The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World … by David Graeber
By changing our assumptions, we can change ourselves—and the world. That assumption was crucial in the thinking of David Graeber (1961-2020), anthropologist-turned-anarchist activist. He was an organizer in the Occupy movement that grabbed headlines in 2011 before imploding under the difficulties of maintaining a participatory democracy that demands a vote for even the smallest decisions.
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World … is a posthumous collection of Graeber’s essays, always thought-provoking even if the implementation of his ideas is distant from present-day reality. Graeber was steeped in the humane values of Dostoyevsky and other Russian thinkers from the 19th century, crucially, Peter Kropotkin, whose conceptualization of anarchism competed with Karl Marx’s ideology of communism. Kropotkin’s Russian contemporary, Mikhail Bakhunin, warned that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” Marx imagined as a steppingstone to utopia would become yet another prison house for humanity. Lenin proved him right.
So if anarchism is the surest alternative to authoritarianism, then how exactly would it work? The Occupy movement showed how it can easily fail. Graeber admits that as a military formation, the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s were crushed by Franco but insists that their “social structure and political structure” functioned in the places where they briefly governed—if that’s a proper anarchist term. Other observers disagreed with his assessment. Similarly, the anarchists who briefly seized portions of Ukraine during the Russian Civil war were obliterated by the highly organized Bolsheviks.
However, Graeber has many good points to make. Rather than always pointing to Athens for the origins of democracy, we might think instead of democracy as a tendency in human societies across the world. It was not “the special invention of ‘the West,’” a term he questions, but a planetary process “in which ideas were flying back and forth in all directions.”
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Graeber grounds his assumptions about anarchy on the idea that “human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” Of course, all of us can be reasonable, but we are also capable of unreason and avarice. Humanity walks on a tightrope between self-interest and altruism. The society Graeber envisions could be inhabited only by saints. Malice is real and how would an anarchist society protect its members from aggression from within and without?
It's a beautiful dream whose realization demands a revolution of the human spirit unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
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