I’m reading David Graeber’s pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), and ran across the following provocative passage:

Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is the might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isn’t much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort of thing is generally classified as “policy issues,” and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these (Graeber 2004, Loc. 89).

I find this provocative because I am simultaneously attracted and repelled by the idea of policy and by the study of it.

Note that planning is a different issue from policy . Although the two are typically  lumped together and treated as inseparable, the two are completely different.

Policy is the formulation of rules that attempt to explicitly prescribe and proscribe behavior—it is necessarily top-down and intended to be binding. Note the etymological similarity to police, policing.

Planning is an imaginative exercise in deciding what should be done. It certainly can be top-town, anti-democratic, planning for others, but it need not be.

Yet what would it mean to plan something complex—an electrical grid or an urban water and sewage system—on anarchist principles? This is an imaginative challenge. At first blush it might even seem impossible. How could anything like consensus ever be achieved among the teeming millions of a great urban center? Indeed, how could it be accomplished even for a mid-sized city?

But wait—does this mean anarchism is intrinsically limited by scale? Does it preclude division of labor and technical expertise? After all, is not such technical expertise inherently anti-democratic?

Only if we insist in thinking of ourselves as monads who should be free from dependence on others. Mutual interdependence is not anti-democractic, though obviously any system that requires advances and prolonged training to understand, produce or maintain is subject to potential abuse as a source of power.

But, frankly, there are far easier ways establish power over others than years of technical study. Anarchism does not require equality of condition, much less ability, or training. It requires a variety of creative breaks on power-tripping. It requires the cultivation of an active distrust of anyone who would try to set him- or herself above others.

Such attitudes are neither natural nor unnatural, but part of the human possible. They are not without a downside—every possible configuration of relationships has consequences. There is the danger of the false positive—the person subject to derision for assuming airs, who might only be following her own passion.

An urbane anarchism has to make room for passions, obsessions, individual priorities—so long as they do not force others into subordination.

And then there is the desire to be subordinated, to give way before the power of an other. This is also part of being human. The ideal of absolute equality flows partially from organisational forms that assume relationships are founded on debt—on payments and repayments; on contracts for service—rather than mutual obligations.

The contractual model of relationships—which is really a model of nominal equality— holds that we have the right to subordinate ourselves to others by going into debt to them. For as long as the debt remains unpaid, the debtor remains one-down and unequal to his creditor. Eventually of course the debt might be repaid (or cancelled, or forgiven) restoring contractual balance