Pour une anthropologie anarchiste

If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide:
1. a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and
2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.
For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will. (p. 89)

Once during the protests before the World Economic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corporate flacks and politicians, networking and sharing cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to be discussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I was invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their representatives. As it happened the task went to another activist but I did get far enough to prepare a three-point program that I think would have taken care of the problem nicely:
- an immediate amnesty on international debt (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either but it’s a different issue.)
- an immediate cancellation of all patents and other intellectual property rights related to technology more than one year old
- the elimination of all restrictions on global freedom of travel or residence.
The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The moment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos, was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or Rotterdam, the government of every rich and powerful country in the world would certainly decide nothing was more important than finding a way to make sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up with something? (p. 79)

Je ne prétends pas que rien d’important ne s’est produit au cours des cinq cents dernières années, pas plus que je ne suggère que les différences culturelles sont sans importance. Dans un sens, chacun - chaque communauté, chaque individu d’ailleurs - vit dans un univers unique. Par «faire tomber les murs», je veux dire, avant tout, éliminer les présuppositions arrogantes et irréfléchies selon lesquelles nous n’avons rien en commun avec 98 % des gens qui ont pu vivre, et nous n’avons donc pas vraiment besoin de les prendre en considération. Car, après tout, si vous présumez qu’il y a eu une rupture fondamentale, la seule question théorique que vous pouvez poser est une variante ou l’autre de :«Qu’est ce qui nous rend si spéciaux?» Une fois que nous nous débarrassons de ces présupposés, que nous décidons au moins de considérer que nous ne sommes pas aussi exceptionnels que nous voulons bien le croire, nous pouvons aussi commencer à réfléchir à ce qui a vraiment changé, et à ce qui n’a pas changé.

What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos - all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future. Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn’t - or, for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science.

Question : Combien faut-il d’électeur pour changer une ampoule ?
Réponse : Aucun. Les électeurs ne peuvent rien changer.

Un moyen infaillible de simplifier les arrangements sociaux, d'ignorer le jeu incroyablement complexe des perspectives, des passions, des intuitions, des désirs de la compréhension mutuelle dont est faite la vie humaine, est d'établir une règle et de menacer de s'attaquer à quiconque y contrevient. C'est pourquoi la violence a toujours été le recours préféré des personnes stupides : c'est la forme de stupidité à laquelle il est presque impossible de fournir une réponse intelligente. C'est aussi bien sûr le fondement de l'Etat.