David Graeber, in conversation with Lenart J. Kučić, earlier this year on a site I've never heard of called Disenz. This is a long excerpt, but I found the whole interview very interesting!
But why are China, South Korea, and Singapore so often presented as role models? Are they not supposed to have the best results in stopping the pandemic? Doesn’t that have something to do with social discipline?
I recently read a very interesting study comparing how authoritarian and non-authoritarian regimes have handled the pandemic. The authors concluded that more or less authoritarianism was irrelevant as a factor. What was important was people’s faith in government’s pronouncements: how much they trusted public institutions, the media, the scientific establishment.
There simply no systematic relation between what they are calling “democracy” and that sort of trust in institutions. Here in the UK we have one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies but the politicians and the press lie to us so systematically, and so flagrantly, that we have, I think, the lowest trust in the media in Europe—next to Italy, then Spain, if I remember.
In the US, the right has figured out a way to turn that justifiable suspicion to their advantage. Everything is “fake news.” We’re in a hall of mirrors. Might as well vote for the guy (Donald Trump, Boris Johnson) who at least is honest enough to admit he’s lying; then you can become an accomplice, in effect, because the world is made up of con men and marks and that way at least you’ll be on the winning team.
But there’s something deeper. I think what we really need is a proper analysis of what’s called “centrism” which is in many ways a startlingly perverse political ideology.
Centrism?
What did middle class people—basically, members of the professional-managerial class, who are the core constituency of centrism—actually mean in the ’80s and ’90s when they started describing themselves as “life-style liberals, fiscal conservatives”?
It means they accepted a social order where the moderate left would be left in charge of the production of people, as it were, they’d run the hospitals and universities, while the moderate right would be left in charge of producing oil and clothes and highways. So just as leftist social movements attack CEOs and trade agreements, right wing social movements attack the authority of the people running the educational or the health system: teachers and scientists. Just think of creationism, global warming, or abortion.
But really it’s a hopeless war of position, as a Gramscian might say, neither side is going to win; the radical right is no more likely to put evangelical churches in charge of social reproduction than the radical left is of turning Bechtel or Microsoft or Monsanto into a self-managed collective. What the radical right can do is undermine faith in experts, and of course, the more they get into power, the more they can do that by placing actual incompetents in positions of authority. So the whole thing feeds off itself.
The result is an endless hall of mirrors where everything is or might be a lie. These are the places where the bodies are now piling up. Because they’ve gone furthest from Saint Simon’s fantasy. And you can’t exactly blame people for being suspicious when you have a country like the UK where we’re not supposed to know the names of the scientists on the board advising the government on what to do in a medical crisis, but somehow, we do know that two of the members of the board are Tory propagandists with no scientific training. It’s almost as if they want you to know they’re entirely unreliable.
And if unreliable governments also become more authoritarian…?
The idea is that it feeds off itself. There is a paradox here. People confuse anti-authoritarian politics with an opposition to any sort of intellectual authority, even, to any shared notion of truth, justice, even physical reality. As if insisting on any form of truth is tantamount to fascism. But of course if there’s no truth, why is fascism even a problem? What is your grounds for objecting to fascism, other than that you personally don’t like it, which doesn’t mean much if other people do. Well, that kind of absolute relativism is now fading on the left just as it’s being taken up aggressively on the right.
But if that’s the case, authoritarianism—at least of the populist variety—just took a major hit. It really is, as some people are saying, a death cult, a form of mass suicide.
For that very reason, though, I don’t think we should be limiting ourselves to debates on the nature of the future government – will it become more authoritarian, socialist, nationalist, emancipatory? What’s really striking is the degree to which people are self-organising like never before. The first thing that happened in the UK when the pandemic began was that every neighborhood began setting up its own mutual aid group identifying vulnerable people: individuals with no relatives or help, older people… They call them that, “mutual aid” groups, using the old anarchist expression. There are hundreds of them in London alone.
Does this prove the old saying that everybody becomes a socialist – or an anarchist – during the crisis?
In my neighborhood, and I live just a few away from Grenfell Tower, people are already aware that the government is basically useless in a crisis. When the fire happened two years ago, they completely dropped the ball. You’d imagine the government of a country with the world’s fifth largest economies wouldn’t have found it that difficult to find a place to live for a few hundred survivors, but in fact, church groups and spontaneous community groups operating out of squatted spaces ended up having to do everything.
So despite the more common perception that anarchism would push order into chaos it can actually help bring chaos into order?
I always find it slightly amusing that people always say “oh my God, we can’t get rid of the police, because if we get rid of police, everybody will just start killing each other!” Notice they never say “I would start killing people.” “Hmm, no police? I think I’ll get a gun and shoot someone.” Everyone assumes someone else will.
Actually as an anthropologist I know what happens when police disappear. I even lived in a place in rural Madagascar where the police had, effectively, disappeared some years before I arrived. It made almost no difference whatsoever. Well, property crime did increase, if people were very rich, they sometimes got pilfered. Murder if anything decreased. When police vanish in the middle of a big city, where property differences are much more extremely, burglary increases, definitely, but violent crime is entirely unaffected.
But when it comes to organization – well, what we need to ask ourselves is why we think it’s necessary to threaten to hit people over the head, or shoot them, or lock them in a dingy room for years, in order to maintain any form of organization. People who think that really don’t have much faith in organization, do they?
