The French Strikes and the Zomian Highlands: Reading James C. Scott on Anarchism

There was something about the French strikes that, like so many things recently, had me feeling out of step with my peers. It was not the particular content of the strikers' demands, in the particular context in which these demands were made, that bothered me; in fact I strongly supported the strikers' effort, and was disappointed when it failed.

It was rather the assumptions behind most of the international (read: North American academic) support for the strikers that I could not entirely accept. How many times did we hear phrases to the effect that the strikers, in fighting to keep in place the relatively generous social welfare system that had been built up in France over the course of the 20th century, were doing nothing less than fighting to defend the 'minimum conditions for a just society'? This got me asking myself: do the highland peasants of Southeast Asia, who live outside of the scope of nation-state control, live in unjust societies? Is there any conception of justice on which the minimal conditions of its being present need not be met by states, but instead might be met by sub-state associations of people? Even if such associations are not up to the task of maintaining the minimum conditions of justice in today's France or the US, is this sufficient reason to neglect them altogether as possible models for the future?

For a while, I had a tenuous and unsatisfying relationship to anarchism: I contented myself with a sort of 'anarchism of the spirit', which conceded that the abolition of government is wholly impracticable, but still insisted that one may, individually, live one's life free of any externally imposed arche. This 'anarchism' was of course only poorly disguised cosmopolitanism (not that there's anything wrong with cosmopolitanism): it had to do with the cultivation of an individual life and the refusal to anchor it in loyalty to some nation-state, with which a person can only ever hope to be contingently associated, rather than with any real conception of the social good.

There were two considerations that kept me dithering in mere cosmopolitanism: I hate village life, and I am afraid of thugs. As to the first, I supposed that if nation-states were to be phased out as the providers of services, utilities, health care, and so on, this would require a radical scaling back to a form of social life that could not include many of the things I enjoy, such as moving easily between cultures across vast geographical regions, sampling from them, taking what I like and rejecting what I don't. As to the second, I supposed like many people that wherever nation-states fail to exercise their famous monopoly on violence, more craven and ancestral forms of it would move in to take their place.

Reading James C. Scott, particularly The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, 2009), as well as Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), has done much to end my dithering. On his treatment, non-state confederations are a sort of endangered species, like indigenous languages and polar megafauna; they are all being encroached upon by very much the same global process. In fact, Scott thinks that Zomia, a mountain region that extends across the borders of several states, including Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, is perhaps the last non-state region in the world. (Similar subaltern accounts have been given of the relative vitality of the local economies of Sudanese villagers, a vitality World Bank functionaries for the most part do not even know how to measure.) This is the last remnant of a sort of sub-state or pre-state social organization that once extended as far as Europe with groups such as the Cossacks: groups consisting in people who were not by any viable measure worse off than the 'citizens' they would soon be forced to become.

With respect to my first concern, about the tedium of the sort of village life that can afford to do without state support (a concern which Scott does not share, and so does not address), it should first be admitted that whether or not I would feel comfortable living a certain kind of life says nothing about whether that life could be considered a good one. Second, upon reflection there is no reason in principle why --if the model of social organization presented by the Zomians were, by some miracle, to be adopted in places that currently have trouble conceptualizing a just society except as one whose upholding is the responsibility of the state-- innovations developed under state direction (the Internet being such a one par excellence) could not be retained and maintained collectively (it is a good deal more difficult to imagine the highway system and the aviation industry being maintained in this way, but I say good riddance), and thereby make possible an optique that extends beyond the Kinder, Kirche, Küche mantra that Marx, for example, thought was the inescapable frame of reference of village life.

With respect to my second concern, about the supposed natural tendency of anarchy towards thugocracy, one comes away from reading Scott (even if this is not his central argument) with a sharp sense of the implausibility of the popular belief that it is the state monopoly on violence that is keeping sub-state actors (my neighbor, the mob, a warlord) from doing me in or generally making my life miserable. For one thing, these parties have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of operating within states, frequently making comfortable arrangements with representatives of the state in order to carry on with their business. For another thing, the anthropology of violence simply makes it, like public copulation, unfeasible in most situations: it's not, or not primarily, law that keeps people from acting out, but custom, of which law is a recent accretion. Finally, it would be very difficult to make the case that sub-state aggressors, even if states do provide a genuine service in holding them back, could possibly do any more harm, if given carte blanche to rape and pillage and fill mass graves, than states themselves have done over the past century. Tribal warlords are nasty, but it is unlikely that villagers have had more reason to fear them than to fear the designs of generals with state-conferred authority.

I for one would not at all mind sitting at home, stateless, watching lolcat vids and reading Wikipedia articles about the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. I would say hello to my neighbors every day, and if they ever got aggressive with me I would say: 'Shame on you'. If it continued, I'd get some local elders to shame them. I'd watch the seasons pass, and I'd get a lot of great writing done. If I were to get sick, there might be a local, natural remedy available, and if not, I might very well die at an earlier age than if there had been the sort of massive state- and corporate-sponsored medical industry most people think of as among the minimum conditions of 'justice'. That would indeed be too bad, but even with my world-renowned Canadian health benefits I note that I am far from immortal, and again, I refuse to admit that the vast majority of communities throughout human history were less just than the one I live in to the extent that they lacked these benefits.

In Marseille this past summer I recall seeing the posters put up by the Socialist Party: Pour nous la retraite, c'est 60 ans! I found myself thinking: wouldn't it be better to strive to bring about a world in which work is not so odious that one dreams of nothing more throughout one's working life than arriving at the age where one may be excused from it? I understand that I risk going off the utopian deep-end in having that sort of reaction to what is in the French context a perfectly laudable demand. But still, I can't help but think, and am very much emboldened by James C. Scott in thinking, that the lack of such a demand among the Zomians is a sign that they are somewhat closer to this utopia than Euro-Canadian democratic socialists are generally capable of seeing.

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Comments

[Barry Stocker]

http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/september-2010-seeing-like-a-state-a-conversation-with-james-c-scott/
Scott's though also gets interest from free market libertarians, not sure that's company you're seeking though Justin.
Good post

[Pablo Policzer]

Great post, but I'm not sure Scott is right about the absence of thugs outside the state. At least it's an open question. Steven Pinker takes the Hobbesian view and argues that pre-modern (and pre-state) tribal life is far more violent, by orders of magnitude:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

[Abestone]

Could the network you like (the Internet) be maintained without the ones you don't like (highways, air traffic — also trains, I guess, unless I'm missing some reason that's much easier)? What happens when a section of fiber optic cable needs to replaced? Local artisans make it from scratch? And where do integrated circuits come from? And who is updating Wikipedia articles, in English, about languages of Southeast Asia? Do they have to travel to Southeast Asia in a dugout canoe, or what?

Even older tedium-relief technologies, such as the book, are rather hard to keep going without a state, as the experience of medieval Europe seems to show.

[Abestone]

Also: it may well be that post-state society would be much more violent than pre-state society was (again medieval Europe looks like a good example of this). The systems you mention (shame, elders, etc.) are not in place, and look hard to create from scratch, especially given that the people now living near you are not related to you in any way except as fellow citizens.

And one more point: you probably wouldn't need to appeal to the Zomian highlands to argue that, e.g., a retirement age which remains constant regardless of demographics is not among the minimum requirements for a just society.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Abe, I concede there are some details to be worked out, and anyway if they can't be worked out I'm always happy to revert back to mere anarchism of the spirit.

The tedium problem is not a serious one: I only have the tedium-relieving strategies I do because of the state of the world at the time I came into it; I don't believe they really make me any happier than campfire stories make hunter-gatherers. (I noticed with interest, by the way, that while you are quite certain Wikipedia entries on Southeast Asian languages would not be kept up, you seem less sure that the lolcat phenomenon could not survive in a vacuum of state power).

The thug problem is perhaps a greater one. We know that hunter-gatherers practiced raids on neighbors in connection with cyclical intertribal feuds, but it was only with pastoralism that wars of expansion became routine. Professional armies appear only with the appearance of states, and again, while they might prevent some thuggish violence in some parts, they also appear to exercise their monopoly on violence at a scale to which warlords can only aspire.

[Abestone]

The lolcat phenomenon is a fundamental manifestation of the human spirit which would be difficult indeed to suppress. Even well short of her second birthday, my daughter already says "'puter, picture, kitty cat?" whenever the laptop comes out.

The issue about state violence confuses me, I admit. It's hard not to believe, and almost everyone who's given thought to the issue for millennia now has believed, that life is generally more peaceful and secure within a state. And yet if you average over history, I see your point. (Socrates does take a view like yours in the Republic, as I understand it.)

[Abestone]

And Thoreau says this (addressing both the thug problem and the tedium problem, perhaps): "I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers … And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers.… Though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properly distributed."

In our time it seems certain that his house would have been vandalized, however.