Two Cheers for Anarchism by James Scott

​A very good book by a great thinker. Scott makes the case for "an anarchist's squint"--he claims that this lens reveals unique insights on "popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state." I'm not sure how far Scott's commitment extends beyond this; he recognizes the ultimate necessity of the state to guarantee "relative equality." He presents his case through a series of fragment-essays.

This book is also a great introduction to his oeuvre. The fragments touch on the key concepts he presents in his other books.

Unsurprisingly, the most important unit of analysis in Scott's anarchist lens is the individual. Scott begins with his idea of "anarchist calisthenics," which describes minor infringements against the law to prepare for the day when one will "be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality."

These small acts of disobedience ("everyday forms of resistance"), once emulated and multiplied, can change the course of history (although these micro-events hardly register in official documents)--in his view, foot dragging, desertion, draft evasion "may well have been decisive" in the Confederacy's defeat during the American civil war.

Small acts of disobedience are a temperature check on general levels of discontent among the populace. When levels of discontent reach boiling points, there is open rebellion. Scott takes a decisively oppositional view to the liberal consensus on non-violent protests. In his view, acephalous, chaotic, violent, and unorganized forms of protest lead to the greatest structural transformations--a very timely insight, given the George Floyd protests. These manifestations of public discontent cannot be bargained with and appeased, and force elites to act. Trade unions, left-wing parties, the vanguard of the proletariat--these are reactionary and "parasitic" institutions that funnel the unadulterated anger of the masses into a language that the elite can understand.

Scott valorizes vernacular knowledge and practices, which are in contrast to the state's way of seeing and knowing. Vernacular knowledge and practices are rooted in localities and are "illegible" ("legibility" is one of my favorite concepts by Scott) to the synoptic, bird's-eye view of the state. The state's way of seeing (and knowing) is abstract, rational, and standardized; local conditions disappear in computerized modelling tools used by state planners. The vulnerability of these models are exposed once they are translated into real world conditions. While vernacular farming practices are the result of centuries of innovation and micro-experimentation with local conditions, factory farming creates one type of crop for a standard model of farming with a set of standard farming practices.

Through the anarchist's squint, the story of the past two centuries has been a story of the a wholesale extinction of vernacular ways of seeing and knowing and vernacular practices. Local practices of governance are replaced by the model of the nation-state, and mutually unintellible dialects are dying and are being replaced with the national dialect. Whole worlds of meaning and seeing and knowing are replaced by the English language. The vernacular may only exist in museums in the future, a dessicated and mummified artefact that is preserved under the watchful and scientific eye of the official regime.

Scott recognizes that the anarchist's vision of the individual does not exist apriori to societal structures, and he is concerned about the individuals that are being produced through modern institutions. Modern institutions (e.g. the school, the workplace, etc.) are hierarchical and autocratic, and are motivated by neo-classical concepts of efficiency. These institutions create a standardized product with "institutional neurosis," where those who suffer from it are "apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in their surroundings..." The modern individual is also produced in the image of the neo-classical homo economicus. To this Scott asks this provocative question: "To what degree have the growing reach of the state and the assumptions behind action in a liberal economy actually produced the asocial egoists that Hobbes thought Leviathan was designed to tame?" In place of GDP Scott proposes another measurement: the Gross Human Product (GHP). This measurement would determine "how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills" and how "workers themselves [judge] ... their satisfaction."

Throughout the book, I sensed a common affinity between Scott's narrative and the logic of neo-classical economics. I might not have read him closely enough, but Scott seems to suggest that politics is motivated by individual interest; small acts of disobedience are inversely correlated with adverse political-economic conditions (e.g. the harder it is to feed yourself and your family, the more you will commit small transgressions), until the perfect form of civil protest occurs--the headless and uncoordinated mob. In ECO100 level theory, the market works in a similar manner, and it is motivated by individual interest. Higher prices of commodity x are inversely correlated with levels of demand (or something like that, it has been a long time since ECO100).

I write this because of Scott's exaltation of the much malaligned petty bourgeois. (I can't help but think of Maupassant!) As he writes, "A society dominated by smallholders and shopkeepers comes closer to equality and to popular ownership of the means of production than any economic system yet devised." It also comes closest to the ideal, neo-classical state of perfect competition, where the market is conpletely composed of small, individual entrepreneurs, and there are no market inefficiencies. This is as far as this observation goes--I just found it the connection interesting. Scott explicitly distances himself from libertarianism in the introduction; I do not wish to mislead anyone.

All in all, a very good book. Three cheers for James Scott.

---