The discussion with Mirko Canevaro and Greg Yudin about David Graeber’s essay took place on the 5th of December 2024. We would like to share the recording and our thoughts in this post.

Consensus is possible when people can just walk away from the assembly, if they do not like decision, that were made.

Majority decision-making becomes necessary when people have to agree on something that requeres the use of violence: war, tax collection, imprisonment. In such cases, the majority can force the minority to do as they told.

The Greek polis was a patriarchal, slave-owning society constantly at war with its neighbours. As Sergey Averentsev wrote in his book Fascinating Greece, the poleis were constantly at war with each other, seizing slaves and land, and only paused for the harvest.

In such a society, majority voting is a necessity. But do we really want to live in such a society?

Another interesting point from the discussion was Grigory Yudin’s comment that the idea of democracy as a purely Western phenomenon, which is taken apart by David Graeber’s text “There Never Was a West.” This concept has been adopted in Russia and tends to harm the development of democracy in the country. Would it be worthwhile to revisit the dominant discourse of “the West” and “democracy,” and try to think about how do these concepts affect different social regimes around the world?

We plan to hold a follow-up session of this meeting because of the large number of responses to the first one. The questions of what democracy is and how to build a real one proved to be relevant to many of us.
We will post the link to zoom soon! Join us!