Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

The nineteenth-century "founding figures" did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The basic principles of anarchistm - self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid - referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means "without rulers"), even the assumption that all these forms are somewhat related and reinforce each other. (Graeber 2004: 7)

[Georges] Sorel argued [in Reflections sur le Vioelnce] that since the masses were not fundamentally good or rational, it was foolish to make one's primary appeal to them through rational arguments. Politicsis the art of inspiring other with great myths. For revolutionaries, he proposed the myth of an apocalyptic General Strike, a moment of total transformation. To maintain it, he added, one would need a revolutionary elite capable of keeping the myth alive by their willingness to engage in symbolic acts of violence - an elite which, like the Marxist vanguard party (often somewhat less symbolic in its violence), Mauss described as a kind of perpetual conspiracy, a modern version of the secret political men's societies of the ancient world. (Graeber 2004: 18)

In typical revolutionary discourse a "counter-power" 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 maintaim themselves in the face of the state, this is usually referred to as a "dual power" situation. (Graeber 2004: 24)

...all societies are to some degree at war with themselves. There are always clashes between interests, factions, classes and the like; also, social systems are always based on the pursuit of different forms of value which pull people in different directions. (Graeber 2004: 25)

A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing - "the" revolution, the great cataclysmic break - and instead ask "what is revolutionary action?" We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some forms of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations - even within the collectivity - in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis' definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules and principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything. (Graeber 2004: 45)

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. (Graeber 2004: 64)

POWER/IGNORANCE or POWER/STUPIDITY
Academics love Michel Foucault's argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway, they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine - a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.
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 ourself 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 hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community in Christiana, Denmar, 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.
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 understanding 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 the top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures 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. (Graeber 2004: 71-73)

While anthropologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about, that very body of comparative ethnography is seen as something shameful. As I mentioned, it is treated not as the common heritage of humankind, but as our dirty little secret. Which is actually convenient, at least insofar as academic power is largely about establishing ownership rights over a certain form of knowledge and ensuring that others don't really have much access to it. Because as I also mentioned, our dirty little secret is still ours. It's not something one needs to share with others. (Graeber 2004: 96)