Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play

by James C. Scott

The last strand of anarchist thought I definitely wish to distance myself from is the sort of libertarianism that tolerates (or even encourages) great differences in wealth, property, and status. Freedom and (small “d”) democracy are, in conditions of rampant inequality, a cruel sham as Bakunin understood. There is no authentic freedom where huge differences make voluntary agreements or exchanges nothing more than legalized plunder.

For a market fundamentalist, selling a child is, after all, a voluntary choice, and therefore an act of freedom, the terms of which are valid (pacta sunt servanda). The logic, of course, is monstrous. It is the coercive structure of the situation in this case that impels people into such catastrophic choices.

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.

In many cases these forms of de facto self-help flourish and are sustained by deeply held collective opinions about conscription, unjust wars, and rights to land and nature that cannot safely be ventured openly. And yet the accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts can have massive effects on warfare, land rights, taxes, and property relations.

Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people. Only occasionally do they embody implicit or explicit opposition to state law and institutions. Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization, let alone hierarchy. In other words, the experience of anarchistic mutuality is ubiquitous.

I am suggesting that 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.

It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh against the pressure of their scolding. Striding out boldly into the intersection with apparent conviction made a more striking impression, perhaps, but it required more courage than I could normally muster.

You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.

Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous.

Thus, desertion is a lower-risk alternative to mutiny, squatting a lower-risk alternative to a land invasion, poaching a lower-risk alternative to the open assertion of rights to timber, game, or fish. For most of the world’s population today, and most assuredly for subaltern classes historically, such techniques have represented the only quotidian form of politics available.

The job of trade unions, parties, and even radical social movements is precisely to institutionalize unruly protest and anger. Their function is, one might say, to try to translate anger, frustration, and pain into a coherent political program that can be the basis of policy making and legislation. They are the transmission belt between an unruly public and rule-making elites. The implicit assumption is that if they do their jobs well, not only will they be able to fashion political demands that are, in principle, digestible by legislative institutions, they will, in the process, discipline and regain control of the tumultuous crowds by plausibly representing their interests, or most of them, to the policy makers.

ingrained habits of automatic obedience could lead to a situation that, on reflection, virtually everyone would agree was absurd.

To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessors were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.

One sees in the newspapers photographs of beaming city officials and architects looking down on the successful model as if they were in helicopters, or gods. What is astounding, from a vernacular perspective, is that no one ever experiences the city from that height or angle.

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.

Workers have seized on the inadequacy of the rules to explain how things actually run and have exploited it to their advantage. Thus, the taxi drivers of Paris have, when they were frustrated with the municipal authorities over fees or new regulations, resorted to what is known as a grève de zèle. They would all, by agreement and on cue, suddenly begin to follow all the regulations in the code routier, and, as intended, this would bring traffic in Paris to a grinding halt. Knowing that traffic circulated in Paris only by a practiced and judicious disregard of many regulations, they could, merely by following the rules meticulously, bring it to a standstill.

we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder.

One can look anxiously ahead to a time, not so far away, when the North Atlantic businessman can step off a plane anywhere in the world and find an institutional order—laws, commercial codes, ministries, traffic systems, property forms, land tenure—thoroughly familiar. And why not? The forms are essentially his own. Only the cuisine, the music, the dances, and native costumes will remain exotic and folkloric … and thoroughly commercialized as a commodity as well.

Eventually the line had to be redesigned and slowed to a humane pace. For our purposes, what is crucial here is that the resistance by the workforce to its inhuman speed actually made the design inefficient. There is no such thing as labor efficiency in neoclassical economics that does not implicitly assume conditions that the workforce will accept and tolerate. If workers refuse to conform to the discipline of the work plan they can, by their own acts, nullify its efficiency.

It was deliberately designed to eliminate the artisanal-craft knowledge, and the power this knowledge conferred on workers, that characterized the carriage-making era. The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one “hand” could be easily substituted for another.

the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that’s the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative “net democratic product.”

The great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. This tendency has only been exacerbated by the push in recent decades for standardization, measurement, testing, and accountability. The resulting incentives for students, teachers, principals, and whole school districts have had the effect of bending all efforts toward fashioning a standard product that satisfies the criteria the auditors have established.

Those of us who “won” this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out. And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of a system that values such a narrow bandwidth of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?

Under the most severe forms of “institutionalization” (the term itself is diagnostic), such as prisons, asylums for the mentally ill, orphanages, workhouses for the poor, concentration camps, and old-age homes, there arises a personality disorder sometimes called “institutional neurosis.” It is a direct result of long-term institutionalization itself. Those suffering from it are apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in their surroundings, make no plans, and lack spontaneity. Because they are cooperative and give no trouble, such institutional subjects may be seen by those in charge in a favorable light, as they adapt well to institutional routines.

The question I want to pose is this: Are the authoritarian and hierarchical characteristics of most contemporary life-world institutions—the family, the school, the factory, the office, the worksite—such that they produce a mild form of institutional neurosis?

the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world’s population.

The petite bourgeoisie, by contrast, are neither fish nor fowl; they are mostly poor but they are poor capitalists. They may, from time to time, ally with the Left, but they are fair-weather friends; their allegiance is fundamentally unreliable as they have a foot in both camps and desire themselves to become large capitalists.

As a general rule, states of virtually all descriptions have always favored units of production from which it is easier to appropriate grain and taxes. For this reason, 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. For much the same reason states have preferred agribusiness, collective farms, plantations, and state marketing boards over smallholder agriculture and petty trade. They have preferred large corporations, banks, and business conglomerates to smaller-scale trade and industry.

I suspect that the tremendous desire one can find in many societies for a piece of land, one’s own house, one’s own shop owes a great deal not only to the real margin of independent action, autonomy, and security it confers but also to the dignity, standing, and honor associated with small property in the eyes of the state and of one’s neighbors.

Over the past several decades, standard opinion polls in the United States have asked industrial workers what kind of work they would prefer to factory work.7 An astonishingly high percentage pines to open a shop or a restaurant or to farm. The unifying theme of these dreams is the freedom from close supervision and autonomy of the working day that, in their mind, more than compensates for the long hours and risks of such small businesses. Most, of course, never act on this wish, but its tenacity as a fantasy is indicative of its power.

What is perverse about this system is that it preserves a simulacrum of independence and autonomy while emptying out virtually all of its substantive content. The subcontractor is an independent landowner (and mortgage owner), but his workday and movements are nearly as choreographed as those of the assembly-line worker. There is no one immediately breathing down his neck, but if the contract is not renewed, he is stuck with a mortgage as large as his shed. The agribusiness in effect transfers the risks of landownership, of capital on credit, and of managing a large workforce—a workforce that would demand benefits—while reaping most of the advantages of close supervision, standardization, and quality control that the modern factory was originally designed to achieve. And it works! The desire to hold on to the last shred of dignity as an independent property owner is so powerful that the “farmer” is willing to forfeit most of its meaning.

The officials of the French absolutist kings sought to tax their subjects’ houses according to size. They seized on the brilliant device of counting the windows and doors of a dwelling. At the beginning of the exercise, the number of windows and doors was a nearly perfect proxy for the size of a house. Over the next two centuries, however, the “window and door tax,” as it was called, impelled people to reconstruct and rebuild houses so as to minimize the number of apertures and thereby reduce the tax. One imagines generations of French choking in their poorly ventilated “tax shelters.” What started out as a valid measure became an invalid measure.

In the meantime, our political life is impoverished. The hold of the SAT convinces many middle-class whites that affirmative action is a stark choice between objective merit, on the one hand, and rank favoritism on the other. We are deprived of a public dialogue about how educational opportunity ought to be allocated in a democratic and plural society. We are deprived of a debate about what qualities we might want in our elites, individually in our schools, insofar as curricula simply echo the tunnel vision of the SAT.

Beneath this appearance, of course, cost-benefit analysis is deeply political. Its politics are buried deep in the techniques of calculation: in what to measure in the first place, in how to measure it, in what scale to use, in conventions of “discounting” and “commensuration,” in how observations are translated into numerical values, and in how these numerical values are used in decision making. While fending off charges of bias or favoritism, such techniques—and here is a second paradox—succeed brilliantly in entrenching a political agenda at the level of procedures and conventions of calculation that is doubly opaque and inaccessible.

They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public—while excluding that public from the debate—that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely making transparent technical calculations. They are, today, the hallmark of a neoliberal political order in which the techniques of neoclassical economics have, in the name of scientific calculation and objectivity, come to replace other forms of reasoning.

Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels as a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.