Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Two Bobs: A Note on Cults of Personality

Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.

The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.

This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.

That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.

But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:

The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.

Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)

And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:

[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.

In short, hail Bob.

Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher. 

Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.

A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.

Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?

Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.

Pussies vs. Dicks in Putin's Russia

Amateur neo-Kremlinologists will by now have heard of Pussy Riot, a league of masked anarchist feminist punks who, until recently, could be spotted around Moscow performing their music, uninvited, in public spaces. Their career was cut short when two of their members were detained by Putin's security forces. Here is a clip of what appear to be various performances, to the tune of their best-known song, "Kropotkin-Vodka":

 

As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to translate the lyrics into English, so let me give it a try:

Occupy the city with a frying pan
Go out with a vacuum cleaner, reach orgasm;
Seduce the battalions of police virgins.
The naked cops rejoice at the new reforms.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

Kropotkin-Vodka floats in their stomachs
You're doing fine, and the Kremlin bastards
Are having a rebellion of the johns, poisoning is fatal
Blinkers won't help, meet Kennedy.

Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.

I must have slept, the day again is for oppression,
Brass knuckles in my pocket: feminism, that is,
Carry your soup to eastern Siberia,
So that [Pussy] Riot can be sufficiently vulgar.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

If I were to attempt an analysis, I would point out that on one level it appears that something is getting lost in the translation of a certain species of Western anarchist feminism into the Eastern European context. The formula here seems to be the assertion of a radical political stance through straightforward, in-your-face vulgarity-- something that I think is rather foreign to Western feminism. But I also think it's a mistake to try to interpret this as a borrowing or a derivation from the West: in fact it connects up with a long history of political dissent in Russia, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, through the public assertion of sexuality, most of which has not traditionally been overtly feminist. Most recently, we had the case of Voïna (War), an artists' collective that was brutally supressed by the KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, after painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises right next to the security forces' headquarters in Moscow. Banksy rushed to their support, though one suspects that he would have considered graffiti like this rather less interesting if it were to appear in London or Los Angeles.

More distantly, we have the pornographic novel-cum-memoir It's Me, Eddie, written in the 1970s by Eduard Limonov during his sojourn as an impostor Refusenik in New York City, long before he became a mercenary in Serbia and, finally, returned to Russia to found the so-called 'National Bolshevik Party': a bizarre mix of hateful fascist ideology with subversive street theater and clever manipulation of 20th-century political iconography. (To the right is a photo of me speaking, but not agreeing, with said fascist pornographer, circa 1996). More distantly still, we find the work of the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev in the late 1960s and early '70s, who, like the Russian examples cited, seems to have been excited by the idea, which can be traced back to the 'Freudo-Marxism' of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s --before Stalin's imposition of socialist realism as the only legitimate form of aesthetic expression--, that true political liberation can only come with sexual liberation, or as Wilhelm Reich put it, and as Makavejev aggressively reminded us in his film about the apostate German psychoanalyst and communist: 'Fuck freely, comrades!' 

So Pussy Riot, I mean to say, joins a distinguished lineage. But one thing is different this time around: the oppressive state against which the avant-garde is recalcitrating has grown more sophisticated, adaptable. In the West, this adaptability takes the form of 'greenwashing'; in China (as that one Slovenian guy is always mentioning), the state has figured out that it is better off not suppressing Buddhism altogether, but rather putting forth its very own, party-approved Dalai Lama to undermine the authority of that Western media darling in exile in India. The Putin regime, in turn, has responded to the Pussy Riot problem not only by brutal suppression (though that too), but also by propping up its very own aggressively sexual, masked, subversive, avant-garde-ish answer to Pussy Riot. As reported recently at Snob.ru (I haven't quite figured out what Snob is all about; all I know is that it is a consistently interesting source of news and information coming out of Russia, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, its servers are currently down), and as confirmed by a simple YouTube search, there is now a character going by the name of 'Dick Riot', roving around Moscow, making an ass of himself.

He claims to be an independent journalist who happens to support Putin, and protests rather loudly when he is asked whether his stunt is being supported directly by the Putin regime. To be honest I can't really figure out what he is on about in the YouTube clips of him, but he seems like a rather unpleasant person. Anyway what is of interest about him is that in today's Russia such a man as Dick Riot could be one of the derivative products formed in reaction to the hybrid of Eastern European sexual-political subversion with Western feminism that is Pussy Riot.

Putin is no Stalin, and the fact that he has been able to consolidate power in the era of YouTube is in part a result of his ability to coopt the forces of would-be subversion, forces that to which a tyrant like Stalin could respond only through utter suppression. Usually, this cooptation is simple Berlusconi-style media manipulation; surely the most vulgar example of this was the 'Tear Something Up for Putin' campaign, in which nubile young women could win their very own iPad2 by submitting a video of themselves sexily tearing something up that, it was understood, represented Putin's cowardly enemies. One of the most favored submissions featured a Playboy-ready young woman tearing up a pile of US dollars.

But the reaction to Pussy Riot, perhaps, shows a new sort of cooptative sophistication. It responds to the avant-garde not with more, louder, sillier, glossier air-brushed nonsense, sustained by the hope of a new iPad, but rather with a figure that supposedly emerges from the fringes himself, bearing a mask, pulling stunts, playing the merry prankster. Of course, there is nothing at all avant-garde about Dick Riot, and in fact the substitution of 'dick' for 'pussy' is deeply, literally, illustratively reactionary, exactly like the disgruntled proposals we often hear in the United States for the creation of a 'National Association for the Advancement of White People'. The very first lesson of feminism, learned by pretty much all non-australopithecines in the West a long time ago, is that feminist and 'masculinist' perspectives on one and the same thing are not, so to speak, enantiomorphs of one another. They are different because the feminine is always the marked category; everything is a dick unless otherwise specified.

So in that respect Dick Riot is not just reactionary but also redundant. That the Putin regime would be able (directly or indirectly) to produce such a creature, as its pseudo-avant-garde response to a genuinely subversive phenomenon, makes sense when we recall what a dick Putin himself is. I sat at a desk across from that morose little man in 1990, when he was consigned by the Gorbachev regime to a sinecure watching over foreign students at Leningrad State University. I swear I'm not making it up when I say this: I remember thinking, this guy's got a problem. But he's managed to do a lot with his problem, and again I think much of his success has to do with his adaptability. Stalin squelched the avant-garde. A tyrant with any hope of sticking around in the age of YouTube will take a different, more supple approach.

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Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

I got all teary-eyed around November, 2008, just like every other non-australopithecine American. But unlike most of my co-evolved concitoyens I was not a sucker. I was delighted that we would now have a rational and evidently morally decent person, rather than a cretinous one, volunteering to take on a role that is for structural reasons morally compromising. But I did not think for a second that this was the dawning of some sort of new era. That would be to misunderstand what a president is.

We have what in places like Turkey is lucidly described as a 'deep state' (though in Turkey it's principally the army that is had in mind, while for us it's a more composite beast). The deep state  limits drastically what elected officals can do. It is the permanent structure that endures behind the constant electoral spectacle, and it ought to be the only thing of interest to political analysts. Do I blame Obama for the continuation of the Iraq War, the non-closure of Guantánamo, etc.? Just a little bit more than I blame his tailor. For Obama is, as they say, a suit, and many, many people conspire to maintain him as the presentable image of American power. I am incapable of conjuring any commiseration with the conventional liberals who believe disappointment in Obama the person is an appropriate reaction to his record as president.

However little Obama interests me, the current clamoring of the Republican candidates is of an altogether different order of uninterestingness. The constant din they are permitted to sustain for so many months ought, as someone put it, to be of no more concern to us than the gossip on Jersey Shore. And doesn't the decision to tune in or not to any one of the endless 'debates' feel exactly like the rest of your television viewing habits: passive, recreational, irrelevant, kind of fun?

But I was never a big TV fan, and I feel a bit betrayed by the Internet in recent years for having sneakily transformed into something so TV-like. It could have been a rejection of everything TV tells us to care about. Instead the blogs and the pundits work in perfect tandem, encouraging us for example to take an interest in the details of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney is a classic plutocrat; of course he's getting away with as much as he can. The problem is not this or that indiscretion in any given year's filing. The problem is that one has to be a plutocrat in order to stand any chance of being elected.

Nor do I care about the dog on the roof of Romney's car, or the miscarried child the Santorums brought home and fondled for a few days. Hell, if it helped them get through it, why not? Stranger rituals have been documented in the rich variety of human experience.

Still less do I care about Newt Gingrich's infidelities. I have heard the argument that it is not Gingrich's personal life itself that interests progressives, but only his hypocrisy: the fact that he dogged Bill Clinton in the 1990s for his extramarital affairs, and now turns out to be no better. But we can still be better: we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, and agree that an aspiring politician's sex life is wholly irrelevant to our assessment of his capacity to govern.

As a good rule of thumb, I don't care about anything, really, that Maureen Dowd cares about. She cares a great deal about Newt Gingrich's sexual prowess, for example, and about Callista Gingrich's fashion sensibilities, whereas I don't. Dowd is a fawning courtisane who satisfies an evidently widespread middle-brow craving for page-six gossip by wrapping it up in faux-feminist indignation and moderately witty word play.

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

And still less do I care about the simple existence of Ron Paul. I myself have splashed around in the swamps out of which creatures like Paul congeal. They are my extended family. They are the cranks on the call-in AM radio shows that were always on when I was a child (KFBK AM 1530, to be precise). They are the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who nevertheless, for some reason, still don't add up to WASPs. They feel cast off, left out, and the world-view they conjure up as a defense reaction is so muddled that for brief moments it can look as though it's motivated by genuine concern about the betterment of the world. But it never is. 

I will not vote for any of them, not Obama, not the others. This is, I insist, itself a legitimate use of my right to vote: it is a refusal to get sucked into the spectacle.

Alright, next post: back to Rilke, and to things that are beautiful and that matter.

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Ancestor Worship and Atheism

I learned about the existence of atheism and anarchism at around the same time (I think I was twelve). It may have been simply their parallel structure as words that caused me to interpret them in similar ways. I imagined that atheism properly understood is not so much a doxastic state, a lack of belief in the existence of some external entity, but rather a normative state, an opposition to the existence of that entity, or, perhaps better, an opposition to that entity's supposed claim on my soul. On the standard interpretation, by contrast, atheism involves the denial of the existence of an entity, while anarchism involves opposition to an institution that everyone acknowledges to exist. Its existence is the problem that gives any self-identification as an anarchist its sense and purpose.

Yet there may be something revealing about this misunderstanding-- something that leaves anarchism intact, while forcing us to rethink what it is we are asking, or answering, in conversations about religious belief. Now I've long insisted that it's a huge waste of time to argue either for or against the existence of God. I'm sympathetic to Bertrand Russell's view that claims about God are 'bad grammar', even if, as I see it, he was motivated by cocky self-assuredness, while on this question I suffer from the opposite weakness: total incomprehension.

Things start to make a bit of sense to me however when I turn from philosophical speculation to the ethnographic record. We know that, for the most part, preoccupation with the existence or non-existence of an omnipotent omniscient supernatural creator is a feature of only a particular type of society. It is, to put it succinctly, an abstraction from the idea of the monarch, and debates about the existence of God that characterize the modern era run parallel to the emergence of alternatives to monarchism. In this respect, it is no less provincial to suppose that the question "Do you believe in God?" is universally meaningful, than to suppose that one might reasonably ask of a paleolithic hunter-gatherer whether he prefers republicanism or absolute monarchy.

Countless ethnographic reports tell us that in relatively simple societies (and I mean 'simple' not as a judgment but as a description of measurable features) it is not the supreme being or first cause or summum bonum that is of interest: it is rather ancestors, the way the dead continue to play a role in the world of the living, the way they are reincarnated back into that world through new births, and the way they influence that world for better or ill depending on how the living regulate their behavior. This is what matters, and even if there might be some myth about the origins of the world or even about a supreme entity that rules the 'other side', this is nonetheless not what their religion --if we can speak of such a thing-- is centrally about.

This is something many early missionaries understood. For them, it was a matter of bringing God to the people who had not yet heard of him, in the savage and barbarian lands such as America, and not a matter of insisting that they exchange one god for another. This was a categorically different project for them than the conversion of the Chinese, for example, who were held by many (particularly the more liberal Jesuits) to already have a perfectly viable distinction between God and Creation, which would now only need to be recast in Biblical terminology: a cosmetic change more than a change of heart.

Now it seems to me that it makes sense to call an Amazonian native circa 1600 an 'atheist' only to the same extent that it makes sense to call her an 'anarchist'. She has no familiarity with state structures or with the idea of a causa sui, summum bonum, etc., but in both cases there is no real opposition, just a different range of belief options afforded by the particular sort of society in which she happens to live.

Yet while anarchism is supposed to concern an individual's beliefs about what is best for human society, atheism by contrast is supposed to be about the way not just human society in fact is, but the way the entire world is, with all its galaxies and quarks and so on. It is supposed to be a viewpoint about the ultimate causes of these things, and about what is sustaining them in existence and giving them their natures. That's a pretty tall order for any -ism, especially when we know that there is such a rigid correlation (in the ethnographic record, which for some reason no one wants to look at) between beliefs about the transcendent order on the one hand and the civic order on the other.

Now I am, as I've confessed repeatedly in this space, both an anarchist and an atheist, but I see the latter more or less as a direct consequence of the former: not so much as a view about what's actually behind the quarks and galaxies and magnets and stuff, but rather as a direct corollary for the transcendent realm of my principled commitments in the immanent realm. I don't need God because I don't need kings. I'm with the 16th-century Amazonians. (At least deep in my heart I am; in actual practice I am a run-of-the-mill liberal democrat and a non-practicing unitarian universalist, just like pretty much everyone I know.)

The so-called atheism of someone like Dawkins, from this perspective, looks at least as foolish as the piety of any bishop. It is born of a deep assurance that ethnographic data can be of no interest in formulating claims about the ultimate nature of reality, and this because of an absolute certainty that the ethnographic lens could never be turned back upon oneself, whose declarations about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being are motivated by reason and reflection alone, and not by the range of options one has in a particular time and place. (Hitchens, by contrast and to his credit, admits that he is an 'Anglican atheist').

The tragedy is that a century ago it looked like we were well on our way to a sophisticated science of religion, grounded in ethnographic data. Marcel Mauss was an atheist too, but he was light years ahead of Dawkins in his understanding of what it is to be an atheist, and by the same token of what it is to experience the world religiously or through the filter of ideas about transcendent beings (whether ancestor spirits or a supreme creator).

These days I'm trying to figure out when and how that vital research program trailed off, and left us only with yokels like Dawkins and Ratzinger to represent each his own position in the crudest and most un-self-aware terms possible. I suspect it has something to do with the rise of US Cold War hegemony (which made it seem that the American liberal democratic way of thinking was just thinking simpliciter) and of postmodernism (which made the study of human cultural diversity by European-trained scholars into an act of 'violence'). But now that these two trends are fizzling as well, perhaps now is a good moment to reclaim that early 20th-century scientific seriousness for the future study of religious belief. 

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Anarchism (a Concluding Postscript)

This will be the final installment in the recent cascade of reflections on anarchism. I had not expected to have so much to say on this topic, and in many ways am looking forward to getting back to other things that matter, such as verbal prefixes, and the aesthetic difference between plunderphonics and mash-up (coming soon).

I carried Fields, Factories, and Workshops of Tomorrow around with me for a while as a teenager, but later in life for the most part I held to the familiar line, according to which anarchism is just too tall an order, no one who claims to be committed to it can actually believe what she says, and so on. Quite unexpectedly, then, a number of rivulets came together of late to swell into a full-fledged and --I hope I can say-- mature interest in anarchism. One rivulet that is particularly worthy of mention is the seemingly unrelated reading I had undertaken in the past year or so on the history of the scientific study of animal ethology. Any comprehensive survey of this field will extend back further than Konrad Lorenz and Jakob von Uexküll in the early- to mid-20th century to acknowledge the contribution to the incipient field made by Petr Kropotkin. The Russian anarchist had no systematic interest in the quantitative study of animal behavior, but he did believe that cooperation in gregarious species provided a model, one that could be confirmed by closer scientific study, of society without government. This conception of animal cooperation went very much against the prevailing vulgarized version of Darwinism ('red in tooth and claw', 'survival of the fittest', etc.), which has been under attack in the past few decades, by Frans de Waal and other scientists who have insisted on the important role of cooperation alongside competition in all primate societies.

Now I take it as a starting point of any reflection about the viability of anarchism that, if it is viable, it is so in view of human ethology, in view of the innate behavioral range of the particular species of primate we happen to be.  But there is another factor to consider as well, beyond our species-specific behavior, and that is the circumstances in which we find ourselves, which trigger certain behaviors that might have continued to lie dormant in a different sort of landscape. Chimpanzees, as Sarah Hrdy reminds us, are particularly uncooperative with one another when they are made to fly in airplanes (if left unrestrained, they will bite each other's fingers off). My sense is that much state-backed violence (as well as derivative or state-like violence perpetuated by over-armed clans) results from the fact that, in states, and a fortiori in densely populated industrial and post-industrial states, homo sapiens are in a situation not so different from a plane full of chimps.

One of the most common objections to anarchism is that it would require the abandonment of too many of the things that all but the most rugged and survivalist of anarchists hold dear. It is of course absurd to speak of a world that is more or less like ours --airport gift shops, Diet Dr. Pepper, health insurance, cricket leagues, and so on-- but that does not include governments. If there is going to be a world without governments, it is going to look very different from this one. To be a bit more explicit --as explicit as I am able to be, I fear--, it is going to look very much more like the world of chimpanzees (the ones in rain forests, that is, not the ones in airplanes). But is it a precondition of coming forth as an anarchist that one must wish to trade this world for that world without further delay? I don't see why it has to be.

Developing a point I've made in earlier posts, it seems to me we might distinguish at least three varieties of anarchism, which we may as well call the 'hormonal', the 'spiritual', and 'political'. The hormonal anarchist is the adolescent who antagonizes mall cops and draws that 'A' symbol on every surface he can find. He need not detain us, except as long as to note that spiritual anarchism might grow out of hormonal anarchism (perhaps somewhat as love of the forms grows out of sexual lust in Plato's Symposium), but need not. (Spiritual anarchism, I'm tempted to say, ought to be seen as a precondition of the philosophical life: it's cosmopolitanism in the ancient sense, in which one acknowledges citizenship only in the cosmos, rather than in whatever obscure province or empire one happens to inhabit. Any other stance towards the world makes one a mere party philosopher, a courtier, a hack. How, really, can you claim to be à la recherche de la vérité, même amoureux de la vérité, and simultaneously come to feel invested in the mundane jockeying of political parties?)

I said before that if political anarchism doesn't work, I'm happy to simply linger in the anarchy of the spirit. (It would be difficult to imagine a comparable equanimity in partisans of other political ideologies facing up to the unrealizability of their vision of society; you'll never meet a 'spiritual socialist', for example.) But the dichotomy between spiritual and political anarchism is starting to ring false to me. I think rather that it is more fitting to characterize the anarchist stance in terms of narrow- vs. broad-focused perspectives. The anarchist prefers to think about the human species as having got by for the vastly greater part of its existence without states and armies (and airports, etc.), and insists on asking, based on the perspective of the longue durée, whether so many things that are taken as inevitable in our age are in fact so. I grew up assuming cars were inevitable; now they strike me as relics from a swiftly waning era. I don't see why at least some of us should not be trying to imagine how we might go about securing a similar fate for armies, police, and prisons. It bears pointing out that whether you believe these institutions are inevitable or not, it is undeniable that they are capable of radical transformation. So if you tell me that it is impossible to imagine a world without prisons, it seems to me a reasonable challenge to your claim to note that the very denotation of the term you are using has shifted drastically, not just over the centuries, but even over the past few decades. The fact that this has been a shift for the worse, from the perspective of any lover of peace and freedom, does not diminish the strength of the challenge.

Whether one is naturally more inclined to take the broad or the narrow focus is probably just a matter of personality, which is in turn just a matter of genes and environment. Some people will do better monitoring which district fell to the Tea Party in the midterms, coming up with ways to fix shortfalls in the federal budget, and so on. Best of luck to them. I'm even willing to join them at the polling station (with a non-stop stream of cynical commentary, of course). But meanwhile it would be nice if there were a recognized space for people who are by nature more concerned with the full dossier of the human species, and who are trying to imagine its long-range possibilities for the future based on the very good scientific data we have about what it looked like for most of the past, without being marginalized as idle utopians.

Anarchism, then, as I see it, is a certain perspective on the affairs of men. It is realistic and naturalistic, in that it takes human beings as first and foremost a kind of primate, which only in certain circumstances comes to saddle itself with police and armies and so on. It asks whether and how human beings might thrive in the absence of these, and perhaps also hopes that they might someday (again) thrive without them, even if much of what we now value would have to be relinquished, and even as we soberly acknowledge that human pre-history was no idyll either.

Slavoj Žižek Wants to See a Bloodbath

It is said to be a token of the immense respect for the Slovenian philosopher in Western upper-middle-brow media that that pair of distinctive carats in his surname are consistently retained in printed versions of it, no matter what the language of the revue, and no matter what its editorial policy concerning the more obscure diacritical marks that adapt the Latin script to languages for which it was never intended. I note, to begin, that I accord exactly the same respect, and no more, to Radovan Karadžić. In an era when we are all free to pilfer even the obscurest diacritics from Wikipedia profiles of Balkan villains, getting their names right should hardly be taken as a sign of any subtextual esteem.

A parallel that goes far beyond accent marks was brought home to me, again, when I was reading the latest iteration of Žižek's new vision for the future in this month's Le monde diplomatique (which for its part has the absurdly hypercorrect editorial policy of referring to 'William Clinton' and 'James Carter'), in which he expresses more unambiguously than ever, to my knowledge, his belief in the neeed for a Robespierrean redux in order to set history on the right course. Žižek believes that the economic crisis that began in 2008 has brought bourgeois institutions to a critical juncture, and has precipitated a now-or-never moment that will separate the true radicals --the agents of revolutionary change-- from the pseudo-radicals who stand by and call impotently for reform. The intellectual radicals "wanted a real change," he writes, "now they can have it." This change will happen, he goes on to say, when the oppressed classes (among whom he seems to include 'radical intellectuals') take recourse to 'legitimate violence', "legitimate because their very status results from violence."

I've been trying --mostly in posts in this space, as I find these days I'm not even sure I've had a coherent thought at all until I've attempted to write it out and dared to parade it around in public-- to think through a different way of conceptualizing the 'revolutionary potential' of disadvantaged groups (which I do not want to call 'oppressed', for reasons I'll get to). I've been confessing recently that I am drawn to a variety of anarchist pacifism, rather than to the sort of old-fashioned class struggle that Žižek has been campaigning to revive. To be a pacifist, I take it, means above all that we should stop looking for vanguards, and start looking for exemplars. To this end, there is no particular reason to stop at the working class, when in fact there are layers much more disadvantaged still, whose members do not even participate in the system of labor. They cannot be said to be oppressed, because would-be oppressors haven't figured out a way to get anything out of them at all.

Indigenous people might be a minority in today's world, population-wise, but they represent one possible form of human life, and as long as it survives we will have a living model of society that has not been subsumed into any of the available world systems, neither the monotonous transnational capitalist order of airport gift shops and so on, nor the order that Žižek imagines is about to rise up and seize control. As exemplars rather than vanguards, they won't have to seize anything or kill anyone in order for the lesson to get across; what matters is that this truly different way of being be there, and visible, that 'radical intellectuals' be prepared to notice it and to seize on its tremendous power to shame those who are pursuing their narrow class (or national) interests. Exemplarity of this sort is, I take it, very much what Gandhi had in mind in his elaboration of the doctrine of ahimsa or nonviolence, in which aggressors are shamed rather than fought against with their own weapons, and goodness is preserved in the world by those who refuse to adopt the methods of the exploiters. More and more, I believe that there is no greater weapon than shame. It is a weapon, moreover, to which oppressors can have no recourse.  

Can indigenous exemplars really bring the oppressive order down? Probably not, but neither will Žižek's proletarian vanguard, and if we follow the first at least when it's all over we won't have blood on our hands. (I'll try to explain what it might mean for pacifism to 'work', given that we are in the end a bunch of bloodthirsty apes, in another post.)

Žižek's shtick works for a number of reasons among readers who are not ordinarily receptive to calls to the barricades. One is that he is a clown, that he cuts his Leninism with enough sweet stuff about Jennifer Lopez and whatever other trash passes across his hotel TV screens that readers can easily assume to be a put-on every bit that they are not inclined to accept. Another reason, obviously, is the way he plays on his foreignness. He's been through it, Western readers will tell themselves, and has surely earned the right to hold forth on these matters. But anyone who would joke that the only position he would accept in the Slovenian government is that of chief of secret police evidently has not been through it quite enough. Slovenia was the freest republic of the freest federal state in the socialist bloc: the Switzerland of Yugoslavia, as Slobodan Milošević once scoffed. This does not mean it was always easy to be a Lacanian intellectual in Ljubljana during the Tito era, but the sort of inconvenience Žižek faced is categorically different than, say, the Stalinist show trials in the Soviet Union of the 1930s (made possible, of course, by the secret police).

Žižek, I mean, is not speaking from any particular position of experience when he suggests that there is something to be salvaged from the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution. When he suggests that what is to be salvaged is the very most brutal part of that legacy, moreover, he is just being flippant, and Western readers should not let him get away with it simply on the grounds that he has funny accent marks in his last name. 

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The Dregs of States

Unlike most of my contemporaries, I simply hate the mafia. I hate everything that has to do with the mafia, including fictional representations of it in cinema, television, and video games. I am regularly forced to report ads for Mafia Wars on a certain social-networking site as 'offensive' (ads for KY Jelly, in turn, are dutifully denounced as 'irrelevant'). I hate so much as thinking about casinos, Teamsters, cocaine, construction firms, since these all invariably carry with them a further thought of the mafioso who makes them his business. I hate hearing imitations of Sicilian bosses doing their schtick (threatening to kill people in a funny accent), which are almost always imitations of Christopher Walken doing imitations of Sicilian bosses.

Most of all I hate it when earnest students of mine invoke omertà as an example of a moral code, as having a laudable principle at its core even if in its application it leads to regrettable consequences. Each time this comes up I think to myself: don't students read The Stranger anymore? Or do the 'classics' that inform their moral reasoning extend back only as far as The Godfather and Scarface (I admit I made it through the first of these, but only as a Coppola completist; I have never seen a single episode of the Sopranos, and the earliest memory I have of being repulsed by the whimsical representation of organized crime was Wise Guys, the horrid Brian de Palma film of 1986 starring Billy Crystal and Danny De Vito). I would greatly prefer to engage in a discussion about morality with a student contemplating the possibility of random, lone, unprovoked murder, than with one who thinks unquestioning group loyalty represents any sort of moral accomplishment at all. Omertà is for stunted cretins, I want to say, now get that Godfather poster off your dorm-room wall and start reading some Camus or some Nietzsche.

There was another big mafia hit in Montreal this week, as a major parrain montréalais was gunned down in his own home. Predictably the female enablers of the clan showed up in the newspapers looking indignant, flashing gold crosses around their necks, talking on cellphones in front of their bloated pre-fab mansions. Why anyone would find this culture worthy of glorification in TV and movies is truly beyond my comprehension (the TV romances portray these women as victims of fate, as born into it and thus unable to do anything about it; but they damn well can do something about it: they can run away, they can choose to construct their lives autonomously). I am unable to understand, but not at all because I have no appreciation for the power of violence in art and myth. I am right there with Ernst Jünger when he describes the sublimity of trench warfare, and I am no stranger to Gothic tales of torture and bloodsucking either. But these have to do with transgression against ordinary morality, whereas organized crime is about the redoubling of the very most ordinary morality: it's patriotism for people too small-minded and provincial to think about loyalty to the nation.

And this brings me to my real point. I mentioned recently that one of the concerns that often holds me back from publicly identifying myself as an anarchist is this: although I would very much like to see nation-states wither away, I am generally concerned that bands of thugs would move right into the vacuum of state power. But recently I've been wondering whether such bands are not rather the product --or, better, a by-product-- of the existence of more legitimate systems of rule with relatively more legitimate claims to a right to exercise coercive violence. We tend to think of organizations like the mafia as operating against the state, but what if they are in fact operating in imitation of the state, as a sort of trickle-down, derivative reflection in folk culture of a modus operandi that is exemplified par excellence by the state?

It's true that mobsters and warlords tend to thrive most where states function least. But this fact does not necessarily mean that human beings only ever have a choice between states and thugs. It seems to me that it's at least possible --and I'm sure there is plenty of scholarship both empirical and theoretical pertaining to this suggestion, about which less dilletantish students of politics might be able to inform me-- that the thriving of state-like violence cartels within certain states is a sort of jockeying for power in which the under-performing state is one of the players, not the eternal enemy and opposite of the sub-state players.

Would sub-state violence continue in a vacuum of state power? One thing we know is that there is a fairly tight connection between modes of production on the one hand, forms of social organization on the other, and, finally, characteristic expressions of communal violence on the third hand. Hunter-gatherer societies had no standing armies, and engaged in no wars of expansion; their 'wars' were limited to cyclical revenge-based raids on neighboring groups. Wars of expansion began with pastoralism; as many scholars have noted, the current ethnic make-up of Eurasia was determined by nothing more heroic than the cattle-rustling campaigns of steppe dwellers. Standing, professional armies only came with the rise of states, and the idea that a soldier should be a 'citizen' of the state for which he fights, rather than a mercenary, is a very recent development, and likely not a permanent one. 

State violence develops in a continuous line out of clan-based violence as sociocultural complexity increases. The state does better and at a larger scale what tribal raiders and mafiosi seek to do at a smaller scale. Such groups would indeed probably keep doing this in the absence of state power, but I see no obvious reason why the absence of state power should be a particular boon for mobsters and warlords who are currently limited in their exercise of violence by pesky law-enforcement efforts. At present, we have mafia violence and state violence. Whatever we may learn from science and history about human nature, and about the sinister designs that groups of humans spontaneously come up with, it remains a fact that states are vastly more violent than sub-state actors like the mafia that they are officially charged with keeping in check. It is unlikely that thuggish violence would disappear in the absence of states (just as early cattle rustlers did not need state support in order to settle a continent), but in the present situation states do set a fairly high standard of coerciveness for mobsters and thugs to emulate.

Anyone who has seen the special paramilitary stations in Rome dedicated to 'antimafia' operations, with the word 'antimafia' carved into thick stone columns outside their gates, cannot help but notice that there is a certain structural pas de deux going on here, that the two sides need each other and legitimate each other. One also cannot help but think that any state that would think to immortalize its antimafia activity in marble columns is a pretty crappy excuse for a state: a state that permanently acknowledges the reality of sub-state violence cartels in its midst, and in this way sets itself up as merely one center of coercion among others. How much healthier is the state that has no need for such institutions! And how much healthier, to push this thought to the limit, is the 'state' that has no need for coercion of any sort.

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I'm With the Hunter-Gatherers

(From CounterPunch)

A while back I was told that the workers in some slaughterhouse in Kansas were all laid off when management decided to close up shop and decamp to other parts. My reaction was: Well, finally some good news! Only after a few seconds of awkwardness did I realize that the proper reaction was one of somber bemoaning of the state of the economy, the absence of job security in our precarious age, etc. But honestly, if it comes down to minimizing the disgrace of the factory-farming industry versus preserving the jobs of slaughterers, I know where I stand, and it is not with the working class. From my point of view, the dignity of animal lives trumps the need for human jobs as an absolute good to be fought for, and to be preferred wherever the two are in conflict with one another. The same goes, and even more so, for any conflict between the interests of indigenous peoples and the interests of any other constituency, of any class, that encroaches upon them.

It often seems as if the Left is still stuck in a moment of the not too distant past in which it made sense to glorify a certain kind of labor (of a certain species)-- namely, industrial labor. This is a kind of labor that was new in the 19th century, and that inspired many statues and public murals in the early-to-mid-20th century. It is the kind of labor that gave rise to the labor movement, and to all of that movement's laudable gains. For a while, it seemed like such a world-changing form of life that many people took it to be one of only two social classes that mattered, and a good portion of the world was consequently transformed on the presumption that it was the historical destiny of this class to govern the affairs of all men.

But rather than simply assuming that all varieties of industrial --or, somewhat more broadly, of blue-collar-- labor are worthy of equal valorization simply in view of the class membership of the laborer, I would much prefer a perspective on labor that takes into consideration what is being labored towards. And where the telos is indefensible, I would rather not feel obligated to defend labor simply because it is labor. After all, is it not a gross perversion of the laudable aims that brought labor unions into existence to see employees of the American prison industry gaining job security for themselves through collective bargaining? Can anyone honestly say that a victory for prison guards in a state like California --where 27 times more money is spent on juvenile detainees in the criminal justice system than on students in the public school system-- is a victory for oppressed peoples?

The industrial proletariat and other blue-collar laborers, I mean to say, have no particular grip on my sense of justice, when right alongside them --frequently as a condition of their thriving-- we find millions of disenfranchised prisoners, and billions of domesticated animals, all of whose lives consist in unmitigated suffering from beginning to end. Moving from the American to the global context, we find labor --the labor of blue-collar oil industry workers, logging-industry workers, miners, ranch-hands, and so on-- coming up against the interests of people who have never yet had so much as the opportunity to enter the working class. They've never worked at all! They are the people Marx thought were beyond the pale of history, the people who can't even be cast as extras in the grand play of class conflict. Again, here, I know which side I'm on.

There is nothing worse for members of pre-labor communities, particularly indigenous and nomadic peoples, than to be forced by dint of circumstance into a social world that recognizes only the working class and the various gradations of the upper class: management, ownership, and so on. Forced to enter a social world that recognizes only these distinctions, they of course come in at the sub-basement level, and they are despised for being so unable to get their acts together that they can't even make it as common laborers.

They are the drunk Inuit on the streets of Montreal, the Roma in France, the Indian slum-dwellers in urban Mexico. With their hand-me-down Salvation Army clothing, their knock-off sports garb and vestimentary advertisements for products and wrestlers they likely know nothing about, these people can easily appear as very poor representatives of the working class, as low-end proletariat.

But this is an illusion: in fact, where they come from a class designation like this means nothing, and they only get assimilated to the lowest of the lower class of the class-stratified society because they have to be placed somewhere or other, and clearly are not going to be permitted to be absorbed directly into, say, the middle-management class. A homeless, alcoholic, urban Inuit sports some of the symbols beloved of members of the working class, but these symbols are no more accurate a measure of his class background than a knock-off Versailles fountain in a Jersey Shore suburb is a reliable indicator of aristocracy. They are not Lumpenproletariat, or sorry excuses for workers, but something entirely different. In fact, they are frequently the first to be harmed by the promotion of the interests of those with gainful employment. It is my belief that these are the people most in need of protection and of defense, and indeed glorification in the old sense that once caused statues to be commissioned, both because they are themselves the most exposed and defenseless, and also because they offer a valuable model for the construction of a society beyond the boring and plainly inadequate choice between the glorification of factory workers and the glorification of bankers.

When revolutionary ideology was extended to parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, that lacked an industrial proletariat, the role of the peasantry in revolutionary change was correspondingly elevated in order to compensate for the absence of one of the members of the desired 'worker-peasant alliance'. But from Romania to Cambodia the fundamental precondition of transforming the peasantry into a usefully revolutionary class was that they be fully sedentarized, counted, registered, and in various other ways made 'legible', to use James C. Scott's felicitous term, by the state. Revolutionary ideology has, then, generally held up the industrial worker as the key player in social transformation, but has dipped down where necessary to have the peasantry play the transformative role, while stipulating conditions on how the peasants must first themselves be transformed in order to be ready to do this. No revolutionary thinker has ever contended that there is a transformative force to be harnessed in the form of social life of entirely nomadic and document-less pastoralists, let alone the social life of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Curiously, while Marx thought the final stage of history would amount to a sort of return to humanity's initial state ('primitive communism'), Marx and his successors never supposed that our own era's 'primitive communists' had any place in the transformations about to take place. You can't be an agent of history, the presumption went, if your form of life places you outside of history altogether.

I believe that much of the ongoing neglect of indigenous rights throughout the world has to do with a widespread perception among people at all points on the political spectrum, inherited from the Enlightenment view of history accepted by Marx and many others, that people who are not (at least) workers cannot be significant actors in the making of history and in the modeling of society. But there are many things we now know, in the age of ecological crisis, that remained occluded from the view of high Enlightenment thinkers. For one thing, we know that there is far too much work being done in the world. There is in fact very little labor that does not chip away at the delicate balance of the ecosystem, as anyone who has tried to secure an environmentally friendly mutual fund can affirm.

It seems odd, given this brute fact, to continue supposing that labor can show the way forward for world history. Under the circumstances, it seems that it is precisely the people who have managed to stay outside of history, in a certain admirable sense, who should be held up, if not as a vanguard of active transformation of the world, at least as an exemplar of how others might transform themselves. Indigenous peoples then --the ones without papers, without fixed addresses, and most importantly without jobs-- need to be defended not only because they are the most vulnerable members of our global society, and not only because we owe it to them, but also because they provide a possible model for how to get out of the dismal situation we've created for ourselves with all this hard work and history-making.

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For further reading:

Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London, 1974.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 2009.

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, 1982.

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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