John Protevi's Blog

Crisis and State Marginality

(Opening disclaimer: I'm a rank amateur with regard to the sociology of squatting I mention below, but am going to be working on it, so I may come back to this note later in either shame or relief at my good luck in guessing at things.)

The preamble to the June 14-15 ENS colloquium "Margins of Europe: Borders Now" asks us to consider the margins of Europe in both geographical and social senses. The geographical sense would be national borders and the attempt to regulate flows of immigrants and refugees, and the social sense would be the manner in which national governments manage their populations by distinguishing citizens and non-citizens, and, within the latter class, the criteria for and treatment of those who are documented or undocumented residents.

I'd like to show here, by considering the work of James C Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Against the Grain (2017), that Europe's current struggles with its marginalities are examples of practices that are constitutive of the state as social form.

First, let us note that Scott, like Pierre Clastres (1989; 1994), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and others, reject any notion that the state evolves from pre-state conditions; rather, they insist, states are born by "capture," the violent imposition of the state form (taxes, obligatory labor, and rent on land) on non-state peoples. The state is then one social form among others, not the telos of sociality.

Such capture, however, provokes flight or marronage[1]. The first maroon societies are thus contemporaneous with the first states; as soon as there were states, people "ran for the hills." However, those fleeing the state could rarely simply ignore states, and would sometimes wish to return either to settle down, or to trade with the state. In fact, non-state people came to be necessary to states as supplying both non-human (raw materials) and human (enslaved people) commodities.

Thus, flight, while it is in one sense a mere consequence of capture, is in another sense co-constitutive of states; without those who flee, the state would have no one to trade with and would have to attempt raw material resource extraction itself. But this would dangerously stretch the power of the state to extract taxes, labor, and rent in its core. Much better then to manage the margins of the state qua geographical border.

At the same time as states dealt with those on their geographical borders, internal population management by means of "social marginality," was instantly set up, as states were in constant need of importing new members whose differences in political status (free vs slave; urban vs rural; and so on) needed to be regulated.

Overall, Scott's (2017) analyses of the first states fit Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) "Urstaat" thesis of the necessity of assembling state forms all at once in a mutually constitutive functioning unit: taxation, including the special apparatus of collectors, assessors, accountants; work gangs for agriculture or monumental architecture; scribes and their record-keeping apparatus; military specialists; standardized weights and measures (Sibertin-Blanc 2013; 2016; Smith 2018). These mutually constituting functions of the state are themselves as a whole in constant negotiations with their geographical and social margins with non-state peoples.[2]

Scott talks of the relation of state and non-state peoples as "symbionts" or "dark twins," a situation which sometimes produced a sort of shared sovereignty (or sharing of appropriated surplus), in which state and non-state peoples are competing for ability to extract surplus from captive primary production populations (2017, 243). Non-state control of trade routes enabled them to trade with states, and also to extort "taxation" of state-traders via "tolls" to allow passage, and piracy as predation on state trading. Non-state people did not always flee or repel the state; sometime they conquered it and become the new ruling class, and at other times they become mercenaries of state armies (250-251).

Scott ends Against the Grain by noting that while the "Golden Age" of non-state peoples lasted a long time, enslavement of other non-state people and sale of military service to states ultimately tipped the scales in favor of states, which now dominate the globe to a much greater extent than ever before (255-56). In the periphery, surveillance with GIS and drones; force projection with helicopters, and brutality with automatic weapons, can keep peasantry in line, and keep nonstate people confined to margins and ineffective in resisting resource extraction when desired.

Moving now to consider social marginality, contemporary biopolitical and neoliberal state administration can keep internal population management going in the core: the middle and working classes that are registered, tracked, and managed, some with full disciplinary force, others with the more "dividualizing" practices of "control" via databases and so on (Deleuze 1992).

In both these ways, then, the purely geographical and the "control" management of populations, fleeing the state by seeking territorial marginality is compromised to the point that for a full picture of marronage, we must make the turn to social marginality, and the ways non-documented people, or those dissatisfied citizens, go about trying to live as squatters, as inhabitants of "no go zones," as those who "go off the grid," and other forms of evading state rule within state territories.

For reasons of limited space and professional training, I won't continue except to ask that we consider one last turn of the screw. Scott agrees with Deleuze and Guattari on the need to conceptually separate the primary or originary violence of statification as capture and enslavement of non-state peoples, and the ordinary, everyday, or secondary violence of policing, tax collection, and labor coercion, which repeat and reinforce the originary violence by which tax and labor become obligations and attempts to evade them and / or to appropriate surplus by private means become criminalized.

Might it not be the case however, that in "no go zones" that non-state actors, often seen as "criminal gangs" by the state, engage in a sort of "shared sovereignty" by which they compete with states for appropriation of surplus ("protection" rather than taxes being a form of regularizing plunder, hence requiring punishment of those even gangs consider free-lancers infringing on "their people") and, sometimes, for provision of services (food handouts, housing via squatting or camping, and so on) from the marginal populations that states show little interest in managing other than by intermittent raids for deportation and camp dismantling purposes?

It’s an ambiguous situation, of course, as some (or indeed many) sans-papiers on the margins do indeed want to be recognized and documented. But I think that’s because they see that as the only way to a secure and stable life, given the way states render people on their (geographical and socials) margins precarious. But as precarity for the documented populations in the core grows, the difference in quality of life shrinks, and some documented folks themselves look for ways to avoid state capture by squatting and so on. I’m not an expert here by any means on squatting, but it does seem to be a positive, sought-after marginality.

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REFERENCES

Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society Against the State. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books.

Clastres, Pierre. 1994. Archaeology of Violence. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. Postscript on Societies of Control. October, vol. 59: 3-7.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Protevi, John. 2015. Economies of Violence. http://www.protevi.com/john/ECONOMIES-28-March-2015.pdf

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume. 2013. Politique et Etat chez Deleuze et Guattari. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

-----. State and Politics. New York: Semiotexte, 2016

Smith, Daniel. 2018. 7000BC: Apparatus of Capture. In Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey Bell, and James Williams, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 223-241.

 

[1] Here Scott disagrees with Thomas Nail, who reads early state marronage as expulsion rather than flight.

[2] None of this is to deny an economy of violence among non-state peoples (Protevi 2015), including 1) fighting against state agents; 2) internal state-preventing violence (capital punishment as "reverse dominance hierarchy" practices); and 3) predation on state economies in a) targeting trade routes for robbery or extortion of tolls, in b) raids which steal from the produce of valley agricultural producers, and c) enslavement practices, in which other hill peoples, or the valley population is itself the target, a commodity to be sold to competing states (Scott 2017: 219-256).

Lecture notes on James C Scott, Against the Grain

PDF file here:  Download Notes on Scott Against the Grain

Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's multiplicity

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Scott describes a multiplicity with topographical / transport-technological, political-economic, political-organizational, administrative, and violence elements. A multiplicity is a set of interacting processes in which thresholds in the relations of processes produce qualitative changes in the behavior of the system.

For Scott, “state” and “non-state” processes are in “dialectical” or “mutually constituting” relations. The “state” processes (enclosure, enslavement, taxing …) here are orienting limits, with classic, colonial, and post-colonial states with varying capacities to approach the limits and maintain / reproduce those gains. The “non-state” processes (flight, nomadicism, raiding …) also admit of degrees, with well-administered states in times of economic growth sometimes attracting non-state peoples to settle down. States and non-states exchange (at different rates at different times) people, customs, and goods across the “membrane” that frontiers provide, all mediated by smugglers, traders, brokers, peddlers, and so on.

However, the whole analysis is governed by the “last enclosure” thesis whereby post-WW2 “distance-destroying technologies” (roads / cars / ATVs; planes / helicopters / drones; electronic communications) are severely encroaching upon ability to live a self-governing or non-state life. However, again (something Scott underplays), climate change could quite possibly throw a spanner in the works and allow more leeway for non-state living.

I. Topographical / transport-technological (“friction of terrain”)

1. State spaces: valleys and rivers / oceans
   1. military enforcement
   2. administrative “visibility”
   3. economic integration limited by cost per unit weight across distance:
      1. much easier by water
      2. by land, human / animal power constrained by its need for fuel, which it also had to carry with it
2. Non-state spaces:
   1. hills / mountains (in this book)
   2. but generalizable to any zone where state reach is hampered: jungles, deserts, marshes, and so on.

II. Political economy (production)

1. state
   1. coerced by state: sedentary river valley rice agriculture is legible, taxable / appropriateable, and the population is conscriptable into army or into corvée labor
      1. slavery
         1. capture of hill people by raiding
         2. debt bondage
      2. share-cropping
      3. corvée labor for infrastructure and / or monuments
   2. however,
      1. Scott rejects Wittfogel: states did not build irrigation, but took over historical, slow, accretions of it
      2. similarly, you can have terraced rice cultivation in hills and wet-rice w/o states or states w/o wet rice (64-65)
   3. tolerated / encouraged by state
      1. independent urban artisanal production
      2. temple / palace luxury goods (also by trade / gift)
      3. products for trade with hill peoples
         1. fish and other foods unavailable in the hills
         2. manufactured goods (e.g., metal tools and weapons)
2. non-state production
   1. food production / consumption
      1. swidden agriculture / horticulture
      2. nomadic steppe pastoralism
      3. nomadic foraging
   2. trade with states (sale, barter, debt payment, tribute [106])
      1. by land (high density / high value
         1. plants: medicinals / spices (opium, pepper)
         2. animals: birds, feathers, honey
         3. minerals: jewels 
      2. by water (can be bulkier)
         1. timber
         2. cattle
         3. animal products (e.g., furs)
         4. hill agriculture (yams, rice, etc)
      3. slaves

III. Political organization

1. state
   1. concentrated manpower (64)
      1. for agriculture
      2. for military
         1. to squeeze peasants
         2. to hold geographically important positions to collect tolls on trade
         3. but concentration allows famines / epidemics
   2. central command authority with radiating subordinates
   3. military specialization / conscription
   4. taxes
      1. land rents based on “visible” agricultural productivity
      2. tolls / taxes commercial transactions
   5. corvée labor

2. non-state “shatter zones”
   1. egalitarian / acephalic bands
   2. chiefdoms
   3. temporary alliances

IV. Ethnic / kinship / linguistic structures

1. state systems:
   1. need ease of incorporation in order to concentrate populations, even if we see use of ethnicity for stratification
   2. once incorporated, we see tendency to uniformity, fixity, religious orthodoxy (155)
2. non-state peoples: multiple / flexible kinship (“ethnogenesis”)
   1. ethnicity: varying declared identities depending who was asking
      1. p 254: “identities are plural … and systematically structured by relations of power and prestige … a bandwidth of traits or identities that could be deployed or performed as the situation required…. Ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited”
      2. nonetheless with states providing constraints
   2. tribes:
      1. often state creations for administration
      2. can become a self-identity for political purposes
   3. kinship:
      1. ease of incorporation of immigrants, captives, in-marrying
      2. ease of creating fictitious lineages to legitimate new aristos
   4. languages: hill peoples tend to multi-lingualism

V. Regimes of violence

1. state
   1. primary violence of statification warfare:
      1. territorial incorporation
      2. population enslavement and resettlement
   2. secondary violence:
      1. tax terrorization
      2. enforcement of conscription and corvée labor
2. non-state
   1. anti-state fighting (state avoiding)
   2. internal state-preventing violence (exile, "capital punishment")
   3. predation on state economies
      1. trade routes
      2. raids:
         1. stealing from produce of valley agricultural slaves
         2. slave-raiding (population is targeted commodity)

Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's dialectical method

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

PRINCIPLES OF ANALYSIS

I will rearrange the order of presentation in the Preface to emphasize some connections of principles. Under each of the three main headings there is a dialectic of escape and living free that is a theoretical mirror of the historical process being examined: first, a critical interpretation of state thought (escape) and then a positive project of examining the practices of self-governing peoples (living free).

ANTI-STATE-CENTRISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE DENIGRATION OF THE OTHER: “My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘raw,’ the ‘primitive.’ On close inspection, those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end—in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese” (Preface, p x-xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT: WRITING THE HISTORY OF NON-STATE PEOPLES AS THE COMPLEMENT OF STATE-CENTERED HISTORY (the original and implicit affirmative universal “all history is that of the state” has to be changed to an explicit pair of particulars “not all history is that of the state” and “some history is that of non-state peoples”): “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE PROGRESSIVISM: From a state perspective, “self-governing peoples” are “living ancestors,” a glimpse of pre-agricultural, pre-civilized life. Here is a politics of anthropology, a way that progressivism or evolutionism is put to work, legitimating incorporation of non-state peoples to allow them access to modernity. Scott argues, on the contrary, “hill people are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare” (Preface, p ix).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING “PRIMITIVISM” AS ANTI-STATE CHOICE: “the argument reverses much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’ generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a ‘secondary adaptation,’ a kind of ‘self-barbarization’ adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-DETERMINISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF ECOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM, OR, PUTTING THE POLITICS INTO “POLITICAL ECONOMY”: “Usually, forms of subsistence and kinship are taken as given, as ecologically and culturally determined. By analyzing various forms of cultivation, particular crops, certain social structures, and physical mobility patterns for their escape value, I treat such givens as political choices” (Preface, p xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING ANTI-STATE PRACTICES: “physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structures, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders all serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them” (Preface, p x).