The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  For those who lack the classical education of New York’s early butchers and bakers,b Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife, and has gone down in history as an atrocious nag. Socrates’ equanimity in enduring (ignoring) her is regularly held out as a proof of his nobility of character. Graves begins by pointing out: why is it that for two thousand years, no one seems to have asked what it might have actually been like to be married to Socrates? Imagine you were saddled with a husband who did next to nothing to support a family, spent all his time trying to prove everyone he met was wrong about everything, and felt true love was only possible between men and underage boys? You wouldn’t express some opinions about this? Socrates has been held out ever since as the paragon of a certain unrelenting notion of pure consistency, an unflinching determination to follow arguments to their logical conclusions, which is surely useful in its way—but he was not a very reasonable person, and those who celebrate him have ended up producing a “mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality” that has done the world enormous harm. Graves writes that as a poet, he feels no choice but to identify himself more with those frozen out of the “rational” space of Greek city, starting with women like Xanthippe, for whom reasonableness doesn’t exclude logic (no one is actually against logic) but combines it with a sense of humor, practicality, and simple human decency.

  With that in mind, it only makes sense that so much of the initiative for creating new forms of democratic process—like consensus—has emerged from the tradition of feminism, which means (among other things) the intellectual tradition of those who have, historically, tended not to be vested with the power of command. Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness—one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but “a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons.”30 Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s own perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view.

  This is how consensus is supposed to work: the group agrees, first, to some common purpose. This allows the group to look at decision making as a matter of solving common problems. Seen this way, a diversity of perspectives, even a radical diversity of perspectives, while it might cause difficulties, can also be an enormous resource. After all, what sort of team is more likely to come up with a creative solution to a problem: a group of people who all see matters somewhat differently, or a group of people who all see things exactly the same?

  As I’ve already observed, spaces of democratic creativity are precisely those where very different sorts of people, coming from very different traditions, are suddenly forced to improvise. One reason is because in such situations, people are forced to reconcile divergent assumptions about what politics is even about. In the 1980s, a group of would-be Maoist guerrillas from urban Mexico descended to the mountains of the Mexican southwest, where they began to create revolutionary networks, first by beginning women’s literacy campaigns. Eventually, they became the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who initiated a brief insurrection in 1994—not, however, to overthrow the state, but to create a liberated territory in which largely indigenous communities could begin experimenting with new forms of democracy. From the beginning, there were constant differences between the originally urban intellectuals, like the famous Subcomandante Marcos, who assumed democracy meant majority vote and elected representatives, and Mam, Cholti, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil speakers, whose communal assemblies had always operated by consensus, and preferred to see a system where, if delegates had to be selected, they could be recalled the moment communities no longer felt they were conveying the communal will. As Marcos recalled, they soon found there was no agreement about what “democracy” actually meant:

  The communities are promoting democracy. But the concept seems vague. There are many kinds of democracy. That’s what I tell them. I try to explain to them: “You can operate by consensus because you have a communal life.” When they arrive at an assembly, they know each other, they come to solve a common problem. “But in other places it isn’t so,” I tell them. “People live separate lives and they use the assembly for other things, not to solve the problem.”

  And they say, “no,” but it means “yes, it works for us.”

  And it indeed does work for them, they solve the problem. So they propose that method for the Nation and the world. The world must organize itself thus.… And it is very difficult to go against that because that is how they solve their problems.31

  Let us take this proposal seriously. Why shouldn’t democracy be a matter of collective problem solving? We might have very different ideas about what life is ultimately about, but it’s perfectly apparent that human beings on this planet share a large number of common problems (climate change comes most readily to mind as a pressing and immediate one, but there are any number of them) that we would do well to work together to try to solve. Everyone seems to agree that in principle it would be better to do this democratically, in a spirit of equality and reasonable deliberation. Why does the idea that we might actually do so seem like such a utopian pipe dream?

  Perhaps instead of asking what the best political system is that our current social order could support, we should be asking, What social arrangements would be necessary in order for us to have a genuine, participatory, democratic system that could dedicate itself to solving collective problems?c

  It seems kind of an obvious question. If we are not used to asking it, it’s because we’ve been taught from an early age that the answer is itself unreasonable. Because the answer, of course, is anarchism.

  In fact, there is reason to believe the Founders were right: one cannot create a political system based on the principle of direct, participatory democracy in a society such as their own, divided by vast inequalities of wealth, the total exclusion of the bulk of the population (in early America, women, slaves, indigenous people), and where most people’s lives were organized around the giving and taking of orders. Nor is it possible in a society such as our own, in which 1 percent of the population controls 42 percent of the wealth.

  If you propose the idea of anarchism to a roomful of ordinary people, someone will almost inevitably object: but of course we can’t eliminate the state, prisons, and police. If we do, people will simply start killing one another. To most, this seems simple common sense. The odd thing about this prediction is that it can be empirically tested; in fact, it frequently has been empirically tested. And it turns out to be false. True, there are one or two cases like Somalia, where the state broke down when people were already in the midst of a bloody civil war, and warlords did not immediately stop killing each other when it happened (though in most respects, even in Somalia, a worst-case hypothesis, education, health, and other social indicators had actually improved twenty years after the dissolution of the central state!).32 And of course we hear about the cases like Somalia for the very reason that violence ensues. But in most cases, as I myself observed in parts of rural Madagascar, very little happens. Obviously, statistics are unavailable, since the absence of states generally also means the absence of anyone gathering statistics. However, I’ve talked to many anthropologists and others who’ve been in such places and their accounts are surprisingly similar. The police disappear, people stop paying taxes, otherwise they pretty much carry on as they had before. Certainly they do not break into a Hobbesian “war of all against all.”

  As a result, we almost never hear about such places at all. When I was living in the town of Arivonimamo in 1990, and wandering about the surrounding countryside, even I had no id
ea at first that I was living in an area where state control had effectively disappeared (I think part of the reason for my impression was that everyone talked and acted as if state institutions were still functioning, hoping no one would notice). When I returned in 2010, the police had returned, taxes were once again being collected, but everyone also felt that violent crime had increased dramatically.

  So the real question we have to ask becomes: what is it about the experience of living under a state, that is, in a society where rules are enforced by the threat of prisons and police, and all the forms of inequality and alienation that makes possible, that makes it seem obvious to us that people, under such conditions, would behave in a way that it turns out they don’t actually behave?

  The anarchist answer is simple. If you treat people like children, they will tend to act like children. The only successful method anyone has ever devised to encourage others to act like adults is to treat them as if they already are. It’s not infallible. Nothing is. But no other approach has any real chance of success. And the historical experience of what actually does happen in crisis situations demonstrates that even those who have not grown up in a culture of participatory democracy, if you take away their guns or ability to call their lawyers, can suddenly become extremely reasonable.33 This is all that anarchists are really proposing to do.

  * The same is true of all thirteen of the original state constitutions created after the Revolution.

  † The uprisings are known to history as Shays’ Rebellion, and even more condescendingly, the Whiskey Rebellion, though the latter name was consciously invented by Alexander Hamilton to dismiss the rebels as drunken hillbillies rather than, as Terry Bouton has demonstrated, citizens calling for greater democratic control. See Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). There has been a wealth of recent research on the topic: notably, Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origin of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), and William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), and Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). The intellectual tradition goes back at least to Charles Beard’s famous An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: McMillan, 1913), which pointed out the Framers were almost exclusively bond-holders, though his original conclusions have been much further refined by subsequent research.

  ‡ Husband had called for a relatively equal distribution of landed property as well, on the grounds that inequalities of property mitigate against democratic participation, and for voting districts small enough that representatives could regularly consult with their constituents. It is likely he was exactly who Adams was thinking of in his remarks about the dangers of majority vote.

  § This passage is the opening epigraph of William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion, which emphasizes the degree to which the resulting document was careful to avoid actual democracy.

  ‖ In the twelve collected volumes of Jefferson’s work the word “democracy” appears once, and only then in a quote by Samuel von Pufendorf about the legalities of treaties! Of course, Jefferson was the closest to an advocate of direct democracy as there was among the Founders, with his famous vision of dividing the country into thousands of “wards” small enough to afford public participation, allowing citizens to maintain the same sort of popular mobilization witnessed during the Revolution—but even these he referred to as small republics.

  a With a few die-hard exceptions. I should note here that the first mass use of consensus process, in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was often quite rocky—partly out of simple lack of experience, partly out of purism (it was only later that modified consensus for larger groups came into common use)—and many who went through the experience, most famously libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, who promoted the idea of communalism, came out strongly against consensus and for majority rule.

  b One does sometimes worry that the Gouverneur Morrises of the world have ultimately been successful in preventing such knowledge from reaching most of the population.

  c It wouldn’t have to be based on a system of strict consensus, by the way, since, as we’ll see, absolute consensus is unrealistic in large groups—let alone on a planetary scale! What I am talking about is just what I say: an approach to politics, whatever particular institutional form it takes, that similarly sees political deliberation as problem solving rather than as a struggle between fixed interests.

  FOUR

  HOW CHANGE HAPPENS

  The last chapter ended with a long-term, philosophical perspective; this one aims to be more practical.

  It would be impossible to write a how-to guide for nonviolent uprisings, a modern-day Rules for Radicals. If there is one rule that always applies to civil resistance, it is that there are no strict rules. Movements work best when they best adapt themselves to their particular situations. The best democratic process depends on the nature of the community involved, its cultural and political traditions, the number of people taking part, the experience level of the participants, and, of course, what they are trying to accomplish—among any number of other immediate practical concerns. Tactics have to remain flexible: if movements do not constantly reinvent themselves, they soon shrivel and die.

  Then there’s the obvious, but often misunderstood, fact that the kind of tactics appropriate to one community might be completely inappropriate to others. After the OWS evictions, there was a raging debate, as I’ve mentioned, over Black Blocs. Black Blocs are formations, mainly composed of anarchists or other anti-authoritarians, that come to actions dressed in masks and identical black hoodies, partly as a display of revolutionary solidarity, but also to indicate the presence of people willing to engage in more militant action should it be required. In America, they tend to consider themselves nonviolent but also to define “violence” as damage to living beings; they are often willing to engage in symbolic attacks on corporate property, and sometimes even to fight back in limited ways if directly assaulted by police. Just as often, though, “militant tactics” might just be a matter of spray painting slogans, or linking arms or forming a shield wall to protect more vulnerable protesters from police.

  As I mentioned earlier, the very presence of Black Blocs is often treated by liberal commentators as itself a form of violence. One common argument is that such formations, by their very presence, end up alienating the very working-class communities that the larger movements are meant to draw in, or giving police a pretext to attack nonviolent protesters. But the truth is that in 90 percent of occupations, no one has employed Black Bloc tactics at all, and the one that saw the largest bloc—Occupy Oakland—had its own specific, local reasons. Oakland is a city marked by decades of extreme police brutality and militant resistance from the poor—especially within the African-American community (the Black Panthers, after all, did come out of Oakland). Where in most cities Black Bloc tactics could easily alienate the larger movement from working-class communities, in Oakland militant tactics are more likely to be seen as a sign of working-class solidarity.

  As I learned in my days in the Global Justice Movement in 2000, heated arguments about tactics are often really arguments about strategy in disguise. For instance, after the Seattle WTO actions in November 1999, the question we all debated was “Is it ever okay to break a window?” But the underlying argument was really about whom the Global Justice Movement in the United States should really be mobilizing, and for what purposes: educated middle-class consumers who might be brought around to support fair trade policies—the sorts of people who might recoil from any signal of violence—or potentially revolutionary elements who didn’t need to be convinced that the system was violent and corrupt, but did need to be convinced that it was possible to successfully strike against it—the sorts of people who might find a broken window or tw
o inspiring. The debate was never fully settled and such strategic questions also seem out of place here—at least, it’s hardly my role to weigh in on what part of the population should be mobilizing, other than to say all those organizing in their own communities, whoever they are, should think about how to act in a spirit of solidarity with all other members of the 99 percent.

  Rather, I will concentrate on a series of practical ideas and suggestions, born of my own decade-long experience in horizontal organizing, and my direct experience with Occupy itself.

  CONSENSUS

  There is a great deal of debate about whether consensus is even possible in larger groups, when it is appropriate for consensus-based groups to fall back on voting and to what purpose, but these debates are often marked by confusion as to what consensus actually means. Many for example assume, fairly stubbornly, that consensus process is simply a unanimous voting system—and then proceed to debate whether such a system “works,” presumably, as opposed to a system where all decisions take the form of a majority vote. From my perspective at least, such debates miss the point. The essence of consensus process is just that everyone should be able to weigh in equally on a decision, and no one should be bound by a decision they detest. In practice, this might be said to boil down to four principles: