"Citizens of these pirate port towns had far more freedom than your average twenty-first century American prole moiling long hours for monopoly corporations. They had more democracy as well: decisions were debated and the majority ruled, unlike this country, where citizens express their preference through the franchise, but somehow when their representatives arrive in the capital the only people they listen to are their donors, and only the richest ones, at that. The pirates off the coast of Africa had no such problems. Had any such tyrannical oligarch of the sort who rule the world from Washington appeared in Madagascar, the pirates would have cut his throat."

Egalitarian Paradise Lost: David Graeber and the Pirates of Madagascar - CounterPunch.org

The search across the globe and in history for egalitarian societies turns up some strange finds. One anthropologist, the well-known, radical, recently

^{Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch.org)}