Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber

I’ve never read anything by David Graeber before (someone often touted as “the thinking person’s Malcolm Gladwell“, “the thinking person’s [name of the person who wrote Sapiens“, the thinking person’s [insert another popular non-fiction writer who is broadly considered by the people who read them to be for thinking people]), though there are a few of his books in my dangerously tall piles of boxes of unread books.

This one was a recent addition to said piles, and it didn’t remain unread for long.

It didn’t remain unread for long because it’s short, and because I needed to try and read something serious and real after a burst of not-escapist-enough science fiction reading and I thought brevity might help me to feel like I was able to hold thought and understanding again…

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So, David Graeber (who died on my birthday in 2020) was an anthropologist, studying and lecturing on the history of humanity. He was also – especially later in his life/career, beyond the publishing date of this book (2004, released by Prickly Paradigm Press, an imprint of The University of Chicago Press) – an actively practicing anarchist, promoting and advocating for mass actions, communal decision making and all of the good, sustainable, solutions that are discussed in this book.

Looking at ancient and current/recent non-capitalist societies and/or communities, Graeber pulls apart and discusses the ways in which a lack of state infrastructure (i.e. government) has been consistently shown to offer personal benefits to a wide range of people, and how the modern idea of the “nation state” is a dead end and a danger, intellectually, psychologically and – crucially – environmentally – as it is inherently linked to (trapped by?) and both supportive of and supporting the broad capitalistic system that – we all know – demands inequality and inequity, praises cruelty, rewards selfishness and maintains itself through sanctioned (by who???) violence, imprisonment and (often) executions, as well as relentless bullshit propaganda training us all to believe – and most of us do most of the time, because we’re fucking idiots – that this is the only possible reality that could possibly exist, and no better world than this is possible and that if we’re not happy with ourselves and our lives it is because we are failures and fools, unable to thrive in a “healthy” (it’s unhealthy) “competitive” (i.e. bullying, hoarding, destructive, short-sighted and in denial of consequence) environment (which we’re quickly destroying, though not – clearly! – quickly enough for anyone with the means within the existing system to change this feeling like it’s worth their time or luxuriousness to do so…

If that makes sense?

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Graeber writes here about the importance and practice of consensus-based decision making, about how societies inevitably fall into disrepute and disarray when “politics”, i.e. “representative democracy”, is forever making societal decisions on a vote-by-vote basis.

When there must always be an “argument” or a “debate” – rather than a “discussion” and a “decision” – some people are always thus positioned as “losers” and others as “winners”.

When party politics changes the individuals from the political class who are in control without ever shifting the terms of society, it is always vacuous, vapid, empty.

While there is always disagreement there is always discord, while there is discord there can never be peace.

While there is never peace there is never joy and we end up with the relentless fucking stream of misery that is the wage labour system that kills us, takes joy and time and life from us and – if we as a species ever fucking grow up enough to get over capitalism – must must must eventually be understood as the assault on humanity and wellbeing that it is.

That’s probably enough for now.

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