Fragments of Occupy Primitivism

NOTE: This is Part 2 in a series called “Deconstructing Anarchy. The first part of this series can be found here.

Before we move forward, we should trace the word: anarchy. Etymologically, ‘anarchy’ is already wrapped up with contradiction and ambiguity. These building blocks are already defined by a previous set of preconceptions, and meaning is obscured and obfuscated by time, place, and situation. The translation is an act of disentangling the word from history.

Let’s look at ‘anarchy’. Anarchy comes from the Ancient Greek anarkhos or, in Latin, anarchos. Anarkhos translates an as not, lacking or without — and arkhos, as in, chief, ruler, or authority. This allows for the possibility of a few interpretations — anarchy can be lacking ruler or without authority. Proudhon himself defined the term as “the absence of a master, of a sovereign.” This ambiguity already allows for the possibility of an almost anarchic definition of anarchy. The definition itself has no definitive authority, no definitive arkhos. Its lack of definition is therefore subject to the shifting signs that regard themselves as the ethical and moral embodiment of the spirit — the spirit of an absence of masters, of a spirit that is without authority.

This ambiguity should not be taken lightly. The absolute authority of the sign should be called into question. A deconstructive analysis calls for it. The structural cohesion of the sign and cohesion that ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Anarchism’ rests upon. “Lacking ruler” is far different than “without authority,” and “the absence of a master, of a sovereign” has its own set of connotations and contradictions. Let’s take these three examples as separate translations, which need to be re-translated and reconfigured accordingly:

1. Lacking ruler. Lacking brings to mind — loss, separation, inadequacy. Somehow, the governing cohesion of the sign is missing something, it’s absent an essential part, it was once whole and now it is not. To lack a body part is to assume a whole body — the part that is lacking, then, is somehow a ghostly disembodied present-absence of the arkhos. The object that is lacking, the ruler. ‘Ruler’ itself is already an inexact phrase, the presumed monarch, authority figure, or governing body or bodies. ‘Ruler’ sounds like a king or figure, but it also is general enough to not refer to a specific figure. Instead, the ruler is taken to be someone who others measure themselves to, a reflection of the Other inside of the subjects. This is the feudal project, to see the ruler measured against the subservience of its subjects. However, taken together, anarchy, as a lacking ruler sounds more like the king, went on a vacation, or was exiled only to return. This doesn’t quite hold the same authority as the way that anarchy has been utilized or perceived since its advent. Nor should it. This definition is a matter of temporality — lacking ruler perceives the absence of a ruler, of an authority figure, as a temporary matter, a question of leadership displaced rather than abandoned altogether.
2. Without Authority. This is the more common translation and one that seems closer to a ‘modern’ definition of anarchism. To be without is much more in the spirit of anarchy. While it may, in fact, still maintain a temporality — to be without certainly connotes a similar type of loss as to lack — however, to be without makes it a question of ontology, of cogito, while without in and of itself opens up to the question of metaphysics. Without God, without masters, without leadership: all of these broaden the definition of anarchy over the previous translation to lack. Arkhos translated as authority also expands the definition from a necessarily human ruler to a metaphysical authority. Suddenly, authority is dependent on an unwritten author, a writer of laws. This contingency upon another, a law-writer, a decider-of-justice, becomes not a question of who is the leader, but a question of whether a law was ever, in fact, an act of justice to begin with. The existence of a totalizing arkhos must be called into question, doubted, abandoned, deconstructed, and re-imagined for there to ever be a ‘thing’ that approaches as an-arkhos.
3. Absence of a master, of a sovereign. This is Proudhon’s definition. This definition falls in line with Graeber’s stress on the hierarchy as the governing definition of arkhos. Arkhos is not quite hierarchy per se — ἄρχω means, in Ancient Greek, “to begin” or “to lead” — or, more broadly, “to be first.” In a transitive sense, it means, “someone who leads” or, in an intransitive way, “to be a ruler.” The attachment of being “first” and “rule” implies a deep connection between sovereignty and temporality. To be the first is to be the authority and the person who is first leading. This implies, for Graeber, a person, but that absence of a person implies a societal organization around something else. For Proudhon, anarchy is achieved through a revolution facilitated through science. For Graeber, anarchism is achieved through a gradual questioning of hierarchy. To be “without ruler” necessitates a without-social hierarchy because the arkhos is a model for a symbolic exchange between ruler and ruled. The sovereignty of subjects is subordinate to the king, and you remove the king, thus you remove the subordination.

Notice how these three definitions necessitate a temporality attached to the arkhos. Either the implication is that there will be temporarily an absence of leadership or that the leader, defined by their firstness. Therefore, there’s a compelling argument that defines the origins of arkhos as a temporal firstness to the nature of authority. Therefore, in an absence of this firstness, in an absence of the temporality that defines leadership as such, there is an opening to the defining characteristics of sovereignty. What makes up sovereignty without arkhos? Can sovereignty be detached from arkhos? What is the nature of democracy without arkhos?

These are the questions that vexed my mind as I read David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Graeber is most widely known for being an instrumental part of one of the largest anarchist movements of our collective lifetimes, the Occupy Movement. In Fragments, he lays out a framework for a merging of Marxist theory with Anarchist-Primitivism and uses this framework as an “anthropology” of anarchism. This leads to a few observations that update the defining features of anarchism for a modern context and would lay the groundwork for the theories that would bring about Occupy Wall Street and the social context for a resurgence of social democracy in the United States and the United Kingdom.

One criticism of the Occupy Movement and Graeber’s anarchist project, made by Mark Fisher and others, is attached to this question of temporality and the nature of democracy without arkhos. Quite simply, Occupy couldn’t imagine a world without capitalism. Occupy couldn’t imagine a future without capitalism. Instead, it had to work backward, it traced its model to non-traditional non-hierarchical societies to provide a model for the present. It set up an encampment that declared itself in opposition to capitalism, in opposition to Wall Street and the 1% that amassed wealth. However, this movement was never quite clear what it was in favor of, and that question, that spirit of the Occupy-to-come also hung over the text of Fragments.

This lack of hierarchy and explicit purpose was a defining feature of the movement. When I visited the movement’s epicenter, at Zuccotti Park, there was an air of excitement, an air of hope, an air of, well, difference. This was different. This appeared. This appearance was significant. It existed as a spectacle, like a home, as a potential democracy-to-come. After all, these people showed up. They came from all over. Their voices were heard in a way that made everyone feel like they were playing a part in a direct democracy. That they were a part of something, even if that something wasn’t well-defined. This experiment was making a statement, even if that statement wasn’t crafted as a matter of public relations, even if the average populace couldn’t explain the goal of Occupy to a cynical reporter.

The Occupy Movement was defined by the Outside. Just as Proudhon defined anarchism alongside the borders of what it was not, the Occupy movement defined itself relative to what lay outside of its borders. I remember those borders. Those were the most interesting parts of the encampment, the silent police presence standing watch over this sudden performance of collective action. They spit on the population, which they viewed as idealistic deadbeats, sycophantic homeless, or the envious downtrodden. Soon, the city’s government also saw the collective in this fashion and exacted revenge for the disruption by power-washing them out of existence.

The further you got from the encampment, the more confusion there was about the inside. So much confusion that it haunted and engulfed the psyche of the average New Yorker in Manhattan. Everywhere you walked, people were talking about the encampment. Everywhere you walked, you heard “we don’t know what they want,” “they don’t know what they want,” “it’s disorganized,” etc. Even sympathetic ears were hesitant, cynical, and eventually growing tired of what was perceived to be lazy interlopers outside the halls of power. These claims, at the time, were viewed by myself as capitalist misunderstandings of the movement, but they still haunt the ethos and collective memory of the Occupy Movement.

Graeber takes up these themes in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. The book traces anarchism through the lens of organizing a society that could sustain itself through collectivization and spiritualism that counteracted the influence of scientific rationalism and property ownership. He offers an insight into “primitive” societies that resist social hierarchies and Enlightenment philosophies and offers a counter-argument to communists and a rejection of the institutionalization of Marxist thought. For Graeber, the lack of institutionalization of Anarchism in the academy should be celebrated and investigated as a way to investigate institutions themselves. Instead, he tries to synthesize Marxism as a “libertarian” or “practiced-oriented” Marxist.

Central to his rejection of academic Marxism — which he derides as a “parody of sectarian politics” that privileges “theory” over “practice” or “strategy” over “action.” This dynamic is central to his premise about how a socialist revolution can be enacted in industrialized capitalist nations. In his expansion of the anarchist definition, he proposes the binary that Marxists concern themselves with theory, while anarchists concern themselves with practice. We’ll return to this binary at a later time, but for the moment, we’ll focus on how this builds Graeber’s argument towards Primitivism, which has been an underlying school of Anarchist “thought” and how it was an instrumental part of formulating the conditions for the Occupy Movements, and how this dichotomy has been integral to other movements.

To outline his notions of Primitivism, Graeber utilizes the field of anthropology because of the inherent westernized view of society linked to industrialization, and primitivism linked with non-industrialized societies. To that end, he uses his experiences with the tribe of “Malagasy” people from Madagascar to note their rejection of French Enlightenment and Colonialism was integral to “being Malagasy.” In this concept he saw promise, he saw hope, he saw democratic potential. Graeber wrote then how identity itself should be thought of as revolutionary:

Being ‘Malagasy’ came to be defined as rejecting such foreign ideas. If one combines this attitude with constant passive resistance to state institutions, and the elaboration of autonomous, and relatively egalitarian modes of self-government, one could see what happened as a revolution… If a revolution is a matter of people resisting some form of power identified as oppressive, identifying some key aspect of that power as the source of what is fundamentally objectionable about it, and then trying to get rid of one’s oppressor in such a way as to eliminate that sort of power completely from daily life, then it is hard to deny that, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. (pg. 33)

‘Being Malagasy’, therefore, becomes an ontology in-and-of-itself. It is, in a rather Heideggerian sense, the Dasein, the Being-Time, the Being-in-Time. It is revolutionary to be, to Being-Malagasy. Therefore we have removed the outside, the Outside-Malagasy, that is, the conditions of colonialism that have defined “Being Malagasy.” To exist as Malagasy is to resist the Enlightenment, and therefore, to perform a revolution of the everyday. Returning to Heidegger, it is the returning-to that is revolutionary, because primitivist anarchism and its Dasein are caught in returning-to ‘true democracy’, that is, to a society without arkhos.

Graeber argues that revolution doesn’t have to involve toppling a government (45) and that the existence of autonomous communities signifies a revolutionary act. This series of revolutionary acts can gradually bring about social change, which will lead to a worldwide revolution. Revolutionary acts inside the autonomous zone signify a wider range of resistance on the outside, and therefore, a global revolution against global capitalism. This ‘lead by collective example,’ or, perhaps, ‘collective by example’ to be more precise (to obscure the question of arkhos, after all, who is leading if there is no arkhos?). This Being-Malagasy can be reduced to simply Being — but that ontological formulation must be paired with returning.

Primitivism, therefore, is a call for radical action by returning to pre-capitalist modes of production and organization. This includes gift-giving, peace offerings, bartering, radical acts of ‘kinship’ (anarchists love this word, seemingly) to remind industrial capitalist nations what it has lost in the process of industrialization. Keeping within Graeber’s problematic theory-practice binary, this type of practice inspires like no Marxist theory can because it is immediate, tangible, and egalitarianism in action. This kind of practice was commonplace in the Occupy Movement and in other Anarcho-Communes that I’ve experienced. The idea is to practice these everyday radical actions on the inside, and apply them every day to the outside of these regions.

What will this supposedly inspire? What will Being-Malagasy in every day solve? Why does this matter? The idea, according to Graeber, is to return to ‘democracy’ in a literal and direct sense. Here, he argues and challenges the notion that democracy originated with Athens. Instead, he claims that Athens invented majority democracies, which were inherently militaristic and not true democracy (87). He then problematizes the origins and argues that Native American societies were far more egalitarian than what he views as the militaristic Greeks (88). By Being-Malagasy, one is enacting a form of direct democracy, a more true form of democracy.

Furthermore, Graeber points out that democracy translates to Kratos or “force” or “violence” of the people (91). He then attacks American indirect democracies by saying that right-wingers are correct to point out that America “is a republic, not a democracy,” and that anarchists should strive to return to a truer form of democracy (92). Ultimately, he advocates for direct democracy which will be brought about by an international movement. He calls it “anarchist globalization.” (94). This is an inversion of communist internationalism, but with the aim being to counter global capitalism through mass direct action, and not just falling into the Marxist-Leninist model of top-down bureaucratized state-craft.

It’s hard not to read Fragments as an argument for an Anarcho-Primitivism that was the unsteady foundation for the Occupy Movement. Just like Occupy, Graebers’ Anarcho-Primitivism lacks a clear vision. The future is presented as a direct democracy. But the future is one in constant conversation with the monstrous force of Capital. These conversations cannot be avoided by simple disownment, because capitalism’s mainspring of power comes from disowning itself. The people of New York — the Outside — weren’t just confused because they were all reactionaries, they were confused because there wasn’t a conversation between the occupants and the city. When the hoses washed the camps away, the people of New York shrugged and said they tried to listen but the occupants didn’t want to talk.

As Mark Fisher pointed out, the Occupy Movement failed to break with Capitalist Realism and became the model for reactionary backlash against anti-capitalism. Anti-Capitalism in and of itself is limited by the borders that it draws between itself and capitalism — the Hegelian dialectic that forms between anti- and -capitalism. These limitations are built into the word, into the ideology, and into the movements that form under the banner of anti-capitalism. These limitations, Graber believed, could have spawned an international movement that would challenge global capitalism with a competing Anti-Capitalist movement to mirror its model of influence, but instead, what it did was simply get crushed as a thorn in capitalism’s side.

Let’s return, once again, to the question, to anarkhos. Is anarkhos synonymous with Anti-Capitalism? That, then, begs the question — is arkhos synonymous with capitalism? Does the arkhos transcend Capital? With the diminishment of Communist Nation-States and the End of History followed by our current state of Capitalist Realism precarity, it would appear to a casual observer that it is the only arkhos, the only authority, and sovereignty is attached to the Capital. Paradoxically, Capitalism also holds within itself the capacity to absorb Anti-Capitalism and make it it's own. “All that is solid melts into air.” This is the prediction of Marx and the fate of so-called democratic institutions under capitalism, and this fluidity — not Capital itself — is the arkhos to resist. To demand, to question, and, finally, to revolt with collective and organized action. If the Western Democratic world is not dealt with, the precariousness of capital will swallow you whole; your identity, your time, and your transcendent and political soul.