Have Direct Democracies Ever Worked? Notes from the Anarchist Anthropology

In this post, I share my insights into anarchism and walk my readers through some very basic yet core ideas in the anthropology of anarchism.

Published: 9/1/2025

I want to begin this post with notable anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (may his soul rest in peace) — partly because Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology remains one of the most lucid (to the point) guides to the ideas of anarchism, and partly because Graeber himself understood something that most political scientists and economists continuously overlook. As he put it, anthropology is uniquely positioned to understand the possibilities of human freedom because anthropologists have spent more than a century documenting the endless variety of societies humans have made — including ones without states, police, or rulers at all.

Graeber writes:

“Anthropology is particularly well positioned to examine human possibilities, in all their strange complexity… including societies that manage to exist without states, without markets, even without classes.” (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004)

For Graeber, anthropology and anarchism “go well together” because anthropologists simply know how many stateless, non-hierarchical, directly democratic societies have existed — and still do. Anarchism is not a utopian dream. It’s a reality, and has always been. It is a part of our human history. Yet the same question always returns:

“But have direct democracies ever worked?” Or worse: “Has anarchism ever actually existed?”

It’s an oddly defensive question — one that immediately coveys more assumptions behind it than about anarchism itself. Before we even begin to talk about what a free society might look like, we’re asked to prove that one has already existed. But this question is built on a logical fallacy: the belief that something can only be considered possible if it has already existed in a form recognizably similar to the modern nation-state. It’s a kind of presentism, a category error that conflates “society” with “the state,” as if the only measure of political possibility is whether civilization has produced a stateless equivalent of France or Brazil or Germany.

This is a bit like asking whether “love has ever worked” by demanding evidence of a 10-million-person romantic commune. The scale and the analogy are wrong and flawed. A better question to ask is:

Why do we believe anarchism can work? What is the logic that makes it thinkable? What forms of it already exist — quietly, subtly, all around us?

The Hidden Archive of Stateless Societies

Anthropology gives us a long answer: anarchism — or something close to it — has existed across human history, across continents, across ecological conditions. There have been hundreds of societies without centralized states: hunter-gatherer bands, horticultural communities, federated councils, clan systems, and deliberately anti-authoritarian cultures like the Tallensi or the Onondaga. The French political anthropologist, Pierre Clastres famously described some of these as “societies against the state” — cultures that actively organized themselves to prevent the concentration of power. Graeber reminds us that the problem is not the lack of historical evidence. The problem is that critics refuse to take such societies seriously. They dismiss them as “primitive” or “small-scale,” as if scale invalidates possibility. But why should size determine legitimacy? If anything, it shows the opposite:

human beings gravitate toward cooperation and mutual aid when political coercion disappears.

The Myth That Capitalism Creates Value

Then there’s another myth and baseless assumption that props up the skepticism toward anarchism: the idea that all valuable things must come from profit incentives, from competition, from markets. But as soon as you look at the world with even a little bit of critical thinking, you start to see that some of the most important achievements and practices in human society have nothing to do with profit at all.

Academic peer review, for example, relies almost entirely on voluntary labor. Scholars read, critique, and improve one another’s work without payment — a massive collective intellectual commons. The only entities that make significant profit in this system are the academic publishing houses, which often charge universities outrageous fees for access to knowledge produced essentially for free.

Then we have open-source software: Linux, Apache, Python, R, Wikipedia, Mozilla, and entire infrastructures that run most of the internet. Built by volunteers. Built through cooperation, not competition. In the world of cybersecurity, open-source software is more secure than corporate code — precisely because it’s open, because it can be scrutinized by anyone on the internet (which in itself through this transparency and decentralized control is a form of direct democracy), whereas companies that refuse to make their code public are forms of authoritarian regimes. The logic is still that shared responsibility works.

It turns out that what empowers human creativity is not capitalism, but community. Graeber loved to point out that anarchism is already happening in these spaces: self-organized, horizontal, cooperative, peer-driven, and operating outside the narrow logics of profit and hierarchy.

“Keep your leaders so close you can slap them.”

There is an old global anarchist proverb — origin unknown — that says:

“Keep your leaders so close you can slap them when they do wrong.” It’s humorous, but conveys a lot. Anarchist and directly democratic systems do not forbid leadership. They forbid unaccountable leadership, leadership at a distance, leadership insulated from consequence.

The goal is not to eliminate power (which might be impossible?), but to make power social, visible, and correctable. Leadership as a function, not a class. Leadership as a task or contribution and not as a privilege or a throne. We can see versions of this in Indigenous confederacies, in community assemblies, in cooperative workplaces, in mutual aid groups. Decisions are made collectively; authority is temporary and revocable; no one stands above others. This is the heart of anarchism — not chaos, but intimacy. Not the absence of order, but the presence of accountability.

Marxists and Anarchists are Allies Until the Revolution

Graeber also points out something that academics often prefer not to hear: Marxism became dominant in academic circles not simply because of its explanatory power, but because Marx was himself an academic. He had a PhD. He wrote in the style of a scholar. His ideas can be footnoted, attributed, debated, cited — and therefore institutionalized.

Anarchism, on the other hand, is not a theory invented by a single great man. It is not a doctrine rooted in a sacred text. It is a tradition of practices, values, and experiments — diffuse, collective, often anonymous. In other words, it doesn’t map neatly onto academic habits of credit-giving and hierarchy. Marxism is a cathedral. Anarchism is a campfire. Guess which one universities are structurally inclined to recognize?

So Have Direct Democracies Ever Worked?

Yes — but that’s not even the right question. Direct democracies have worked in small societies, in medium-sized societies, in revolutionary moments, in contemporary workplaces, in online networks, and in most social movements. Mutual aid and horizontal decision-making emerge spontaneously every time people face crisis or opportunity without centralized control. But the truth is that anarchism is not a historical artifact to be proven but a political grammar to be practiced.

If we judge anarchism only by whether it has produced a modern nation-state, we miss the point entirely. Anarchism is not trying to produce a state. It is trying to produce a different way of being human together. The modern nation-state is precisely what the anarchists despise and work to dismantle.

So in the end, the real question isn’t whether anarchist societies have existed, nor whether anarchism “looks good in theory but fails in practice”—because if we’re honest, capitalism doesn’t even look good in theory— but whether the world we have, built on capitalism’s logic, is worth preserving when freer, more cooperative ways of living remain entirely within our reach.