Anthropology possesses a vast ethnographic record of societies that have organized themselves without states, markets, or coercive hierarchy, yet it rarely offers this knowledge as a usable repertoire of political alternatives. The discipline guards this archive while refusing to draw from it the conclusion that other social arrangements are genuinely possible now.
Counterpower is the set of institutions a society builds to prevent the emergence of permanent power, such as structures that block individuals from accumulating authority or wealth. In societies without a state it operates internally against the latent possibility of domination, rather than externally against an existing ruling class.
Graeber cites the Tsimihety of Madagascar, whose name means roughly those who do not cut their hair, a people known for responding to all forms of external authority by simply moving away or refusing to cooperate. They maintained an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian order not by rebellion but by habitual evasion of commands and institutions imposed on them.
Majoritarian voting requires a coercive apparatus to force the losing minority to comply, which is why it tends to appear alongside states and armies; consensus process instead seeks a decision no one finds intolerable, prioritizing that no group is overridden. Direct democracy by consensus is therefore structurally compatible with the absence of enforcement power, while voting is not.
Rather than seizing state power to impose a future order, change can be pursued by building the desired non-hierarchical relations directly in the present, so that means and ends match. Viewed this way, movements are judged less by their programs than by whether their own internal organization already embodies the freedom they claim to want.