The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, but of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the 1970s, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace. Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.

  Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt, and the morality of work, are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything. It’s also why it would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

  WORK 3: BUREAUCRACY

  One genuinely disastrous failure of the mainstream left has been its inability to produce a meaningful critique of bureaucracy. I think this is the most obvious explanation of the failure of the mainstream left, pretty much everywhere, to take advantage of the catastrophic failure of capitalism in 2008. In Europe, the parties that successfully managed to take advantage of popular outrage were, in almost all cases, on the right. This is because the moderate, Social Democratic left had long since embraced both the market and bureaucracy; the right (and particularly the far right) not only found it easier to abandon blind faith in market solutions, but already had a critique of bureaucracy as well. It is a crude, outmoded, and in many ways irrelevant critique. But at least it exists. The mainstream left, in rejecting the hippies and communes of the 1960s, has effectively left itself with no critique at all.

  Yet bureaucracy fills every aspect of our lives in ways it never has before. Bizarrely, we are almost completely unable to see or talk about it. Partly because we have come to see bureaucracy as simply an aspect of government—ignoring the often vastly more powerful private bureaucracies, or, even more crucially, the way that public and private (corporate, financial, even educational) bureaucracies now are so completely entangled that it’s impossible to really distinguish them.

  I once read that the average American spends about half a year, over the course of their lives, waiting for a traffic light to change. I don’t know if anyone has ever calculated how much time he or she spends filling out forms—I doubt they have—but I can’t imagine it would be substantially less. I am quite sure that no previous population in history has ever had to spend so much of their lives on paperwork. And while the government does seem to specialize in particularly excruciating forms, as anyone who spends much time on the Internet knows, what paperwork really surrounds is anything involving the giving and receiving of money. This is true from the top of the system (the vast administrative system put into place to regulate global trade in the name of the “free market”) to the most intimate details of everyday life, where technologies that were originally supposed to save labor have turned us all into amateur accountants, legal clerks, and travel agents.

  Yet somehow, unlike in the 1960s, when the problem was much less, this unprecedented cascade of documents is no longer seen as a political issue. Again, we have to make the world around us visible again. Especially since one of the instinctive suspicions that nonpolitical people have of the left is that it will likely produce even more bureaucratization. To the contrary. It would be almost impossible to have more bureaucratization than we do already. Any revolutionary transformation—even if it doesn’t eliminate the state entirely—will almost certainly mean far less.

  WORK 4: RECLAIMING COMMUNISM

  Here we have the most difficult challenge of all, but as long as we’re at it, why not go for broke?

  Something indeed strange began to happen in the 1980s. This was perhaps the first period in the history of capitalism when capitalists actually began calling themselves “capitalists.” For most of the previous two centuries of its existence, the word had been basically a term of abuse. I remember well how The New York Times, which at the time became the real ideological driving force for the popularization of what was to become conventional neoliberal wisdom, led the way, with an endless series of headlines crowing over how some communist regime, or socialist party, or cooperative enterprise, or other ostensibly left-wing institution, had been forced, by sheer expedience, to embrace one or another element of “capitalism.” It was tied to the endlessly repeated mantra of “communism just doesn’t work”—but it also represented a kind of ideological back-flip, one first pioneered by right-wing lunatic fringe figures like Ayn Rand, where “capitalism” and “socialism” were essentially made to change places. Where once capitalism had been the tawdry reality, and socialism the unrealized ideal, now it was the other way around. It was all the more extreme in the case of “communism,” which had always been used, even for those regimes that called themselves “communist,” for a vague utopian future usually only to be realized after the withering away of the state, and, certainly, that bore little resemblance to the “socialist” system that existed at the time. After 1989, the meaning of “communism” seemed to shift to “whatever system of organization prevailed under ‘communist’ regimes.” This, in turn, was followed by a genuinely peculiar rhetorical shift, whereby such regimes—once written off as ruthlessly efficient in the maintenance of armies and secret police, but woefully inept at the production of consumer pleasures—were treated as themselves utopian, that is, as so completely defying the basic realities of human nature (as revealed by economics) that they simply “didn’t work” at all, that they were, in effect, impossible—a truly remarkable conclusion when speaking, say, of the USSR, which for seventy years controlled a large share of the earth’s surface, defeated Hitler, and launched the first satellite, and then human, into outer space. It was as if the collapse of the Soviet Union was taken to prove that it could never have existed in the first place!

  The ideological deployment of the term on the popular level is fascinating, and no one really talks about it. I keenly remember, as an adolescent working in restaurant kitchens and similar places, how any suggestion by the staff on how things might be organized in a more reasonable, or even efficient, manner was immediately met with one of two responses: “this isn’t a democracy,” or, “this isn’t communism.” In other words, from the perspective of employers, the two words really were interchangeable. Communism meant workplace democracy and that’s exactly why they found it objectionable. This was the 1970s and 1980s; the idea that communism (or democ
racy) was inefficient let alone intrinsically unworkable did not really enter in. By the current decade, we’ve reached the point where I have witnessed middle-class Londoners—ones who considered themselves distinctly left of center—appeal to the idea automatically even when dealing with their children, like the one who responded to a daughter’s suggestion of more democratic allocation of dog-walking responsibilities by saying, “No, that would be communism, and we all know that communism doesn’t work.”

  The irony is that if one takes a more realistic definition of the term “communism,” exactly the opposite has been proved to be true. It could well be argued that we’re in the reverse of the situation so widely touted in the 1980s. Capitalism has been forced, in a thousand ways in a thousand places, to fall back on communism, precisely because it’s the only thing that works.

  I’ve made this argument repeatedly before and it’s a simple one. All it requires is to stop imagining “communism” as the absence of private property arrangements, and go back to the original definition: “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”† If any social arrangement grounded and operating on such a principle can be described as “communism,” all of our most fundamental understandings of social reality completely change. It becomes apparent that communism—at least in its most attenuated form—is the basis of all amicable social relations, since, sociality of any sort always assumes a certain baseline communism, an understanding that, if the need is great enough (e.g., to save a drowning person) or the request small enough (e.g., a light, directions), these are the standards that will be applied. We are all communists with those we love and trust the most; yet no one behaves communistically in all circumstances with everyone, or, presumably, ever has or will. Above all, work tends to be organized on communistic grounds, since in practical situations of cooperation, and especially when the need is immediate and pressing, the only way to solve a problem is to identify who has what abilities to get them what they need. If two people are fixing a pipe, it doesn’t matter if they’re working for the Heritage Foundation or Goldman Sachs, if one says “Hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t normally say, “And what do I get for that?” Hence, there’s no point in imagining some ideal future “communism,” and arguing whether it would be possible. All societies are communistic at base, and capitalism is best viewed as a bad way of organizing communism. (It is bad among other things because it tends to encourage extremely authoritarian forms of communism on the workplace level. One key political question is: what better way of organizing communism can we find that will encourage more democratic ones? Or even better, one that eliminates our contemporary institution of “workplaces” entirely.)

  Just putting things this way seems startling, but it’s really very commonsensical, and pushes away the endless accretions the concept of communism has taken on, both from those who claimed to speak in its name, and those who claimed to revile it. It would mean there can never be such a thing as a “communist” system, in the sense that everything is organized on communistic terms. It would also mean that in the most important sense we are already living in one.

  The reader can perhaps get a sense now of the overall direction I have in mind. We are already practicing communism much of the time. We are already anarchists, or at least we act like anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require physical threats as a means of enforcement. It’s not a question of building an entirely new society whole cloth. It’s a question of building on what we are already doing, expanding the zones of freedom, until freedom becomes the ultimate organizing principle. I actually don’t think the technical aspects of coming up with how to produce and distribute manufactured objects is likely to be the great problem, though we are constantly told to believe it’s the only problem. There are many things in short supply in the world. One thing of which we have a well-nigh unlimited supply is intelligent, creative people able to come up with solutions to problems like that. The problem is not a lack of imagination. The problem is the stifling systems of debt and violence, created to ensure that those powers of imagination are not used—or not used to create anything beyond financial derivatives, new weapons systems, or new Internet platforms for the filling out of forms. This is, of course, exactly what brought so many to places like Zuccotti Park.

  Even what now seem like major screaming ideological divides are likely to sort themselves easily enough in practice. I used to frequent Internet newsgroups in the 1990s, which at the time were full of creatures that called themselves “anarchocapitalists.” (They seem to exist almost entirely on the Internet. To this day I’m not sure I’ve ever met one in real life.) Most spent a good deal of their time condemning left anarchists as proponents of violence. “How can you be for a free society and be against wage labor? If I want to hire someone to pick my tomatoes, how are you going to stop me except through force?” Logically then any attempt to abolish the wage system can only be enforced by some new version of the KGB. One hears such arguments frequently.‡ What one never hears, significantly, is anyone saying “If I want to hire myself out to pick someone else’s tomatoes, how are you going to stop me except through force?” Everyone seems to imagine that in a future stateless society, they will somehow end up members of the employing class. Nobody seems to think they’ll be the tomato pickers. But where, exactly, do they imagine these tomato pickers are going to come from? Here one might employ a little thought experiment: let’s call it the parable of the divided island. Two groups of idealists each claim half of an island. They agree to draw the border in such a way that there are roughly equal resources on each side. One group proceeds to create an economic system where certain members have property, others have none, and those who have none have no social guarantees: they will be left to starve to death unless they seek employment on any terms the wealthy are willing to offer. The other group creates a system where everyone is guaranteed at least the basic means of existence and welcomes all comers. What possible reason would those slated to be the night watchmen, nurses, and bauxite miners on the anarcho-capitalist side of the island have to stay there? The capitalists would be bereft of their labor force in a matter of weeks. As a result, they’d be forced to patrol their own grounds, empty their own bedpans, and operate their own heavy machinery—that is, unless they quickly began offering their workers such an extravagantly good deal that they might as well be living in a socialist utopia after all.

  For this and any number of other reasons, I’m sure that in practice any attempt to create a market economy without armies, police, and prisons to back it up will end up looking nothing like capitalism very quickly. In fact I strongly suspect it will soon look very little like what we are used to thinking of as a market. Obviously I could be wrong. It’s possible someone will attempt this, and the results will be very different than I imagined. In which case, fine, I’ll be wrong. Mainly I’m interested in creating the conditions where we can find out.

  I can’t really say what a free society would be like. Still, since I have said that one thing we really need now is an unleashing of political desire, I guess I can end by describing some things that I’d myself, personally, like to see.

  I would like to see something like the principle behind consensus—in which respect for radical, incommensurable difference becomes the basis for commonality—generalized to social life itself. What would that actually mean?

  Well, first of all, I don’t think it would mean everyone spending all their time sitting in circles in formal meetings all day long. I think most of us would concur that such a prospect would drive most of us at least as insane as the present system does. Obviously, there are ways to make meetings fun and entertaining. The key thing is as I insisted in the last chapter, it’s not so much the form, as the spirit of the thing. This is why I kept emphasizing that anything could be considered an anarchist form of organization that does not involve ultimate recourse to bureaucratic structures of violence. It is often asked how
direct democracy can “scale up” from local face-to-face meetings to a whole city, region, or nation. Clearly, they won’t take the same form. But there are all sorts of possibilities. Very few options that have been tried in the past are no longer available,§ and new technological possibilities are invented all the time. So far most of the experimentation has been in recallable delegates, but I personally think there’s a lot of unexplored potential in the revival of lottery systems like those I mentioned in Chapter 3: something vaguely like jury duty, except non-compulsory, with some way of screening obsessives, cranks, and hollow-earthers, but nonetheless allowing an equal chance of participation in great decisions to all who actually do wish to participate. There would have to be mechanisms put in place to prevent abuses. But it’s hard to imagine those abuses could actually be worse than the mode of selection we use now.

  Economically, what I would really like to see is some kind of guarantee of life security that would allow people to pursue those kinds of value they actually consider worth pursuing—individually, or with others. As I’ve observed, that’s the main reason people pursue money anyway. To be able to pursue something else: something they consider noble, or beautiful, profound, or simply good. What might they pursue in a free society? Presumably, many things we could barely now imagine, though one might expect familiar values like arts or spirituality or sports or landscape gardening or fantasy games or scientific research or intellectual or hedonistic pleasures would figure in, in every sort of unanticipated combination.

  The challenge will obviously be how to allocate resources between pursuits that are utterly incomparable, forms of value that simply cannot be translated into one another. Which in turn leads to another question I’m sometimes asked: what does “equality” really mean?