John Protevi's Blog

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)

Dave Zirin on leaked documents on losing but profitable baseball teams which still demand public subsidies for stadiums

Read it here

Also, check out Field of Schemes.com for continuing coverage.

Tales of the Neoliberal University, vol. 4352

The same day LSU officials discussed gloom-and-doom budget and layoff scenarios, the LSU Board of Supervisors on Friday approved a bevy of pay raises, most within the athletic department.

via www.2theadvocate.com

The athletic program is able to enter the university sports market niche (part of the overall sports market, distinguished from the professional niche only by the ability to deny wages to the athletes*) by means of the LSU brand name, which has been built over the years by the staff and professors at LSU. Using that brand name, they can generate revenue directly from the public.**

This is the future for all university units, from research centers through academic departments: generate your own funds using the university brand name. The administration then becomes the franchising agent for each unit, allowing it access to the brand name in exchange for a percentage of the revenue.

Notes:
* Yes, yes, the athletes receive tuition and housing, etc. But let's be realistic.
** A good accountant would be able to show how much the athletic program benefits from public infrastructure, starting with Tiger Stadium.

You stay classy, Dan Gilbert, billionaire owner of Quicken Loans, and Cleveland's vox populi

Dan Gilbert is trying to moralize a business decision, that is, capitalize on the desperation of the Cleveland community via their emotional commitment to a sports figure. That's bad for Cleveland and it's bad for sports, though I didn't see him complaining when that love for James increased the value of the franchise that Saint Dan Gilbert bought (after James was on board mind you) by hundreds of millions of dollars. He can cry me a river. You stay classy, Dan Gilbert.

What this comes down to is a billionaire financial whiz posing as the vox populi. A break, please give me. What do the people of Cleveland deserve? Relief from decades of de-industrialization in the form of good schools, good health care, good housing, good libraries, good parks, good jobs, etc. They also deserve people to see through Dan Gilbert's trying to speak for "the community" and to examine closely the role that the financialization of the US economy played in the destruction of Cleveland. Owner of Quicken Loans cares about the Cleveland community? He's made billions on refinancing of mortgages which was a major means by which the vast majority of people whose wages stagnated over the last thirty years (see "de-industrializaton" above) have cashed out the equity in their houses. I say Dan Gilbert and his financializing vampire industry can KMRIA, and he can do it twice for trying to speak for "the community" from whose wage stagnation he's benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Toward a Global Autonomous University: Campaign against Debt

We, students, teachers, migrant and precarious workers, call for a debt abolition network to organize a global day of action against student debt.

We struggle everyday in movements all around the world against the privatization of the university, the precaritization of work, the new enclosures of our knowledges and for the reappropriation of our commonwealth.

We have identified debt as a primary component in all of these struggles.

Debt is the main instrument of enclosure of our social wealth: education, knowledge, access to healthy food, housing and healthcare. In nearly every aspect of our lives, the access to credit is necessary in order to live our lives.

Debt is a fundamental political question because it is a key component of control of our lives and bodies. This control is exercised as blackmail on an individual level as well as generalized social exploitation on a large scale.

Debt has been used as a management strategy to separate, divide and maintain supremacy over individuals, communities, countries and even entire continents for over 30 years.

Debt is a necessary parasitical function of financial capitalism today. Without continued lending and deeper debt, capital cannot continue to function. The current economic crisis exemplifies this principle.

Debt is therefore an inequitable system that produces profits for the financial industry at the expense of our education and our lives.

Read the rest of the statement and follow some great links here at www.edu-factory.org.

Oil attacks wetlands, birds

A sea of orange, reddish oil from a sunken rig flowed into Coup Abel Pass and Barataria Pass — two routes southwest of Barataria Bay that oil can take into the interior of Louisiana’s marshes — on Sunday.

Located west of Grand Isle, a handful of modified shrimp boats tried to collect the oil with absorbent boom, but the sheer amount of it seemed daunting.

“They waited too long to close the passes,” said Joel Bradberry, member of the Grand Isle Fire Department.

Read the article here

Heartbreaking photo of oil-covered pelican here. If you're not from Louisiana, you don't know the emotional attachment we have to the pelican, the state symbol. They are amazing, beautiful beasts. The picture is terrible. 

BP are criminals, vandals. Shame too on the US government for its cravenly letting BP stay in charge. Boycott BP! Pressure Washington! 

Middlesex Marketing and Consulting Expenses skyrocket in 2009

UPDATE: Sunday 9 May, 5:15 pm CDT: much more is at stake in the Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign than just philosophy at one London university. Administrators all over the world are watching this situation and will have to think twice about such moves in the face of the international resistance the MDX admin is receiving. So please take part by writing a letter to the MDX Board: the program you save may be your own!

UPDATE Sunday 9 May, 3:00 pm CDT: Please see my Open Letter to the MDX Board. Please consider writing one of your own to the Board as well as to the administrators. 

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More interesting facts from the Middlesex 2009 financial statement, available here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/Finan_stat_08_09.pdf (see page 32) we find the following trends in the period from 2008 to 2009: 

Expenditures for "marketing related costs" went from 1,679,000 pounds to 2,209,000 pounds

Expenditures for "consultants and professional advisors" went from 2,321,000 pounds to 3,122,000.

Yes, that's right. The year before Middlesex administrators closed the philosophy department, the admin authorized some 5.3 million pounds for marketing and consultants. They spent 3.1 million pounds on consultants alone.

How much did the consultants who recommended closing the philosophy department charge? Or did the admin come up with that on their own? 

How much less could they have spent on consultants to be able to retain the philosophy department? 

Regarding the previous post, how much of the increase in admin pay would be needed to retain the philosophy department? 

UPDATE, Friday 7 May, 2:20 pm CDT: useful links: 

Save Middlesex Philosophy website: http://savemdxphil.wordpress.com/

Petition site: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.html

Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119102561449990

UPDATE, Saturday 8 May, 11:00 pm CDT:

Statements in support of Middlesex philosophy by the APA and by SPEP

Cancel Haiti's debt now!

Now is the time to put pressure on the IMF to cancel Haiti's debt, much of which is based on loans stolen by the Duvalier regimes. Please visit Jubilee USA or another debt cancellation campaign and do what you can: http://www.jubileeusa.org/

Notes on Mirowski, "Defining Neoliberalism"

Notes on Mirowski, "Defining Neoliberalism" uploaded to: http://www.protevi.com/john/research.html

"Haiti and Human Nature" talk and time line

Have uploaded two new pieces to my research page at www.protevi.com: the pdf version of a PowerPoint on "Haiti and Human Nature" as well as a time line of events in Haitian history.

Shock Doctrine in Louisiana

The big example, of course, is New Orleans after Katrina (see especially the destruction of the teacher's union), but you can't overlook the destruction of the Stelly Plan as setting the stage for the current self-created budget "crisis." I was glad to see the Baton Rouge Advocate recognize this in their Sunday 6 December 2009 editorial: 

Recent tax changes, including recklessly large reductions in the income tax, have helped to create the budget crisis that so many officeholders decry despite their own major contributions to its existence.

Open Left:: California's higher education crisis: "Shock Doctrine" in action

As I argued back during the stimulus debate, the failure to use federal dollars to help close state budget gaps was a terrible mistake.  First off, every dollar taken out of state spending roughly offsets the stimulative effect of every dollar spent by the Federal government--meaning that until you've closed the state budget gaps (either actually or virtually), every dollar of stimulus spending accomplishes roughly nothing.  I say "roughly," because the stimulative effect of spending a dollar can very tremendously, as shown in this chart from a Feb 4 diary:

via www.openleft.com

Putting the UC situation in the context of the state-fed relation in re the stimulus. Note the comment here (#15), who adds a caveat to Samuels: http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1370/: "One thing I wish he’d do though is be more careful with numbers. He has this calculation of what undergraduate education costs (the basis for his claims that undergraduate fees “subsidize research” etc.) that is just way off, assuming that buildings are free, that staff is free, that administrators (and yes, there’s way too many but clearly we couldn’t function with zero) work only for themselves."

But he also adds: "Re-reading my comment I realize it is dominated by criticism, when I in fact agree with most things Bob says in that interview. So let me make clear, I do agree in fact with most things he says in that interview!"

Elinor Ostrom wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Here's the story from CNN. Here's the Prize committee's background paper. I made some notes last year for my Evolution and Biology of Morality course on one of Ostrom's papers, "Policies that crowd out reciprocity."