The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  I get this sort of question a lot. Usually from very rich people. “So what are you calling for? Complete equality? How could that be possible? Would you really want to live in a society where everyone would have exactly the same thing?”—and, once again, with the tacit suggestion that any such project would, necessarily, mean the KGB again. Such are the concerns of the 1 percent. The answer is: “I would like to live in a world where asking that question would be nonsensical.”

  Instead of a parable here, perhaps a historical example. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered something that has thrown all previous understandings of human history askew. In both Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the first thousand years of urban civilization were rigorously egalitarian. Almost obsessively so. There is no evidence of social inequality at all: no remains of palaces, no sumptuous burials; the only monumental structures were such as could be shared by everyone (e.g., gigantic public baths). Often, every house in an urban neighborhood was of precisely the same size. It’s hard to escape the impression that this obsession with uniformity was exactly the problem. As my friend, the brilliant British archaeologist David Wengrow always likes to point out, the birth of urban civilization came in the immediate wake of what was possibly an even more important innovation: the birth of mass production, the first time in history it was possible to create a thousand containers of oil or grain of exactly the same size, each stamped with an identical seal impression. Apparently, everyone quickly became aware of the implications, and they were terrified. After all, it’s only once you have such uniform products that you can also begin comparing exactly how much more one person has than another. It’s only such technologies of equality that make inequality, as we know it today, possible. The inhabitants of the first cities managed to hold off the inevitable for a thousand years, which is a remarkable testimony to sheer determination, but what happened eventually had to happen, and we have been dealing with the legacy ever since.

  It’s not likely we will ever be able to undo a six-thousand-year-old innovation. Neither is it clear why we ever should. Large impersonal structures, like uniform products, will always exist. The question is not how to undo such things but how to put them to work in the service of their opposite: a world where freedom becomes the ability to pursue completely incommensurable ends. Our current consumer society claims to hold that out as its ultimate ideal, but, in fact, what it holds out is a hollow simulacrum.

  It is often remarked that you can conceive equality in two ways: either by saying two things are (in any important respect anyway) precisely the same, or else by saying they are so different, there’s simply no way to compare them at all. It’s the latter logic that allows us to say that, since we are all unique individuals, it’s impossible to say any one of us is intrinsically better than any other, any more, for instance, than it would be possible to say there are superior and inferior snowflakes. If one is going to base an egalitarian politics on that understanding, the logic would have to be: since there’s no basis for ranking such unique individuals on their merits, everyone deserves the same amount of those things that can be measured: an equal income, an equal amount of money, or an equal share of wealth.

  Still, if you think about it this is odd. It assumes that we are all completely different in what we are, but identical in what we want. What if we were to turn this around? In a funny way, the current feudalized version of capitalism, where money and power have become effectively the same thing, makes it easier for us to do so. The 1 percent who rule the world may have turned the pursuit of both into a kind of pathological game where money and power are ends in themselves, but for the rest of us, having money, having an income, being free from debt, has come to mean having the power to pursue something other than money. Certainly, we all want to ensure our loved ones are safe, and taken care of. We all want to live in healthy and beautiful communities. But beyond that, the things we wish to pursue are likely to be wildly different. What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there will always be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away.

  All this might still seem very distant. At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

  * As an Indian anarchist pointed out, one can find quotes from everyone from Gandhi to Hitler saying that work is holy, but when real working people refer to a holy day (“holi-day”) they are referring to one where you don’t have to work.

  † It seems to have been first set out in writing, in that form, by Louis Blanc in 1840 but an earlier version is also attributed to the French communist writer Morelly in his Code of Nature as far back as 1755. Anyway, it was popular in radical circles well before Karl Marx took it up in his Critique of the Gotha Program.

  ‡ They actually recur in the Matthew Continetti piece cited at the beginning of Chapter 3.

  § A few are unavailable. In ancient Athens, one way of ensuring that technical specialists, whose jobs could not be rotated, did not end up acquiring institutional power over their peers was to make sure they weren’t peers: most civil servants, even police, were slaves. But most expedients are still open to us.

  to my father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to give thanks to everyone in the movement, who taught me everything I know.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Charles Pierce, “Why Bosses Always Win if the Game Is Always Rigged,” Esquire.​com, October 18, 2012.

  CHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING IS NEAR

  1. The information has appeared all over the Internet but it originally appeared in Christopher Helman, “What the Top U.S. Companies Pay in Taxes,” Forbes, April 2, 2010.

  2. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011.

  CHAPTER 2: WHY DID IT WORK?

  1. Ginia Bellafante, “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim,” The New York Times, September 23, 2011.

  2. China Study Group, “Message from Chinese Activists and Academics in Support of Occupy Wall Street,” china​study​group.​net, October 2, 2011.

  3. Amanda Fairbanks, “Seeking Arrangement: College Students Seeking ‘Sugar Daddies’ to Pay Off Loan Debt,” huffington​post.​com, July 29, 2011. While we don’t have figures for the United States, a recent British survey revealed that a staggering 52 percent of female undergraduates had engaged in some sort of sex work to help fund their education, with just under a third having resorted to outright prostitution.

  4. David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination,” The Guardian, September 25, 2011.

  5. “Tea Party supporters are likely to be older, white and male. Forty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as ‘born-again,’ compared with 33 percent of all res
pondents.” Heidi Przybyla, “Tea Party Advocates Who Scorn Socialism Want a Government Job,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2010, citing a poll by Selzer & Company taken in March 2010.

  6. Malcolm Harris, “Bad Education,” n+1 magazine, April 25, 2001.

  7. The debate was kicked off by a post on August 19 on the Freakonomics blog: Justin Wolfers, “Forgive Student Loan Debt? Worst Idea Ever,” www.​freakonomics.​com.

  8. Some excellent case histories can be found in Anya Kamentz, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). Interestingly, this phenomenon was also very much in the news right around the time the occupation began, for instance in an article in The New York Times: “College Graduation Rates Are Stagnant Even as Enrollment Rises, a Study Finds” (Tamar Lewin, September 27, 2011, p. A15). A sample paragraph: “The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two-year degree on time; even after four years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a four-year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree.” According to a Pew study, about two-thirds of dropouts reported they did so because of the impossibility of both financing their education and helping support a family. (Pew Research Center, “Is College Worth It?” May 16, 2011)

  9. A dramatic case is Stockton, California, which declared bankruptcy in early 2012. The city announced it intended to find the revenue to pay its creditors through massively increasing “code enforcement”: essentially, through parking tickets, and fines for unkempt lawns or not removing graffiti quickly enough; such penalties will inevitably fall disproportionally on the working poor. See “Stockton Largest U.S. City Going Bankrupt,” Daily News, June 26, 2012.

  10. “Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr,” http://​rorty​bomb.​wordpress.​com/​2011/​10/​09/​parsing-​the-​data-​and-​ideology-​of-​the-​we-​are-​99-​tumblr/.

  11. See, for example, http://​lhote.​blogspot.​com/​2011/​10/​solidarity-​first-​then-​fear-​for-​this.​html, http://​attempter.​wordpress.​com/​2011/​10/​12/​underlying-​ideology-​of-​the-​99/, and the accompanying comment section.

  12. Linda Lowen, “Women Union Members: The Changing Face of Union Membership,” womens​issues.​about.​com, updated December 17, 2008.

  13. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

  14. Michael Hudson Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (London: Pluto, 2006), p. 288.

  15. Pam Martens, “Financial Giants Put New York City Cops on Their Payroll,” October 10, 2011, Counterpunch. Technically during those hours they are working as private security, but they do so in their uniforms, with guns and badges and full power of arrest.

  16. Andrew Ross Sorkin, “On Wall Street, a Protest Matures,” New York Times, Dealbook, October 3, 2011.

  17. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

  18. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981), and Pat Robertson quote both cited in Melinda Cooper, “The Unborn Born Again: Neo-Imperialism, the Evangelical Right and the Culture of Life,” Postmodern Culture, 17 (1), Fall 2006; Robertson 1992:153.

  19. Rebecca Solnit, “Why the Media Loves the Violence of Protestors and Not of Banks,” Tomdis​patch.​com, February 21, 2012. The KTVU story can be found at: http://​www.​ktvu.​com/​news/​news/​emails-​exchanged-​between-​oakland-​opd-​reveal-​tensio/​nGMkF/. On the issue of sexual assault, inflated figures appeared, but these were based largely on tabulating all reports of sexual assault that occurred anywhere near occupations, whether or not those accused had ever set foot in the camps.

  20. Those interested might consult Norman Finkelstein’s recent What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage (New York: OR Books, 2012), which contains numerous quotes making clear Gandhi felt the worst crime was passivity. He also, most famously, wrote that in the face of manifest injustice “if the only choice is between violence and cowardice, I would recommend violence.”

  CHAPTER 3: “THE MOB BEGIN TO THINK AND TO REASON”: THE COVERT HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY

  1. Matthew Continetti, “Anarchy in the U.S.A.: The Roots of American Disorder,” Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011.

  2. John Adams, The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), Volume 6, p. 481.

  3. R. C. Winthrop, The Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1869).

  4. James Madison, “Federalist #10,” in The Federalist Papers, p. 103. Note that while Madison calls this “pure democracy,” and Adams, “simple democracy,” rule by popular assembly is the only form of government to which they are willing to give the name.

  5. Federalist Papers, No. 10, p. 119.

  6. For a good description of how parliamentary elections worked under Henry VII, see P. R. Cavill, The English Parliaments of Henry VII, 1485–1504 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 117–31. Generally the electorate was a local council of worthies; in London, for instance, such a group might consist of 150 out of 3,000 local inhabitants.

  7. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 38. In ancient Greece, for instance, democracies tended to choose holders of executive positions by lot, from among a pool of volunteers, while election was considered the oligarchic approach.

  8. See John Markoff, “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no.4 (1991): 663–65.

  9. Gouverneur Morris to [John] Penn, May 20, 1774, in Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris: With Selections from His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers: Detailing Events in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and in the Political History of the United States (Boston: Grey & Bowen, 1830), p. 25.

  10. Both quoted from Morris in E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 68.

  11. Adams, The Works, Volume 6, pp. 8–9.

  12. Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10, pp. 54–55.

  13. Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 183.

  14. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. Conrad, 1805), pp. 292–93.

  15. Francis Dupuis-Déri, “History of the Word ‘Democracy’ in Canada and Québec: A Political Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies,” World Political Science Review, 6, no. 1 (2010): 3–4.

  16. John Markoff, “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 41 (1999): 673.

  17. As reconstructed by Marcus Rediker in Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).

  18. Ibid., p. 53.

  19. Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). (cf. Axtell 1985)

  20. Cotton Mather, Things for a Distress’d People to Think Upon (Boston, 1696).

  21. Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline, Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture (Oakland: AK Press, 1993).

  22. Mediker, Many-Headed Hydra (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

  23. Angus Graham, The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2001).

  24. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

  25. Many of the historical reasons for my thinking on this are outlined in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), particularly chaps. 10–12.

  26. Quoted in Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 39.


  27. I am offering only a very brief summary of what happened because I have written about it at greater length elsewhere. See, for instance, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), pp. 228–37.

  28. As Aristotle puts it: “Here the very constitution of the soul has shown us the way; in it one part naturally rules, and the other is subject, and the virtue of the ruler we maintain to be different from that of the subject; the one being the virtue of the rational, and the other of the irrational part. Now, it is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature. But the kind of rule differs; the freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in any of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature.” Politics 1.30. I’m grateful to Thomas Gibson for pointing out how odd this view of human nature is compared to almost any other agrarian society.

  29. I owe this reflection to a brilliant essay by the French political philosopher Bernard Manin.

  30. Deborah K. Heikes, Rationality and Feminist Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 146.

  31. Samuel Blixen and Carlos Fazio, “Interview with Marcos About Neoliberalism, the National State and Democracy,” Struggle archive, Autumn 1995, http://​www.​struggle.​ws/​mexico/​ezln/​inter_​marcos_​aut95.​html.

  32. The evidence has recently been surveyed in a working paper by economist Peter Leeson, who concluded that “while the state of development remains low, on nearly all of 18 key indicators that allow pre- and post-stateless welfare comparisons, Somalis are better off under anarchy than they were under government.” See Leeson, “Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse,” Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 35, no. 4, 2007. You can find the full essay at www.​peterleeson.​com/​Better_​Off_​Stateless.​pdf.