Today marks the 4th anniversary of David Graeber’s passing. When reading Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology I fell in love with his wit, his edge, and his range. But after years of working with his texts, translating a few, and even interviewing him, I still have reservations about some of his ideas. The anarchist scholar in me admires them; the anarchist who grew up in Brazil is conflicted.
Take his stance on the police. In Direct Action, he discusses how “postmodern” they are, as they sneer at the concept of truth in service of authority. But in Brazil, mafias mixing police officers and evangelical zealots – who certainly believe in ultimate truths – are on the rise. One of Graeber’s better known concepts, “bullshit jobs”, describes an issue that most Brazilians – facing high unemployment, platformisation, and the erosion of labour rights – would call a “first world problem”.
The biggest issue might be his stance on tactics for social change. During the global protests against the IMF at the start of the century, Seattle activists came down to Brazil to share their ideas, telling protesters to just “lie on the ground” when the police come. Many, however, laughed in response. Serious harm was far too likely for them to attempt such a stunt.
Graeber, who took part in the protests of that era, similarly wanted to come up with alternatives to “a politics of direct confrontation”, arguing that violence was the “recourse of the stupid”. But such an argument, especially in the context of a country like Brazil, made for a toothless kind of anarchism. For him, “more militant” tactics often relied on broader demilitarization. But it seems that his favoured strategies were the ones which could only be entertained in social environments with much less violence than most countries, let alone those in the global periphery.
Graeber’s preferred solution in the face of such violence was simply “walking away”. It was a tactic that seems to have worked wonders for medieval peasants and South American “societies against the state”. However, doing so today is far more difficult than in these contexts. The police keeps the oppressed in line and separated by borders. With fewer resources, starting over somewhere else becomes harder, and bonds to the land are an actually excellent reason to stay. Is not running away – when one can envision alternative forms of resistance – an aggrieving capitulation to the oppressor?
Graeber was aware of all that. He denounced a world of frictionless money but gated people. He understood that “hospitality” is what makes any “right to leave” consequential, and studied how relations of care were perverted to keep us in place. But how to build a world where walking away could fix collective problems, instead of being an individual solution, truly available only when rare conditions can be found?
He put his faith in occupying public spaces (such as Zuccotti Park) to experiment with the way we make decisions: change that and the rest will sort itself out. But without directly attacking structures of economic and social domination, co-option into state politics is to be expected – as in the case of many Brazilians involved in the “June journeys” of 2013.
On the other hand, some of the tactics he rejected – because he thought them outdated, morally questionable, or less effective – might be successful in other contexts, and without compromising on principles. Chilean militancy came close to burying neoliberalism in the country; native populations in the Brazilian territory are using force against deforestation; Indian syndicalists have recently helped build the largest strike in human history.
There are still things that global periphery radicals can learn from Graeber, however. His 566-page masterpiece on debt helps us to see through the lies of austerity doctrines, which many countries sidestepped during the coronavirus crisis but Brazil was held hostage to. And while Brazil’s job market may not have been “bullshitised” yet, his reflections on social value and caring work are useful for questioning long-standing, unfair differences between professions in many peripheral countries. What’s more, in the vein of pretty much all anarchists before him, Graeber’s thought was profoundly shaped by the social struggles he took part in. If his experience in Madagascar shaped his earlier thought, his unflinching support for the revolution in Rojava significantly expanded his toolbox.
Finding that the principles of consensus were already rooted in hearts and institutions, he gifted the revolutionaries with much more interesting structural analysis (in other words: don’t just trust the process). For those who cried “imperialism”, he had two words: “loser left!”. In a brilliant essay exploring the dynamics of bullying, he grappled with the responsibility of spectators in every conflict: how can they contribute to emancipatory direct action, in Rojava, Palestine, or anywhere else, even at a distance? To the right to walk away he added the rights to disobey and to change rules. Each one, he emphasised, was a reality we must make and sustain ourselves, not something we ask a sovereign to grant us.
This trajectory, more than any specific tactics, is what he teaches us as a militant. Given time, most manuals become obsolete anyway. As we say in Brazil about unfortunate gifts, “the intention is what counts”. It matters a lot that he intended to live “among rebels” as much as possible, as he used to say. He did it precisely because then he could both help build a freer world and be taken there by others, should he vacillate or make mistakes, as any of us might do.
We cannot defeat domination without practising its alternatives, no matter the limitations of our efforts. Graeber always did what he could to help everyone imagine a more desirable future and live it, as much as possible, in the here and now. Taking the brunt of future-killing repression, global periphery radicals can still find within his work hopeful lessons.