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June 25 - June 27, 2018
Americans need only recall the scene of the federalized National Guard leading black children to school through a menacing crowd of angry whites in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to realize that the state can, in some circumstances, play an emancipatory role.
The conditions under which such possibilities are occasionally realized, I believe, occur only when massive extra-institutional disruption from below threatens the whole political edifice.
There is no authentic freedom where huge differences make voluntary agreements or exchanges nothing more than legalized plunder.
Cumulative inequalities in access to political influence via sheer economic muscle, huge (statelike) oligopolies, media control, campaign contributions, the shaping of legislation (right down to designated loopholes), redistricting, access to legal knowledge, and the like have allowed elections and legislation to serve largely to amplify existing inequalities.
Democratic institutions have, to a great extent, become commodities themselves, offered up for auction to the highest bidder.
Organizations, contrary to the usual view, do not generally precipitate protest movements. In fact, it is more nearly correct to say that protest movements precipitate organizations, which in turn usually attempt to tame protest and turn it into institutional channels.
Episodes of structural change, therefore, tend to occur only when massive, noninstitutionalized disruption in the form of riots, attacks on property, unruly demonstrations, theft, arson, and open defiance threatens established institutions.
Massive disruption and defiance can, under some conditions, lead directly to authoritarianism or fascism rather than reform or revolution. That is always the danger, but it is nonetheless true that extra-institutional protest seems a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for major progressive structural change such as the New Deal or civil rights.
By infrapolitics I have in mind such acts as foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight.
The large-mesh net political scientists and most historians use to troll for political activity utterly misses the fact that most subordinate classes have historically not had the luxury of open political organization. That has not prevented them from working
Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people.
the experience of anarchistic mutuality is ubiquitous.
whether the existence, power, and reach of the state over the past several centuries have sapped the independent, self-organizing power of individuals and small communities.
the formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on
a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create and which, in fact, it undermines.
the neoliberal celebration of the individual maximizer over society, of individual freehold property over common property,
all encourage habits of social calculation that smack of social Darwinism.
two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.
It is curiously akin both to state routines and to left-wing authoritarianism in treating the nonelite public and “masses” as ciphers of their socioeconomic characteristics,
What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.
Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organization, escapes notice.
More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.
Representative institutions and elections by themselves, sadly, seem rarely to bring about major changes in the absence of the force majeure afforded by, say, an economic depression or international war.
the contribution of lawbreaking and disruption to democratic political change.
the Great Depression of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. What is most striking about each, from this perspective, is the vital role massive disruption and threats to public order played in the process of reform.
20 percent of the wealth and income distribution. The trick, he added, to keeping this scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially at election time, the next 30 to 35 percent of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20 percent. The relative success of this scheme can be judged by the persistence of income inequality—and its recent sharpening—over more than a half century.
The fact that democratic progress and renewal appear instead to depend vitally on major episodes of extra-institutional disorder is massively in contradiction to the promise of democracy as the institutionalization of peaceful change.
In its immanent logic, Fordist production and the McDonald’s module is, as E. F. Schumacher noted in 1973, “an offensive against the unpredictability, unpunctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man.”
They aimed at a forest that was easy to inspect, could be felled at a given time, and would produce a uniform log from a standardized tree (the Normalbaum).
At least as important, they are not merely producing crops; they are reproducing farmers and communities with plant-breeding skills, flexible strategies, ecological knowledge, and considerable self-confidence and autonomy.
The main purpose of extension work, then, to retrofit the entire environment of the farmer’s field so as to realize the potential of the new genotype.
This logic of modeling and miniaturization as a characteristic of official forms of order is, I think, diagnostic.
The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist, informal processes that the formal order cannot alone create and maintain.
The larger the repertoire of skills a worker has and the greater her capacity to add to that repertoire, the more adaptive she is likely to be to an unpredictable task environment and, by extension, the more adaptable an institution composed of such adaptable individuals is likely to be.
What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people.
The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one “hand” could be easily substituted for another. It depended, in other words, on what we might legitimately call the “stupidification” of the workforce.
Chespening, seven cheap things
almost all forms of small property have the means to elude the state’s control:
the state has nearly always been the implacable enemy of mobile peoples—Gypsies, pastoralists, itinerant traders, shifting cultivators, migrating laborers—as their activities are opaque and mobile, flying below the state’s radar.
The large bureaucratic organizations that characterize the modern era may be originally modeled on the monastery and the barracks, but they are essentially a product of the last two and a half centuries.
Modern agribusiness has, almost diabolically, managed to exploit the desire for small property and autonomy to its own advantage. The practice of contract farming in poultry-raising is a diagnostic example.
Whatever else they may have missed about the human condition, the anarchists’ belief in the drive for the dignity and autonomy of small property was a perceptive reading of the popular imaginary.
From these facts one may conclude that the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of classes over whom the wave of progress is about to roll.
Jane Jacobs
“eyes on the street,”
the alienation that high-stakes, test-driven education encourages threatens to give millions of youngsters a lifelong vaccination against school learning altogether.
the audit was successful but the patient died.
The mistakes made by a revolutionary workers movement are immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of any party.
Cost-benefit analysis,
Porter attributes the adoption of audit systems of this kind in the United States to a “lack of trust in bureaucratic elites” and suggests that the United States “relies on rules to control the exercise of official judgment to a greater extent than any other industrialized democracy.”
Contrary to their self-image as a nation of rugged individualists, Americans are among the most normalized and monitored people in the world.
