Zones of Escape

Welcome to my newsletter. I don’t know how often I am going to do these and I have no real objective. I hope you enjoy.

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Recently I’ve been reading The Art of Not being Governed by James C Scott, which is about two different types of social and political formation in Asia over the past couple of thousand years: valley peoples, which he associates with the large centralised state, large scale staple grain cultivation, and crucially, class society; versus hill or mountain peoples, which are described as smaller, non-state, more or less self-governing, and not involved in large scale agricultural production.

He argues that most prior histories of hill societies are written from the perspective of the ‘civilised’ valley peoples, and tend to judge hill societies as atavistic remnants, people living ‘the way valley peoples used to live’ before they gained the knowledge of class society and wet rice cultivation. The book is an attempt to recognise these prior histories as the self-serving narratives of various states, which describe hill peoples as ignorant and backwards rather than what they really are: people with full knowledge of what life is like as a state subject, who have consciously fled from it.

On this interpretation, moving to live at higher elevations (as well as other non-valley terrains like marshes and jungles etc) is simply a way of evading state control. The relationship between hill peoples and valley peoples, rather than being ‘progressive’ from non-state living to state subjection, is one of constant population exchange over thousands of years. Valley kingdoms were successful based on how many people they could entice or coerce into their large grain production apparatuses, which produced a big surplus that could be easily assessed and appropriated by agents of the ruler. But these early states were not very durable, and not very practised at what we would now call human resources management. They relied on various forms of unfree labour, and couldn’t always generate enough carrots or sticks to keep their subjects hanging around. There were frequent collapses and crises, which would cause large numbers of people to simply down tools and fuck off into the hills for a few generations, where they would form smaller societies whose cultural and cultivation practices were intentionally chosen to resist incorporation into any local kingdoms.

This argument will be familiar to anyone who has read the work of Pierre Clastres, whom Scott cites frequently. Clastres’ 1974 book Society Against the State says (more or less) the same thing about the relationship between states and Amazonian tribes in South America: that non-state societies do not inhabit ‘difficult’ terrain because they are not aware of the benefits of living in large civilisations, but because that terrain is a zone of escape from harsh conditions of state subjection. Both ancient and modern state societies refuse to recognise this dynamic because it undermines their own legitimation ideologies. Why would anyone want to escape from the state, asks the state itself. Well…. ok. The conflict of interest here is pretty obvious, and you can see echoes of it everywhere, especially in colonial states like Australia, which is ever resistant to the idea that Indigenous peoples might have had a pretty good thing going before white people arrived.

Scott is at pains to say that this dynamic has become less and less actual since the rise of mature capitalism, which has colonised pretty much the entire Earth at this point. The remaining pockets of resistance to state subjection are very small, and grow smaller every year, if not through direct coercion then through the wholesale destruction of former zones of escape . States, almost tautologically, are technologies of population management, and over the last few millennia they have become extremely good at doing it, to the point where there are basically no external zones of escape any more. Wherever you go, there you find capitalism.

Reading this book, as well as Clastres’ work and the work of his other intellectual descendants, has been a pretty depressing experience for me. Humans have been trying to escape from class society since it first came into being. Of course this is a straightforwardly Marxist point: ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’, and so on and so on. But it’s one thing to go ‘yeah that sounds right’ and quite another to really understand just how long this has been going on, and the lengths to which people have gone to escape. My lack of intimate knowledge of this, and my only recent apprehension of the full tragey of the situation, is of course a consequence of my own social position: I’m the descendant of white colonisers, and grew up in a society whose fundamental ideologies energetically repress and deny histories that do not support the idea of a progressively unfolding enlightenment. That this knowledge comes to me by way of Marxism and academic anthropology is also no coincidence.

Over the last four or five years I’ve found myself really drawn to this kind of intellectual work, probably because I am not very happy under class society either. I don’t mean to compare my cushy position to recently colonised populations, or to people who suffered so badly under early states that they left behind those lives to start new ones in the hills. Just that there is a reason I am open to it: I find it ‘highly relatable’, as the kids say these days.

Another reason I find the ‘external zones of escape’ argument so compelling is that I am very interested in the types of escape that are produced in my own society, mature first world capitalism. For years I have been more or less obsessed with the products that capitalist society sells to people to help them cope with their lives as workers. I am thinking here of ‘pop culture’ and fandom culture in the first instance, which provide a lot of subjective emotional and psychological benefits as well as an edifice through which there is some minimum commonality for people to relate to each other. You can see a sort of early attempt to grapple with my feelings about the escapes offered to us in this blog post I wrote a couple of years ago.

Because capitalism has no external zones of escape any more, it has to fashion its own internal ones. These commodities are a tacit acknowledgement that life under capitalism is, to varying degrees, unbearable: it is alienating, meaningless, coercive, materially insecure. But if there is one thing capitalism excels at, it is recuperation, or the process of deterritorialisation and reteritorrialisation, if you are a Deleuzean, which I am not really.

Class society is the destruction of self-determination, the insertion of the human community as a moving part in a big machine dedicated to maintaining the power of the ruling classes. But humans still, stubbornly, have social and emotional needs that capitalism is not really set up to meet, so after it destroys the ways humans invented to meet those needs, it has to offer some kind of simulation or substitute for them. It has to provide ways of meeting those needs so we don’t all kill ourselves.

Arch doomer Camatte calls this process domestication, and it’s an evocative metaphor: domesticated animals do not live for themselves; they live for their masters. Whatever standard of living they have is only instrumental to the project of keeping them happy enough to continue producing and reproducing the products they are bred for. Of course humans are conscious in a way that animals are not; class struggle under capitalism is the process of negotiation and re-negotiation between the working classes and the ruling classes of what constitutes the bare minimum for workers to keep on working. The withdrawal of labour power is, broadly speaking, the only check on the misery levels that the capitalist class is permitted to inflict on the global working class.

But capitalism is very clever at the project of pacification. As society has become more and more atomised, there has been an explosion in both the quality and quantity of subjective escapes that are offered to us. Unlike early state subjects, we cannot simply leave and start a new life; we have to keep living this life. You can go and read Debord or Baudrillard or Adorno for different takes on the cultural and political apparatus that capitalism has built internal to itself that keeps us chugging along without going too insane. (Although current levels of insanity suggest even this extraordinary deployment of resources is not really working properly.)

I have probably written enough for today. Usually in my writing I have to think of a snappy tie-up ending because editors really like those, but I am the editor now and I don’t care. Peace out.