I'm reading Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber, and I found this section cathartic:
"For anarchists who do know something about anthropology, the arguments are all too familiar. A typical exchange goes something like this:
Skeptic: Well, I might take this whole anarchism idea more seriously if you could give me some reason to think it would work. Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government?
Anarchist: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...
Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! Iâm talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.
Anarchist: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with workerâs self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy...
Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. Iâm talking about whole societies.
Anarchist: Well, itâs not like people havenât tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain...
Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!
The dice are loaded. You canât win. Because when the skeptic says âsociety,â what he really means is âstate,â even ânation-state.â Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist stateâthat would be a contradiction in termsâwhat weâre really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it mightâhere, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examplesâthe politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot."
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
titsay
kianamaiart
origamiaround
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
