quotes from Two Cheer for Anarchism, Two and Three
A collection of quotes from sections Two and Three
of Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott
from Fragment 10 (The Anarchist's Sworn Enemy)
In their place stands everywhere a single vernacular: the North Atlantic nation-state, codified in the eighteenth century and masquerading as a universal. It is, if we run bac several hundred yards and open our eyes in wonder, nothing short of amazing that one can travel anywhere in the world and encounter virtually the same institutional order: a national flag, a national anthem, national theaters, national orchestras, heads of state, a parliament (real or fictitious), a central bank, a league table of similar ministries similarly organized, a security apparatus, and so on.
The powerful agencies of homogenization, however, are not so discriminating. They have tended to replace virtually all vernaculars with what they represent as universal, but let us recall again that in most cases it is a North Atlantic cross-dressed vernacular masquerading as a universal. The result is a massive diminution in cultural, political, and economic diversity, a massive homogenization in languages, cultures, property systems, political forms, and above all modes of sensibility and the life-worlds that sustain them.
from Fragment 12 (It's Ignorance, Stupid! Uncertainty and Adaptability)
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. Adaptability and breadth serve as a personal and institutional insurance policy in the face of an uncertain environment.
If workers refuse to conform to the discipline of the work plan they can, by their own acts, nullify its efficiency.
from Fragment 13 (GHP: The Gross Human Product)
Nevertheless, were we scoring assembly-line work by the degree to which is served to enlarge human capacities and skills, it would receive failing grades, no matter how efficient it was at producing cars. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor, asked the essential question: "What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins."
How ironic it is that I, who write this, and virtually anyone who reads it, are the benfeciaries, the victors, of this rat race. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw in a Yale toilet stall. Someone had written, "Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat!" Below, in a different hand, someone else had risposted, "Yeah, but you're a winner."
from Fragment 15 (Pathologies of the Institutional Life)
The implications of a life lived largely in subservience for the quality of citizenship in a democracy are also ominous. Is it reasonable to expect someone whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has acquired the habits of survival and self-preservation in such settings to suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking, risk-taking model of individual sovereignty?
And more broadly, do the cumulative effects of life within the patriarchal family, the state, and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists.
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