means to root such institutions out, even assuming that they would have wanted to. But Mauss and Clastres’ argument suggests something even more radical. It suggests that counterpower, at least in the most elementary sense, actually exists where the states and markets are not even present; that in such cases, rather than being embodied in popular institutions which pose themselves against the power of lords, or kings, or plutocrats, they are embodied in institutions which ensure such types of person never come about. What it is “counter” to, then, is a potential, a latent aspect, or dialectical possibility if you prefer, within the society itself.
Interesting that Peter jabs at part of the book that discusses a vague notion of nonviolence, but Graeber doesn't show a diminished view of actions seen as violent. He openly discusses them as options (seen here as “popular militias”).
I find it interesting that Peter routinely neglects anarchist works that would support his theory in this “anarchist” book, but he will take on a liberal professor who is entirely anti-violence in every way because she says things he likes about how to deal with patriarchy. It's kind of telling.
Of course, in later contexts, what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls “the Clastrian machine,” that set of mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domination, what I’m calling the apparatus of counterpower, can itself become caught in such apocalyptic fantasies.
... Is there a point where I can read one fucking anarchist text without someone neutrally or positively citing some pederast piece of shit? Ever?
If a revolution is a matter of people resisting some form of power identified as oppressive, identifying some key aspect of that power as the source of what is fundamentally objectionable about it, and then trying to get rid of one’s oppressors in such a way as to try to eliminate that sort of power completely from daily life, then it is hard to deny that, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. It might not have involved an actual uprising, but it was a revolution nonetheless.
I would argue that it's... not, much in the way that I don't see the Velvet Revolution as a revolution in anything but name. In neither case have they rid themselves of their oppressors; they're still there, and they can still come back.
If anything, they're both 'revolutions' in the way that we consider the 'agricultural revolution' or 'industrial revolution' to be a thing. It's a (noticeable) shift in thought or practice, not a shift in removing the oppressors. This is also clear by the next paragraph:
How long it would last is another question; it was a very fragile, tenuous sort of freedom. Many such enclaves have collapsed—in Madagascar as elsewhere.
This doesn't make it feel revolutionary, in the sense of removing oppressors and maintaining autonomous structure.