The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  One might even speculate about the existence of a kind of broad democratic unconscious that lay behind many of the ideas and arguments of the American Revolution, ideas whose origins even ordinary citizens felt uncomfortable with, since they were so firmly associated with savagery and criminality. The pirates are just the most vivid example. Even more important in the North American colonies were the societies of the frontier. But those early colonies were far more similar to pirate ships than we are given to imagine. Frontier communities might not have been as densely populated as pirate ships, or in as immediate need of constant cooperation, but they were spaces of intercultural improvisation, and, like the pirate ships, largely outside the purview of any states. It’s only recently that historians have begun to document just how thoroughly entangled the societies of settlers and natives were in those early days,19 with settlers adopting Indian crops, clothes, medicines, customs, and styles of warfare. They engaged in trading, often living side by side, sometimes intermarrying, while others lived for years as captives in Indian communities before returning to their homes having learned native languages, habits, and mores. Most of all, historians have noted the endless fears among the leaders of colonial communities and military units that their subordinates were—in the same way that they had taken up the use of tomahawks, wampum, and canoes—beginning to absorb Indian attitudes of equality and individual liberty.

  The result was a cultural transformation that affected almost every aspect of settler life. For instance, Puritans felt that corporal punishment was absolutely essential in the raising of children: the birch was required to teach children the meaning of authority, to break their will (tainted by original sin), in much the way one breaks a horse or other animal—in the same way as, they also held, the birch was required in adult life to discipline wives and servants. Most Native Americans in contrast felt that children should never be beaten, under any circumstances. In the 1690s, at the same time as the famous Boston Calvinist minister Cotton Mather was inveighing against pirates as a blaspheming scourge of mankind, he was also complaining that his fellow settlers, led astray by the ease of the climate in the New World and relaxed attitudes of its native inhabitants, had begun to undergo what he called “Indianization”—refusing to apply corporal punishment to their children, and thus undermining the principles of discipline, hierarchy, and formality that should govern relations between masters and servants, men and women, or young and old:

  Though the first English planters in this country had usually a government and a discipline in their families and had a sufficient severity in it, yet, as if the climate had taught us to Indianize, the relaxation of it is now such that it is wholly laid aside, and a foolish indulgence to children is become an epidemical miscarriage of the country, and like to be attended with many evil consequences.20

  In other words, insofar as an individualistic, indulgent, freedom-loving spirit first began emerging among the colonists, the early Puritan Fathers laid it squarely at the feet of the Indians—or, as they still called them at the time, “the Americans,” since the settlers then still considered themselves not American but English. One of the ironies of the “influence debate” is that in all the sound and fury over the Iroquois influence on the federal system, this was what Grinde and Johansen were really trying to emphasize: that ordinary Englishmen and Frenchmen settled in the colonies only began to think of themselves as “Americans,” as a new sort of freedom-loving people, when they began to see themselves as more like Indians.

  What was true in towns like Boston was all the more true on the frontiers, especially in those communities often made up of escaped slaves and servants who “became Indians” outside the control of colonial governments entirely,21 or island enclaves of what historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have called “the Atlantic proletariat,” the motley collection of freedmen, sailors, ship’s whores, renegades, Antinomians, and rebels who developed in the port cities of the North Atlantic world before the emergence of modern racism, and from whom much of the democratic impulse of the American—and other—revolutions seems to have first emerged.22 Men like Mather would have agreed with that as well: he often wrote that Indian attacks on frontier settlements were God’s punishment on such folk for abandoning their rightful masters and living like Indians themselves.

  If the history were truly written, it seems to me that the real origin of the democratic spirit—and most likely, many democratic institutions—lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches. I might add that this includes the Haudenosaunee themselves. The league was originally formed—we don’t know precisely when—as a kind of contractual agreement among the Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk (the sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined later) to create a way of mediating disputes and making peace; but during their period of expansion in the seventeenth century it became an extraordinary jumble of peoples, with large proportions of the population adopted war captives from other indigenous nations, captured settlers, and runaways. One Jesuit missionary at the height of the seventeenth century Beaver Wars complained that it was almost impossible to preach to the Seneca in their own language, since so many were barely fluent in it! Even during the eighteenth century, for instance, while Canassatego, the ambassador who first suggested a federation to the colonists, was born to Onondaga parents, the other main Haudenosaunee negotiator with the colonists at this time, Swatane, was actually French—or, anyway, originally born to French parents in Quebec. Like all living constitutions, the league was constantly changing and evolving, and no doubt much of the careful architecture and solemn dignity of its council structure was the product of just such a creative mix of cultures, tradition, and experience.

  Why do conservatives insist that democracy was invented in ancient Greece, and that it is somehow inherent in what they call “Western civilization”—despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? In the end, it’s just a way of doing what the rich and powerful always do: taking possession of the fruits of other people’s labor. It’s a way of staking a property claim. And property claims must be defended. This is why, if whenever someone like Amartya Sen appears (as he has recently done) to make the obvious point that democracy can just as easily be found in village councils in southern Africa, or India, one can count on an immediate wave of indignant responses in conservative journals and web pages arguing that he has completely missed the point.

  Generally speaking, if you can find a concept—truth, freedom, democracy—that everyone agrees is a good thing, then you can be sure that no one will agree on precisely what it is. But the moment you ask why most Americans, or most people generally, like the idea of democracy, the conventional story not only falls apart, it becomes completely irrelevant.

  Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word “democracy” was invented in ancient Greece—but largely by people who didn’t like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really “invented” at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It’s not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.

  In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have equal say.

&n
bsp; One of the reasons it is easy for political scientists to ignore such local associations and assemblies when speaking of the history of democracy is that in most such assemblies, things never come down to a vote. The idea that democracy is simply a matter of voting—which the Founders, too, assumed—also allows one to think of it as an innovation, some sort of conceptual breakthrough: as if it had never occurred to anyone in previous epochs to test support for a proposal by asking people to all put up their hands, scratch something on a potsherd, or have everyone supporting a proposal stand on one side of a public square. But even if people throughout history have always known how to count, there are good reasons why counting has often been avoided as a means of reaching group decisions. Voting is divisive. If a community lacks means to compel its members to obey a collective decision, then probably the stupidest thing one could do is to stage a series of public contests in which one side will, necessarily, be seen to lose; this would not only allow decisions that as many as 49 percent of the community strongly oppose, it would also maximize the possibility of hard feelings among that part of the community one most needs to convince to go along despite their opposition. A process of consensus finding, of mutual accommodation and compromise to reach a collective decision everyone at least does not find strongly objectionable, is far more suited to situations where those who have to carry out a decision lack the sort of centralized bureaucracy, and particularly, the means of systematic coercion, that would be required to force an angry minority to comply with decisions they found stupid, obnoxious, or unfair.

  Historically, it is extremely unusual to find both of these together. Throughout most of human history, egalitarian societies were precisely those that did not have some military or police apparatus to force people to do things they did not wish to do (all those sekas and ayllus referred to above); where the means of compulsion did exist, it never occurred to anyone that ordinary people’s opinions were in any way important.

  Where do we find voting, then? Sometimes in societies where spectacles of public competition are considered normal—such as ancient Greece (ancient Greeks would make a contest out of anything)—but mainly in situations where everyone taking part in an assembly is armed or, at least, trained in the use of weapons. In the ancient world, voting occurred mainly within armies. Aristotle was well aware of this: the constitution of a Greek state, he observed, largely depends on the chief arm of its military: if it’s a cavalry, one can expect an aristocracy, if it’s heavy infantry, voting rights will be extended to those wealthy men who can afford armor, if it’s light troops, archers, slingers, or a navy (as in Athens), one can expect democracy. Similarly, in Rome, popular assemblies that also relied on majority vote were based directly on military units of one hundred men, called centuries. Underlying the institution was the rather commonsensical idea that if a man was armed, his opinions had to be taken into account. Ancient military units often elected their own officers. It’s also easy to see why majority voting would make sense in a military unit: even if a vote was 60–40, both sides are armed; if it did come down to a fight, one could see immediately who was most likely to win. And this pattern applies, broadly, more or less across the historical record: in the 1600s, for instance, Six Nations councils—which were primarily engaged in peacemaking—operated by consensus, but pirate ships, which were military operations, used majority vote.

  All this is important because it shows that the aristocratic fears of the wealthy early Patriots—who when they thought of their nightmare vision “democracy” thought of an armed populace making decisions by majority show of hands—were not entirely unfounded.

  Democracy, then, is not necessarily defined by majority voting: it is, rather, the process of collective deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation. Democratic creativity, in turn, is most likely to occur when one has a diverse collection of participants, drawn from very different traditions, with an urgent need to improvise some means to regulate their common affairs, free of a preexisting overarching authority.

  In today’s North America, it’s largely anarchists—proponents of a political philosophy that has generally been opposed to governments of any sort—who actively try to develop and promote such democratic institutions. In a way the anarchist identification with this notion of democracy goes back a long way. In 1550, or even 1750, when both words were still terms of abuse, detractors often used “democracy” interchangeably with “anarchy,” or “democrat” with “anarchist.” In each case, some radicals eventually began using the term, defiantly, to describe themselves. But while “democracy” gradually became something everyone felt they had to support (even as no one agreed on what precisely it was), “anarchy” took the opposite path, becoming for most a synonym for violent disorder.

  What then is anarchism?

  Actually the term means simply “without rulers.” Just as in the case of democracy, there are two different ways one could tell the history of anarchism. On the one hand, we could look at the history of the word “anarchism,” which was coined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840 and was adopted by a political movement in late-nineteenth-century Europe, becoming especially strongly established in Russia, Italy, and Spain, before spreading across the rest of the world; on the other hand, we could see it as a much broader political sensibility.

  The easiest way to explain anarchism in either sense is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society—and that defines a “free society” as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage, or wage labor, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Even deeper structural inequalities like racism and sexism are ultimately based on the (more subtle and insidious) threat of force. Anarchists thus envision a world based on equality and solidarity, in which human beings would be free to associate with one another to pursue an endless variety of visions, projects, and conceptions of what they find valuable in life. When people ask me what sorts of organization could exist in an anarchist society, I always answer: any form of organization one can imagine, and probably many we presently can’t, with only one proviso—they would be limited to ones that could exist without anyone having the ability, at any point, to call on armed men to show up and say “I don’t care what you have to say about this; shut up and do what you’re told.”

  In this sense there have always been anarchists: you find them pretty much any time a group of people confronted with some system of power or domination imposed over them object to it so violently that they begin imagining ways of dealing with each other free of any such forms of power or domination. Most such projects remain lost to history but every now and then evidence for one or another crops up. In China around 400 B.C., for example, there was a philosophical movement that came to be known as the “School of the Tillers,” which held that both merchants and government officials were both useless parasites, and attempted to create communities of equals where the only leadership would be by example, and the economy would be democratically regulated in unclaimed territories between the major states. Apparently, the movement was created by an alliance between renegade intellectuals who fled to such free villages and the peasant intellectuals they encountered there. Their ultimate aim appears to have been to gradually draw off defectors from surrounding kingdoms and thus, eventually, cause their collapse. This kind of encouragement of mass defection is a classic anarchist strategy. Needless to say they were not ultimately successful, but their ideas had enormous influence on court philosophers of later generations. And in the cities, anarchist ideas gave rise to notions that the individual should not be bound by any social conventions and that all technology should be rejected in order to return to an imagined primitive utopia—a pattern that was to repeat itself many times through world history. Those individualist and primitivist ideas, in turn, had an eno
rmous influence on the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.23

  How many similar movements have there been throughout human history? We cannot know. (We only happen to know about the Tillers because they also compiled manuals of agricultural technology so good they were read and recopied for thousands of years.) But really all the Tillers were doing was an intellectually self-conscious version of what, as James Scott has recently shown in his “anarchist history of Southeast Asia,” millions of people in that part of the world have been doing for centuries: flee from the control of nearby kingdoms and try to set up societies based on a rejection of everything those states represent; then try to convince others to do the same.24 There are likely to have been many such movements winning free spaces of one sort or another from different states. My point is that such initiatives have always been around. For most of human history, rejection has been more likely to take the form of flight, defection, and the creation of new communities than of revolutionary confrontation with the powers-that-be. Of course, all this is much easier when there are distant hills to run away to and states that had difficulty extending their control over wide stretches of terrain. After the industrial revolution, when radical workers’ movements began to emerge across Europe, and some factory workers in places like France or Spain began to espouse openly anarchist ideas, this option was no longer available. Anarchists instead embraced a variety of strategies, from the formation of alternative economic enterprises (co-ops, mutualist banking), workplace strikes and sabotage, and the general strike, to outright insurrection.

  Marxism emerged as a political philosophy around the same time and, in its early days especially, aspired to the same ultimate goal as anarchism: a free society, the abolition of all forms of social inequality, self-managed workplaces, the dissolution of the state. But from the debates surrounding the creation of the First International onwards there was a key difference. Most Marxists insisted that it was necessary first to seize state power—whether by the ballot or otherwise—and use its mechanisms to transform society, to the point where, the argument usually went, such mechanisms would ultimately become redundant and simply fade away into nothingness. Even back in the nineteenth century, anarchists pointed out this was a pipe dream. One cannot, they argued, create peace by training for war, equality by creating top-down chains of command, or, for that matter, human happiness by becoming grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all personal self-realization or self-fulfillment to the cause. Anarchists insisted that it wasn’t just that the ends do not justify the means (though the ends do not, of course, justify the means) but that you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. Hence the famous anarchist call to begin “building the new society in the shell of the old” with egalitarian experiments ranging from nonhierarchical schools (like the Escuela Moderna in Spain or the Free School movement in the United States) to radical labor unions (CGT in France, CNT in Spain, IWW in North America) to an endless variety of communes (from the Modern Times collective in New York in 1851 to Christiania in Denmark in 1971; the kibbutz movement in Israel, which was originally largely anarchist-inspired, being perhaps the most famous and successful spin-off from such experiments).