by Danny Dorling | External link

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World is a collection of previously published articles, almost all sole authored by the academic, activist and anarchist, David Graeber. Graeber’s philosophy is that everyone is an anarchist at heart: none of us like being bossed around. Though he has a point, this idea risks underestimating the degree to which people vary, and to which we can all be conditioned by our circumstances. That said, I have always enjoyed what he has to say because it is so often novel, bringing to light ideas that are rarely discussed in the academic mainstream. His influence is greater than any other recent anarchist, especially following the 2011 publication of Debt: The First 5000 years, published in the year when almost a thousand occupy movement encampments were briefly established in cities in over eighty countries. Before him,the best known modern anarchist was Colin Ward, author of The Child in the City (1978), who had a less combative style.

Graeber died four years before this latest book was published. Giving an overview of Graeber’s thinking and his contribution to anarchist thought in the text’s foreword, Rebecca Solnit writes: “In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did.” What may grate on readers is Solnit’s assumption that some people are ordinary while others are great, that only some have the courage of their convictions. Graeber also moves between suggesting we can all be anarchists, to putting a few on much higher pedestals than others. At times he talks despairingly of many of his colleagues.

Solnit […] highlight[s] to readers how unusual Graeber was, but in doing so she inadvertently illustrates the tendency of anarchists to think they hold a monopoly over supposedly dangerous ideas.

(How) can anarchist thought flourish, or even exist at all, within educational institutions? Another of Solnit’s quotations of Graeber’s words in the foreword suggests that universities:  

…ostensibly designed to give scholars the security to be able to say dangerous things have been transformed into a system so harrowing and psychologically destructive that, by the time scholars find themselves in a secure position, 99 percent of them have forgotten what it would even mean to have a dangerous idea.

What’s clear in this quote is a strong criticism of the type of thinking institutions foster, and of the vast majority of what he considers to be his misguided academic colleagues who capitulated to it. Solnit selects this claim to highlight to readers how unusual Graeber was, but in doing so she inadvertently illustrates the tendency of anarchists to think they hold a monopoly over supposedly dangerous ideas.

When we get to the actual meat of the book, a collection of essays ranging on topics from inequality and technology to democracy and protest, there is much to be recommended. It begins with a discussion that includes issues of tolerance, mutual accommodation and kindness; moves on to have a pop at Eurocentrism and especially the: “Eurocentric variety represented by Kant or Zižek” (46). (Ironically, there is a notable Americentrism to most of the works in the collection and perhaps to the kind of anarchism he espoused.)

We find details of his own background, his grandfather’s university degree, and some very honest and open autobiography about his experience of: “bounc[ing] back and forth” between different state and private institutions (60). Interestingly, in other sections, as well as in a 2014 Op-Ed in The Guardian, he frames himself differently, foregrounding his identity as the “child of a working-class family”. We get a sense from the writings in this collection that Graeber had a split view of himself, working-class sometimes, child of the elite at others. In a way he was the child in the city who was the most famous cheerleader of the children who flocked to camp in the cities in 2011.

His ideas sometimes feel utopian, leaving others to think through the messiness of implementation

Graeber was often bullied as a child and turns the memories of that, along with a little research, into an anecdote. These experiences appear to have had a significant impact on his thinking. At one point he writes: “It turns out that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness, absentminded-ness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed” (185). His broader philosopher describes a world of mostly good people, ordinary people, dominated by a few bullies; if we could only see through them and understand that their power relies on our complicity and subservience, we would uncover a truth usually hidden from us.

Graeber offers a very wide definition of what it is to be an anarchist, one he first published in 2000, defining them as “simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to” (243). They are the ordinary people who “can organise themselves and their communities without needing to be told how [… and] power corrupts” (244). There is something evangelical about Graeber’s anarchism, but also something a little naive. In another definition of an anarchist, he uses the analogy of someone who refrains from elbowing his way to the front of the bus queue, without the need of an enforcing police presence. But what occurs when someone does get an elbow in the face, or is pushed under the bus? His ideas sometimes feel utopian, leaving others to think through the messiness of implementation, like his idea for blowing up endless office blocks, the hallmarks of capitalism, that crowd our cities, and replace them with “museums of care” that could become free universities, social centres and shelters for those in need. But how would such spaces run, who would fund and clean them? Would they really police themselves

In a commentary on Abdullah Öcalan’s political thought, published only a few months before he died, Graeber suggested that “it might be curious to ask ourselves how much time would have to pass or what would have to happen for the intellectual world to treat Öcalan’s ideas in the same way that they do those of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, or Frantz Fanon—to name a few politically engaged scholars who were neither party leaders nor academics—or even a theorist comedian like Slavoj Žižek…”

Perhaps Öcalan’s words will change the world, or how we think of the world, but more likely they will be forgotten. Graeber’s might also change the world; but if they do, it may not be as he expected. The “ultimate hidden truth” could be that underlying modern anarchism is a particular naivety to which this book is a good guide. Perhaps it is possible to organise ourselves and our communities with very few police, but it’s hard to imagine we can do without them entirely. Achieving this is not possible with ideas alone, with a wing and a prayer, but would require transformative collaborative action. Just as Ward’s The Child and the City is little remembered or discussed today, it is equally possible that this collection, and Graeber’s many other books, will become absorbed into wider thinking and understanding around anarchism. It may not be the ultimate hidden truth it purports to be, but rather a step on the way to more effective political action.