David Graeber

Dans les années 1960, les forces politiques conservatrices ont pris peur face aux effets sociaux perturbateurs du progrès technique, qu’elles rendaient responsable de l’agitation sociale de l’époque, et les employeurs ont commencé à s’inquiéter des retombées économiques de la mécanisation. Le refus de la menace soviétique a permis une réorientation massive des ressources dans des directions qui paraissaient moins dangereuses pour l’ordre social et économique en place – et, finalement, dans des domaines pouvant servir de point d’appui à une campagne pour annuler totalement les avantages acquis par les mouvements sociaux progressistes depuis les années 1940, et remporter ainsi une victoire décisive dans ce que les élites américaines voyaient bel et bien comme une lutte des classes mondiales.

Toute réforme du marché – tout initiative gouvernementale conçue pour réduire les pesanteurs administratives et promouvoir les forces du marché – aura pour effet d’accroître le nombre total de réglementations, le volume total de paperasse et l’effectif total des agents de l’État.

The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called "the people." This created an immediate logical problem, because "the people" are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those laws? When this questions was first posed in the wake of the British, American, and French revolutions, the answer seemed obvious: through those revolutions themselves. But this created a further problem. Revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. In fact, nothing could possibly be more illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later.
So laws emerge from illegal activity. (p. 214)

Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective, modes of direct democracy--ones that might operate without any need for a bureaucracy of violence to enforce them. I've written about these efforts extensively elsewhere. A lot of progress has been made. But those working on such projects often find themselves having to deal with exactly this sort of horror of "arbitrary" power. Part of the work of developing new forms of consensus process, for example, is to create institutional forms that encourage, rather than inhibit, improvisation and creativity. As activists sometimes put it: in most circumstances, if you bring together a crowd of people, that crowd will, as a groupe, behave less intelligently, and less creatively, than any single member of the crowd is likely to do if on their own. Activist decision-making process is, instead, designed to make that crowd smarter and more imaginative than any individual participant. (p. 201)

people, everywhere, are prone to two completely contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency to be playfully creative just for the sake of it; on the other, a tendency to agree with anyone who tells them that they really shouldn't act that way. This latter is what makes the game-ification of institutional life possible. Because if you take the latter tendency to its logical conclusion, all freedom becomes arbitrariness, and all arbitrariness, a form of dangerous, subversive power. It is just one further step to argue that true freedom is to live in an utterly predictable world that is free from freedom of this sort. (p. 201)

Why is it that languages always change? It's easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that's all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they'd simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about--a new trend or invention, an imported vegetable--but otherwise, leaving well enough alone. In fact, this never happens. We don't know of a single recorded example of a language that, over the course of, say, a century, did not change both in sound and structure. This is true even of the languages of the most "traditional" societies; it happens even where elaborate institutional structures have been created--like grammar schools, or the Académie Française--to ensure that it does not. No doubt some of this is the result of sheer rebelliousness (young people trying to set themselves off from elders, for example) but it's hard to escape the conclusion that ultimately, what we are really confronting here is the play principle in its purest form. Human beings, whether they speak Arapesh, Hopi, or Norwegian, just find it boring to say things the same way all the time. They're always going to play around at least a little. And this playing around will always have cumulative effects. (p. 200)

It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the pictures of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind--no semantics, syntax, phonemics--we'd all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn't be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it's impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time. (p. 200)

Max Weber famously pointed out that a sovereign state's institutional representatives maintain a monopoly on the right of violence within the state's territory. Normally, this violence can only be exercised by certain duly authorized officials (soldiers, police, jailers), or those authorized by such officials (airport security, private guards…), and only in a manne explicitly designated by law. But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along. The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men", but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do *anything* to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime. (p. 195)

What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play. (p. 193)

We are used to speaking of "the state" as a single entity but actually, I think, modern states are better seen as the confluence of three different elements, hose historical origins are quite distinct, have no intrinsic relation with one another, and may already be in the process of finally drifting apart.
I will call these sovereignty, administration, and politics. (p. 175)

There is no consensus amongst philosophers about what the word "rationality" even means. According to one tradition, for instance, rationality is the application of logic, of pure thought untempered by emotions; this pure, objective thought is then seen as the basis of scientific inquiry. This has attained a great deal of popular purchase, but there's a fundamental problem: scientific inquiry itself has proved it cannot possibly be true. Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated again and again that there is no such thing as pure thought divorced from emotions; a human being without emotions would not be able to think at all. (p. 165)

When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism *seem* like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually *be* a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former. Does destroying job security while increasing working hours really create a more productive (let alone innovative, loyal) workforce? There is every reason to believe that exactly the opposite is the case. In purely economic terms the result of neoliberal reform of labor markets is almost certainly negative--an impression that overall lower economic growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties would tend to reinforce. However it has been spectacularly effective in depoliticizing labor. The same could be said of the burgeoning growth in armies, police, and private security services. They're utterly unproductive--nothing but a resource sink. It's quite possible, in fact, that the very weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will itself ultimately sink it. But it's also easy to see how, if the ultimate imperative of those running the world is chocking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today must be a crucial part of the neoliberal project. (p. 129-130)

One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them--including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top--while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well. (p. 81)

Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. "Cops don't beat up burglars," he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reactions from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts is, "define the situation." (p. 80)

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like." In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, "deregulation" has usually meant exactly the opposite: moving away from a situation of managed competition between mid-sized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market. This is what makes the term so handy. Simply by labeling a new regulatory measure "deregulation," you can frame it in the public mind as a way to reduce bureaucracy and set individual initiative free, even if the result is a fivefold increase in the actual number of forms to be filled in, reports to be filed, rules and regulations for lawyers to interpret, and officious people in offices whose entire job seems to be to provide convoluted explanations for why you're not allowed to do things. (p. 17)

First of all, historically, markets simply did not emerge as some autonomous domain of freedom independent of, and opposed to, state authorities. Exactly the opposite is the case. Historically, markets are generally either a side effects of government operations, especially military operations, or were directly created by government policy. This has been true at least since the invention of coinage, which was first created and promulgated as a means of provisioning soldiers; for most of Eurasian history, ordinary people used informal credit arrangements and physical money, gold, silver, bronze, and the kind of impersonal markets they made possible remained mainly an adjunct to the mobilization of legions, sacking of cities, extraction of tribute, and disposing of loot. Modern central banking systems were likewise first created to finance wars. So there's one initial problem with the conventional history. There's another even more dramatic one. While the idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the nineteenth century to justify laissez faire economic policies designed to lessen the role of government, they never actually have that effect. English liberalism, for instance, did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy, but the exact opposite: an endlessly ballooning array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials who made the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals possible. It turned out that maintaining a free market economy required a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis XIV-style absolutist monarchy. (p. 8-9)

Le communisme est en vérité la base de tout rapport social amical et le capitalisme n’est qu’un communisme mal organisé. De même, nous agissons comme des anarchistes chaque fois que nous nous comprenons sans recourir à la menace ou à la force.

"Libre-échange" et "marché libre" signifient en réalité création de structures administratives mondiales, essentiellement destinées à garantir l'extraction des profits pour les investisseurs. " Mondialisation" veut dire bureaucratisation. A l'époque, nous ne formulions pas les choses tout à fait en ces termes. Nous sommes souvent passés tout près. Mais nous avons rarement sauté le pas en le disant.