Written by Prashanth Kamalakanthan, edited by John Thomason

In his latest book The Democracy Project, David Graeber looks around at the ostensible democracies of the developed world and is deeply dissatisfied. Even citizens of liberal democratic states like the United Kingdom are not really “free,” he argues, because they find themselves entering relations that “have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence.” Calling himself a “small a” anarchist, he never tries to explain what the alternative should look like. But his negative critique of what actually exists suggests some rather agreeable — and revolutionary — guiding principles for true democracy.

He writes: “The easiest way to explain anarchism… is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society — and that defines a ‘free society’ as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence.” And he explains how it’s not this unfreedom alone that he finds problematic. He seems as much preoccupied by the threat systemic coercion poses to the normative ideal of “a world based on equality and solidarity,” claiming “vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage, or wage labor, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Even deeper structural inequalities like racism and sexism are ultimately based on the (more subtle and insidious) threat of force.”[1]

These arguments raise several serious philosophical questions. Foremost among them: is all political authority coercive? Can claims of moral authority — that the subject of a command should comply — ever be legitimate when made by a de facto political authority, one that has the power in fact (“armies, prisons, and police”) to coerce subjects into compliance? If we accept Graeber’s ideal of an egalitarian society based on mutual agreement, it seems to follow that political authority — defined as the ability to issue commands that are, in turn, obeyed — insofar as it is coercive and thus at odds with equality among individuals, is morally illegitimate.

But this leads to some radical conclusions. If all political authority reduces to violent commands, is it possible to envision any political arrangement that eliminates systemic coercion and inequality? What would participation in collective decision-making, the activity of politics, look like in these utopian contexts?

It may be helpful to step back for a moment here and clarify what I mean by “command.” A command, as differentiated from requests or advice, amounts to a veiled threat, an attempt to control human behavior by presenting two choices: comply or face punishment. Its subject’s universe is reduced to two courses of action. In the context of political commands (laws), punishment is violent, imposing physical and psychological suffering on the noncompliant. Forms of incarceration, torture and fines (which entail both stolen labor and a decline in one’s living standards) are common examples of such retributive state violence.

Framing a command as such — and insisting that political authority works this way, as Graeber does — often leads to an important objection. I’ll call it the “patriot problem.”

The patriot problem questions the premise that all political authority must create an unequal, coercive social reality that relies on violence as a means of ensuring compliance. It invokes the figure of the patriot: for example, an American chauvinist who pays taxes not because of the threat of retribution were he not to, but because he feels as though he ought to financially support his country, the greatest on Earth, in its democracy-disseminating adventures around the globe. The dilemma (a false one) suggests the idea of a legitimate moral authority totally divorced from de facto authority. We are supposed to believe that our hypothetical patriot does not, in any small, subconscious vessel in his brain, think of what might happen were he not to comply with the command: “pay your taxes.” Instead, having decided that the United States government is morally justified in demanding that he routinely forfeit a portion of his salary, he happily does so, seemingly free from coercion.

But the picture painted by the patriot problem is too reductive, too narrowly individualist in its scope. Immediately, we might ask: wherefrom our patriot? Presumably, babies don’t emerge from the womb either patriots or dissidents. These kinds of precise national-political dispositions are of course acquired through processes of socialization. One must, before becoming a patriot, gain an understanding of the concept of nationality and acquire at least a rudimentary grasp of the world’s geography, among other basic knowledge. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz offer a more satisfying account of how political authority works over time (and on the collective scale), pointing out that decision-making sites such as the voting booth or the tax form (to pay or not to pay?) are not the only places where coercion occurs, that maybe most crucial to the exercise of political power are moments of non-decision. They identify manipulation at the level of the political “rules of the game… [shaping of] predominant values, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures”[2] occurring in a situation where political authority succeeds in “creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous.”[3]

That our own patriot considers the American government’s directive to pay taxes morally justified may draw from information about the state’s attitudes and activities that reached him through many exercises of coercive political authority. These historical sites of social interaction cannot, importantly, be extricated from an individual’s present moral deliberations. The patriot’s belief in American exceptionalism, for example, is likely rooted in the classroom education he had no option but to receive. Hours of lecture from a state-approved curriculum, minutes of a state-allotted time to pledge allegiance to a flag, classified files documenting torture in Iraqi prisons kept secret on threat of extremely punitive retribution to government employees… all of these comprise in part the “rules of the game” Bachrach and Baratz describe, coercively defined boundaries within which the patriot exercises his superficial freedom.

And it’s not only control over access to the information contextualizing the patriot’s moral judgments that constitute his coercion as he faces his tax form. More fundamentally, even the normative framework he uses to filter and evaluate this information has been coercively defined. As Stephen Lukes notes, authority A (the United States government) also exercises power over (our patriot) B by:

… influencing, shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have — that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?[4]

Here, Lukes calls attention to forms of manipulation at the level of individual subconsciousness, evoking George Orwell’s “Big Brother” as a figure A that renders B an inadequate judge of B’s own interests via deep social manipulation of B’s values and aspirations. Simply placing Big Brother’s foreboding portrait on public walls hints at the state’s coercive capabilities, altering B’s incentives, although the display is in itself innocuous.

For our individual patriot, it’s of course impossible to evaluate exactly how a passing headline about a jailed tax evader (a reminder of retribution) weighs subconsciously against the government’s non-coercive appeals to nationalism in speech and gesture. The subconsciousness-level of analysis introduced by Bachrach, Baratz and Lukes is, at the site of the individual, inescapably slippery and immaterial. One simply cannot distinguish with certainty between cases where the boundaries of individual action have been coercively defined and thus limited, and separate instances where people freely make choices that contradict their own interests. Nonetheless, on the aggregate level, coercion observed or felt secondhand clearly transforms (and for authority, eases) environments in which political authority is exercised. In considering the social manipulation of individuals’ desires and dispositions, which in turn form the context where individual moral deliberation occurs, it is crucial to not lose sight of these social features of the environment above all. While in individual instances of action in fulfillment of a political command it’s clearly impossible to determine whether or not coercion has occurred, we can say for certain that over all such actions, and all such patriots, the motivating forces are mixed.

Prescriptively, this muddling of motives again points toward calls for the absence of political authorities capable of manipulating of so-called “non-decision-making sites” in general, since only in the context of such an absence would it be possible to conclude definitively that individuals’ actions haven’t been conditioned by past exercises of coercive authority. I scare-quote “non-decision-making sites” here since, as we saw in the classroom examples of pledging allegiance and completing assignments from a state-defined curriculum, these instances, too, can be construed as discrete sites of decision-making in response to political commands, on the part of the patriot-as-former-student. They are “non-decision-making sites” only insofar as they provide a historical context, rather than open choices, for the decision-making of the present (in our example, the patriot’s tax form).

We see, then, that our happy patriot isn’t really so free as he considers himself. The existence of a political authority that has the power in fact to issue commands and have them obeyed has, to a large extent, constituted the moral universe where he makes decisions. That our patriot doesn’t feel threatened when paying his taxes does not diminish the reality that (a) the threat of violence still stands and (b) threats made and acted upon in his social environment have shaped how he understands the command — both reproducing an ambient violence enveloping him.

To point (a) above, I should add that although appeals to moral authority are not legitimate in light of standing threats of violence (if we are to retain our normative commitments to equity materially and in power) they are remarkably useful for real-world political authorities like the United States government. This final note may help shed light on why, given the coercive capabilities of so highly militarized and carceral a regime as the United States’s, such moral appeals are even attempted. De facto authorities like these make appeals to moral authority because (in the context of the ambient violence that they constantly reproduce, amid which moral judgments are made) they offer a path of least resistance. The IRS quite simply lacks the resources to find and punish each American who dodges taxes, even though, crucially, it reserves the right. To the extent that the government is able to package paying taxes as part of a patriot’s promise, it exercises its authority much more resource-efficiently. A further effect of making moral claims is that the act of appeal itself can serve to obscure how authority actually works through coercion. This, in the last instance, is a forward-looking move that facilitates separate — yet similar and connected — exercises of coercive authority.

How, then, might the processes of cooperative decision-making based on “principles of full and equal participation” vaguely identified by Graeber avoid propagating systems of coercion? What’s better than a liberal democracy?

Clarifying the clause “full and equal participation” and the forms of political participation it excludes helps fill the gaps in Graeber’s answer. Majoritarian voting, for one, is out. The problem with such systems, observes Graeber, is that they tend to be extremely divisive within the political collective, hence, he claims, the reason they are most often historically associated with “societies where spectacles of public competition are considered normal [such as ancient Athens]… but mainly in situations where everyone taking part in an assembly is armed.”[5] In these scenarios, the inability to reach fully consensual political decisions is either (case one) celebrated for its fostering of competition or (case two) regarded as irrelevant or relatively unimportant in light of voting’s expedience over more deliberative forms of collective decision-making. This marginal gain of majority voting over, for example, the time-consuming consensus-building processes famously demonstrated by the encampments of the Occupy movement (unified by their commitment to near-unanimity in decisions reached and, at least, the ability for anyone to individually opt out of collective commitments), are importantly guaranteed only by plausible threats of violence, what seems to constitute the coercion inherent to forms of political authority in general.

The majority/minority divides emblematic of voting succinctly define what “full and equal” political authorization does not mean: power inequalities among individuals within the collective (reducing in action to the ability to issue and enforce violent threats like “respect the tally”). Put positively, realizing a cooperative decision-making process based on principles of full and equal participation requires that the sole political authority of a non-coercive collective is the collective, taken in its totality. We might call this overarching authorization of the collective itself a central characteristic of “communitarian anarchism” (as different from more individualist approaches — a different debate for a different essay). Protecting our normative commitments to equality (thus freedom from coercion), the term comes to describe a political arrangement where all individuals are considered equal, therefore no one person has authority over the other, and all political decisions are reached collectively and in full consensus. As for the systems that might produce such full consensus, a communitarian anarchist like Graeber remains agnostic, only stipulating that the collective should not coercively enforce individual compliance with decisions — a standing, available “opt-out” option for opposed or dispossessed individuals. The command, now a request, renders authority toothless.

So, after a book and all these 2,000-some words: all political authority is coercive, and liberal democracy is at best a convenient compromise that trades away meaningful equality. What are we supposed to do, then? Is it communitarian anarchism or bust? What about socialism along the way? Don’t forget that I started by assuming a commitment to freedom and equality. It’s not all or nothing — it never is — but the societies we envision show how much we really care.