The Best Democracy Is Anarchy

Or: Why are cops so scared of puppets?

- ANTHONY COMEGNA

LONG BEFORE EUROPEAN governments or their colonies began to embrace “democracy,” something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world’s vast ungovernable spaces.

Black Sam Bellamy’s 1717 pirate crew was “a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions,” wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.... Those institutions ranged “from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils”: a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves “forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state.” The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it “the perfect intercultural space” of experiment and improvisation.

For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That’s Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized.

Graeber therefore sided with the libertarian anarchists who believe humanity’s best future has nothing to do with the state. “Anarchism and democracy,” he wrote, “are—or should be—largely identical.”