Printed Matter runs annual art book fairs in New York City and Los Angeles and I sometimes go to the New York one. For those unfamiliar, Printed Matter is a long-running artist bookshop in Manhattan and is a fantastic space for folks interested in a myriad of international, often below-the-radar, artist projects. I get there once every couple of months and the constant rotation of titles along with various exhibits and talks make it a consistently worthwhile trip.

I find the art book fairs less exciting though. It may be the nature of these kinds of events where there’s a ton of people, not a lot of space, and an unbelievable amount of stuff for sale, sometimes from counter-cultures and movements I personally experienced/participated in at what feels like outrageous prices. Sometimes it’s the grouchy and entitled people who make it difficult – like the woman who snapped at a Printed Matter worker not scanning her ticket quick enough this year while (almost) no one in line said anything, or, last year, the guy who almost punched me in the face after he stormed out of the space, smashing past me, huffing and puffing about who knows what. It may also be that I’ve never felt much comfort with “art” as such and have been inspired more by the anti-art work of Henry Flynt, the art strike effort of decades past, and the brilliant writing of Gustav Metzger. There was some of that kind of thinking present at the art book fair, but not a lot. For those inclined and able, though, one could spend over a thousand dollars for a poster from the Anti-University in London.

That said, the folks at Printed Matter who put the fair together do a truly heroic job and the workers are incredibly patient throughout the day with a lot of people. And a lot of great artists and publishers and second hand sellers (and some not so great) put a lot of time and attention into their tables, and there is a geographical diversity that is really neat. Finally, this year had many tables that drew attention to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which was really solid.

My main interest in attending this year’s fair was the one-room exhibit on the Detroit Printing Co-Op put together by Danielle Aubert and based on her remarkable book The Detroit Printing Co-Op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing (we briefly mentioned that work in the past, here). The exhibit on the Detroit Printing Co-Op, which has taken place at least a couple of other times in other parts of the US, was in a very large room at the fair, which was held at MoMA PS1 in the (almost unbelievably, at least to me), gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens.

The Detroit Printing Co-Op grew from and was immersed in the radical struggles of the 60s and 70s and printed many important works, including the anarchist and situationist journal Black and Red, many issues of Radical America, and the first English translation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. I am mainly making this post for people who cannot get to the exhibit and might otherwise be interested so they can see what it was like. Photos below.

Selma James and Filomena Daddario’s 1953 pamphlet A Woman’s Place has a somewhat classic status in Marxist and feminist literature. The pamphlet was written by Selma James and Daddario’s name was also added for the publication. It was first published by Correspondence in 1953 and was republished in James and Dalla Costa’s pamphlet, published by Falling Wall Press, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which has been reissued by various left and feminist presses over the years. The pamphlet was reissued by Friends of Facing Reality Publications in 1970. To our knowledge, however, aside from the Correspondence and FFR editions, this is the only other standalone edition of A Woman’s Place.

A Woman’s Place is both a product of its time and also a pamphlet that has continued to be relevant year over year. Perhaps the most clear limitation of the piece is its heteronormative framing, where all women are framed as straight and all couples as heterosexual couples. That said, at the time of publication the piece was a groundbreaking analysis of the intersecting roles of marriage, the housewife, and the nuclear family in post-war capitalism. True to its roots in the Correspondence group, the essay flows from both James’ own experience and what she heard speaking with other women. There are themes of everyday resistance, self-organization, and autonomy throughout.

In a 2012 interview on Democracy Now!, James gave the basic history of how the pamphlet came to be:

Nello is, of course, CLR James.

In her recently-published monograph on Wages for Housework, historian Emily Callaci provides more context and detail about the origins of the essay. We quote at length here for those who do not have the book but are interested in this history (also we recommend buying the book).

Callaci then quotes James giving the ‘shoebox story’ that she also gave in the Democracy Now! interview quoted above, but goes on to note that “Years later, she concluded that he likely invented the “shoebox method” on the spot, to encourage her to trust her instincts” (pp. 10-11). Callaci continues,

Little information is available about Filomena Daddario but Calacci notes that she was “a young Italian-American woman from Queens who loved jazz.” and also a participant in the Correspondence group.

In the instant edition of the pamphlet, the publisher used Selma James’ legal name while keeping Daddario’s pseudonym as ‘Ellen Santori.’ The reason for the pseudonyms in the original is explained in the Falling Wall press pamphlet cited above. Specifically:

The publication of the pamphlet by Nameless Anarchist Group is a bit peculiar in that James is not typically associated with anarchists. In their edition of the pamphlet the publishers introduce it with an explanation that clarifies their purpose for printing it:

There is very little information available about Nameless Anarchist Group. They were based in Ypsilanti, Michigan and an affiliate member of the Anarchist Communist Federation of North America. Andy Cornell makes no reference to them in his critical work Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century. The instant pamphlet is the sole publication identified with the group in OCLC and Archive.org only locates mentions of them from issues of the ACF’s paper North American Anarchist. In issues of NAA they are listed as, for a time, the group behind the federation’s internal bulletin. By rules of the ACF affiliation structure, there would have been at least 3 members. And they were a participant in the national Reagan for Shah effort in the early 1980s. One of their members’ name was Charlie. Aside from that, and their contact info (which could be a fruitful lead with access to more locally-based resources in Ypsilanti than we have), there is no other info online (note: if you were involved in this group or know more about them please reach out!)

The pamphlet is really very stunning. It’s beautifully printed on a brown cardstock paper with illustrations throughout. The last pages include contact information and, on the back cover, a drawing of Emma Goldman (presumably lifted from elsewhere) and a quote from her 1911 piece “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation.”

The full quote from the Goldman essay is: “The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul.”

This 1979 edition of A Woman’s Place is surprisingly rare, perhaps even more so than the 1953 or 1970 editions. OCLC locates two holdings (NYU and Labadie at Michigan).

There’s been a bunch of solid publications coming out of late and I wanted to highlight a couple of them that may be of interest to readers of this blog and that I picked up over the past month or so.

SWAC Attacks! – Fifth Issue.

During a trip to Montreal this past weekend I stopped at Bibliotheque DIRA, the incredible activist archive space upstairs from Libraire L’Insoumise, Montreal’s anarchist bookstore that I cannot recommend enough. While at DIRA, one of the extremely kind folks there handed me a copy of the SWAC journal.

The Comite Autonome du Travail du Sexe / Sex Workers Autonomous Committee (SWAC) has published five issues of their annual journal and the fifth issue (and likely the others, I haven’t read them yet) has a ton of really important info on the experiences of sex workers in Montreal. Specifically, the issue includes a militant inquiry into massage parlors based on interviews with more than a dozen workers. There is also an inquiry into working conditions in Montreal’s strip clubs based on interviews with three workers.

Also of significant interest to readers of this blog is the illuminating interview with Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of Reproduction among other works.

Folks interested in reading the journal can find a PDF of it online at SWAC’s website – here.

Revolutionary Health and Health for the Revolution – Fourth Issue

Revolutionary Health and Health for the Revolution (RHHR) is a large-form newspaper. The background of it, from their first issue: “Influenced by the Midnight Notes collective, by the struggle against work, payment, money, colonization, sexuality as a work from the feminist perspective, and the ongoing Zapatista struggle against the neoliberal world, we decided to bring into attention these important perspectives that are forgotten or neglected in our political realities.”

I first encountered RHHR when I picked up a copy of their third issue at last year’s anarchist bookfair here in NYC. I found a copy of this issue at P.I.T. in Brooklyn.

The journal includes a number of pieces by George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici and others (including Federici’s piece ‘Capitalist Development and the War on Reproduction, Palestine, and Beyond’ (originally published in The Commoner). Caffentzis’s timely (and unfinished) piece “Trump and Money: From Status to Contract and From Contract to Deal,” even in unfinished form is provocative and worth reading. There are multiple other pieces, most reprinted, in the journal from other writers as well. For folks interested in reading this issue or the other issues of RHHR, PDF’s are available on their website here.

Short 4-page pamphlet against work issued by “Workers Against Work for Social Warfare.” Apparently a one-off of this group (or individual) who do not seem to have published otherwise under the moniker. OCLC states that it was published in 1980 which seems reasonable given this paragraph:

“When we demand the abolition of wage-slavery, we are only using theoretical terms to express a movement that is already materializing before our very eyes, in wild-cat strikes, or riots, when American factory workers foul up assembly lines, and Polish workers loot state stores, when the effort is justified by passion, when wage earners disobey the mummies that govern them.”

For an anti-work pamphlet it is perhaps more reliant on orthodox Marxism than is often found in these kinds of writings (e.g. “This movement is not a product of chance or a surprising historical coincidence. It’s the point of development of the productive forces at which the order of the day is the refusal of work […] Historical possibilities, trapped within the commodity-economy, are preparing the ground for the last revolution: the result will be an international proletarian struggle against wage-slavery and all those who defend it.”)

The pamphlet is a mishmash of the situ-inspired anarchism that increasingly circulated in the 1970s and early 1980s, along with the more orthodox Marxism noted above. There is a somewhat anomalous embrace of technology as liberatory that was less common in some of this anarchism (e.g. “There is no reason in the world that today, human activity should be confined to working. The solution to the problem is certainly not a return to a more primitive life. On the contrary, fantastic developments have taken place in knowledge and technology; the solution lies in their utilization”). It’s a bit theoretically confused, perhaps, but the anger is real, and it comes through.

We located almost nothing about the authors, so if you know background info please write! The address in the pamphlet for correspondence is Room 37 at 200 w. 72nd Street. That building was razed earlier this century, but in the 1970s it was home to offices of Amnesty International and some solidarity groups, though not that specific room.

OCLC locates a couple of holdings. We couldn’t find a full scan online so uploaded it to Libcom, here.

This is the French translation of Wildcat: Dodge Truck June 1974 written by Millard Berry, Ralph Franklin, Alan Franklin, Cathy Kauflin, Marilyn Werbe, Richard Wieske, and Peter Werbe. The booklet, according to the 30-year retrospective piece, was “written and produced by several of the people who became the core of the Fifth Estate collective the next year when it was transformed into an overtly council communist, and then, anarchist publication.” The initial pamphlet was printed via the Detroit Print Co-Op distributed by Black and Red (Lorraine and Fredy Perlman’s publishing project). The photos throughout – which are universally stunning – were taken by Millard Berry.

In the late 1990s when I first got involved in anarchist politics, the English version of pamphlet was common to find in any given infoshop, but nowadays this seems less common (in no small part because there are fewer explicitly anarchist infoshops than there were decades ago).

Wildcat is a reflection on a worker wildcat strike in June 1974 (hence the title), but is also a very concise strategic analysis of working class power from an autonomous and, at points, situationist-influenced lens. The wildcat took place in context of increasing militant actions at auto plants in Detroit, and in context of widespread militancy in the the first half of the 1970s.

There are many useful observations in the essay, but in re-reading it I was struck by the very insightful observations about the role of groups associated with the New Communist Movement (NCM) particularly the Revolutionary Union. In an increasingly well-known story, hundreds and probably thousands of Leninist and Maoist militants moved into traditional working class positions during the 1970s in order to move the class toward more militant confrontations. This pamphlet offers a reflection in which the Leninist model of organizing conflicted with the revolt against work by workers themselves in an auto plant in the midwest US during the early 1970s. The essay reflects on the strategy of wildcat walkouts versus taking over and holding the shop floor during strikes: “In addition, by holding the production process hostage, the natural organization and informal communication networks are still intact. One of the most significant advantages to resistance inside the factory is that it leaves the workers on the inside and the company, union, or any others seeking to destroy or dominate the struggle for their own ends, on the outside, where they all belong.”

The French edition of the pamphlet was published a couple of years after the English edition by Echanges et Mouvement. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with Echanges – it was started in 1975 by militants associated with Solidarity (UK), Informations et Correspondance Ouvrieres (FR), Daad en Gedachte (NL), and the Belgium group who published Liasions. Henri Simon, who recently passed away, carried on its work for decades. The French edition mirrors the English edition almost page for page but (obviously) with French text instead of English text.

Activists in France have scanned a PDF of the French edition, here. The booklet is rare – I’ve seen only one copy for sale in recent years. OCLC locates one copy of the Echanges edition and four copies of the Echanges edition as distributed by Spartacus.

George Caffentzis turned 80 years old today. P.I.T. in Brooklyn hosted a gathering to celebrate his and Monty Neill’s birthdays, and to release George’s first book of poetry, At the End of Everything, published by Common Notions press. The book is small at just about eighty pages and collects poems George has written throughout the course of his life, from his adolescence through 2024 (the book notes that his first poem, “Futile Phantasy,” was published in his high school literary journal in 1961).

I can’t recall the first time I met or spoke with George. Like many others, I first encountered the work of Midnight Notes Collective – which George co-founded, along with Monty Neill and John Willshire-Carrera – as a participant in the counter-globalization movement of the late 1990s. Either from their collection Midnight Oil or from Harry Cleaver’s foundational book Reading Capital Politically, I sought out the essays in the first issue of Zerowork (which, at that time, were not available online if memory serves). In that first issue George had published an essay entitled “Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in Crisis.” I think I was trying to grasp the workerist conceptualization of the crisis of Keynesianism and failing to square a piece of data in that essay with a related datapoint in one of the essays in the Trilateral Commission’s The Crisis of Democracy book. I sent George a note to see if he could help me understand it (in retrospect this was really quite presumptuous!) George, ever generous with his intellect and time, kindly looked through the essay that he had written decades earlier and walked me through his take. Many times after that, George would offer his perspective and encouragement, as he has to countless other younger activists. I know I am not alone in holding his brilliant essay “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse” – which is, regrettably, still timely – to be one of the most stunning and insightful analyses of the “energy crisis,” the refusal of work, and the political economy of capitalist “apocalypse.” Over the past couple of decades, whenever I have sought to try and understand developments in capitalism or contemporary social struggles I have looked for George’s writings, and I have learned tremendously from his razor sharp readings of Marx and analyses of class composition.

The celebration of the publication of George’s book of poetry and his birthday was a beautiful, warm, and deeply caring event. Though I knew some of the people there, there were many more I didn’t now, and the space was packed, which was quite wonderful and certainly fitting. Silvia Federici (the leading feminist and Marxist theorist, and George’s partner of many decades) carried the event from beginning to end, reading many of the poems in the book and explaining their context, and she was joined by readings from Monty Neill, Malav Kanuga (who gave a beautiful statement before reading a poem), and by George himself. George has struggled with illness in recent years, and it was an honor to listen to him and also to hear Silvia read and discuss so many of his poems. Their love and care for one another is truly something to behold (and is the subject of some of the poems in the book).

Silvia began the readings with her poem “To the Cube Steak,” named after a long-closed diner in Park Slope run by George’s father and uncles. George then gave some introductory remarks and went on to read three of his poems: “A spider in my show” (1969), “Experience of Paradise” (2024), and “Dragonflies” (1977).

Below is video of his remarks and George’s reading:

Monty (Neill) read George’s poem “Pilgrimage to a Transvestite Saint” (I couldn’t capture it) and Malav (Kanuga) also read a poem that I, unfortunately, couldn’t capture. Silvia read George’s poem “Poem for Sol Yurick,” referring to friend and comrade (as well as famed novelist and former NYC social services worker) Sol Yurick. Here is Silvia reading that poem:

Here is Silvia reading George’s 2014 poem entitled “Poem for Joe Grange.” Grange was a philosophy professor at University of Southern Maine (where George taught for many years) and close friend of George’s:

The last video for this post is Silvia’s reading of George’s poems “Buenaventura” (2016) and “Guatemala City at Easter-time” (2018) with introductory remarks:

Readers of this blog may appreciate George’s poem “The End of Zerowork,” which is a personal and poetic take take on what by all accounts was a very emotionally exhausting and difficult political break.

There are many other poems in this little book and if you’re interested in grabbing a copy you can order one from the publisher here. I’ve gone through it once tonight and have dog-eared more than a dozen poems I plan to go back to this week.

Given the current political nightmare we all find ourselves in, joining comrades to spend a couple of hours celebrating George’s 80th birthday and listen to his poems read out loud was quite a gift.

The 1984 calendar published by Left Bank Books in Seattle (still there!) is, to our knowledge, the only calendar the collective produced. The reference is, of course, to Orwell’s classic text. This calendar is very much a product of the aesthetics of American anarchism of the period where situationist-inspired, typically detourned images make-up each page preceding the day-by-day breakdown of January through December. These kinds of images were often found in the pages of Fifth Estate in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the work of Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous (John Zerzan and Dan Todd’s prolific grouping) etc. Later, this kind of artwork would become massively popular through work of Gran Fury, Adbusters, and eventually the billions of memes that populate social media.

None of the images are credited but some of familiar to us and perhaps easily identified by readers of this blog.

There is a long history of anarchist and radical calendars and it’s not clear whether the authors of this calendar used earlier radical calendars to fill the dates up. The back cover mentions a handful of sources:

Some of the choices are, if nothing else, humorous. For example, something as significant as the indictments of the Vancouver 5 in 1983 is given as much space as the 1951 birth of Bob Black. On January 9th, 1905 the french anarchist Louise Michel “unlives” (others also “unlive” throughout the calendar). Generally speaking the editorial choices in what the authors’ highlight on a given day hold up.

The calendar is rare with only a single institutional holding showing at OCLC (at Labadie) but shows up for sale from time to time. For interested readers a picture of each month from the calendar is below.

According to a Tweet by Columbia University Historian Karl Jacoby, James C. Scott has passed away. His is a major loss in so many ways.

Scott’s opus is stunning in breadth and quantity. Readers of this blog are very likely familiar with his books Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990). These two volumes gave a very helpful vocabulary for everyday forms of “self-activity” (ala Rawick) and struggle, and under the radar power struggles that, contrary to tendencies that poo-poo struggles without flags, have very significant impacts. Scott’s work influenced countless scholars and activists; his theories of everyday resistance and “infrapolitics” took on particularly brilliant interpretations, in this writer’s view, in books like Robin D.G. Kelley’s indispensable volume Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1996). Scott was author of many other books, with perhaps his work The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (2009) functioning as a sort of magnum opus.

In 2010 a dear friend and I who had been very influenced by Scott’s work reached out to him to inquire about doing an interview. We spent the day with Scott at Yale and he was warm, kind, and generous. That interview was published in Upping the Anti #10 and is reproduced below. Scott was a true genius and he offered a great deal for anarchists, autonomists, and researchers to learn from. He gave the world many gifts and he will truly be missed.

Points of Resistance and Departure: An interview with James C. Scott

BENJAMIN HOLTZMAN AND CRAIG HUGHES   /   ISSUE 11 – Upping the Anti (link: here)   /   11/20/2010

James C. Scott is among the foremost experts on the struggles of subaltern people in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology as well as the Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. Scott’s books have included The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia(1977); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance(1987); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts(1992); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Better the Human Condition Have Failed(1999); and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). In this interview, Scott discusses his own political development, elaborates on some of the major contributions of his work, and offers significant insights into understanding the intricacies of recent worldwide struggles. This interview was conducted in New Haven, Connecticut by Benjamin Holtzman and Craig Hughes in July 2010.

Can you discuss your upbringing, particularly with respect to how your earlier years may have contributed to your political beliefs and research interests?

I was sent to a Quaker school and it had a huge impact on me. I don’t think I noticed it at the time. But people in this Quaker school had been conscientious objectors during the Second World War. These people were still alive and kicking. And they had paid a heavy price for their opposition. I’m sure at the time I didn’t agree with them at all. But I was faced with people who would stand up in a crowd of a hundred and be a minority of one. It made a deep impression on me. They made me the kind of person I am, actually. It wasn’t in me to begin with.

The Quakers also had these weeklong work camps in Philadelphia. Those were the days were we would work with a black family for a day or two, repainting their apartment. We went to Moyamensing prison for part of the day. We went to Byberry, the state mental institution. We ate in settlement houses. We went to communist dockworker meetings. We went to mission churches. We went to see Father Devine, a charismatic black leader who fed the homeless.

I grew up in New Jersey, maybe 15 miles from Philadelphia, and the Quakers showed me a part of Philadelphia and its underclass that I never would have seen – that most people didn’t see. They did this without any particular preaching. They also held a weeklong work camp in Washington, DC. And this was in 1955, the height of the Cold War. All the people who had come from little Quaker schools (there probably were about twenty of us) marched into the Soviet Embassy to talk about peace. We were being filmed, by the FBI I presume, from the house across the street. We met with people like the Marxist author William Hinton, who wrote Fanshen,¹and became acquainted with a kind of political fringe internationally. I never would have done this without the Quakers. There was a kind of intrepid bravery: go anywhere, talk to anyone.

The Quaker belief in “the light of god in every man” led them to a social gospel vision that made a big impact on me. My book, Domination and Arts of Resistance is actually dedicated to Moorestown Friends’ School, which was the tiny Quaker school that I attended. I was part of its biggest class in history, which was comprised of 39 people.

Later, my colleague Ed Friedman played a big role in my political education when I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. We were teaching this course on peasant revolution and Ed said, “once the revolution becomes a state, it becomes my enemy.” What’s striking is that every successful progressive revolution has tended to produce a state that’s even more tenacious and oppressive than the one it replaced. The results of revolution make pretty melancholy reading when you consider how they’ve created stronger and more oppressive states.

Long ago, when people would ask, I would always tell them that I was “a crude Marxist” with the emphasis on “crude.” By that, I meant that the first questions I would ask would be about the material base. These questions don’t get you all the way, but you want to start there. When I was working on Weapons of the Weak and beginning to work on Domination and the Arts of Resistance, I would find myself saying something and then, in my mind, I would say to myself, “that sounds like what an anarchist would say.” And it happened with enough frequency I decided that I needed to teach a course on anarchism.

Through the process, I learned a tremendous amount. I also realized the degree to which I took a certain distance from anarchism. A lot of the anarchists believed that the technological advances of science were such that we wouldn’t need politics anymore – that everything could become a matter of administration. Giving a course on anarchism without writing specifically about anarchism helped me figure out where I belonged. Anarchist Fragments, a book I’m working on now, is an effort to refine that a little bit.

How did you become interested in studying what you refer to as the “infrapolitics” of powerless groups?

I had this book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and people used to ask me where I did my fieldwork. I had to tell them that I hadn’t done any. I didn’t do fieldwork. I had done archival work. This was way back in Madison, when I was studying wars of peasant liberation. I had read so many things that I admired but realized that I knew very little about any particular peasantry. So I decided that I wanted to study one peasantry so well that I knew it like the back of my hand. Afterward, whenever I was tempted to make a generalization, I would know enough about a particular peasantry to ask “does it make sense here?”

One of the contributions of Weapons of the Weak was to take things like Gramsci’s idea of hegemony and to try to figure out how it would actually work on the ground in a small community. I’ve never been able to understand abstractions very well unless I could see them operate. So I spent two years in this village. It was completely formative. People were not murdering one another and the militia was not coming in and beating up peasants. Nevertheless, there was this low-level conflict that I didn’t quite know how to make sense of. Although there was a lot of politics going on, it was nothing that someone like the late social movement theorist Charles Tilly would have recognized. There was no banner, there was no formal organization, and there was no social movement in the conventional sense.

It became clear to me that this kind of politics was the politics that most people historically lived. “Infrapolitics” tries to capture what goes on in systems in which people aren’t free to organize openly. This is politics for those that have no other alternatives. It’s no big news to historians, I don’t think. Eric Hobsbawm noted a similar thing in his book Primitive Rebels. But for political scientists who study the formal political system, I thought it ought to be news. In any organization and in any department, this kind of politics is going on all the time. We learn a lot by realizing that politics doesn’t stop once we leave the realm of formal organizations and manifestos.

Prior to Weapons of the Weak, most writing on peasant resistance had focused almost entirely on large-scale, organized protest movements. As you note, however, “subordinate classes … have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity.” You therefore called attention to the “ordinary weapons” used by poor and powerless groups to resist the rich and powerful. What are these “weapons of the weak” and what effects can they have?

Between 1650 and 1850, poaching was the most common crime in England in terms of frequency and in terms of how much it was loathed. However, there was never a banner that said “the woods are ours.” And there were no efforts to reform the crown or curtail aristocratic rights to woodland. Nevertheless, ordinary villagers and peasantry took rabbits, firewood, and fish from this property even though there are all these laws to prevent them. If you stepped back from this and widened the lens even a little bit, you could see that this was a formative struggle over property rights. It was conducted not at the level of Parliament or formal politics but at the level of the everyday.

One of Marx’s earlier essays concerns the theft of wood in the Rhineland. He pointed out how, when employment rates decreased, prosecutions for taking firewood from the crown lands increased. One of the reasons that people have difficulty seeing these acts as a kind of politics is because they’re based on theft. The thief gets to have rabbit stew and it doesn’t look like a collective act of resistance. It looks like “I’d like rabbit stew tonight, thank you very much. I’ll just take my rabbit and run.” But when you put it all together, you realize that – for decades – no one can get villagers to give evidence against one another. No prosecutions are brought because those in power can’t get anyone to testify. Meanwhile, the game wardens are systematically killed or intimidated and frightened.

Even though it’s hard to get all the details, it’s clear that there’s a collective conspiracy of silence, that the whole pattern relies on tacit cooperation and shared norms and values. And so, if it’s just stealing a rabbit, it doesn’t count. But if you can show that there’s a normative belief that prevents aristocrats from calling woods and fish and rabbits their property, and you can establish that these norms enable a corresponding pattern of violating aristocratic claims in the popular culture, then you put your hands on something extremely political that never speaks its name.

The job of peasants is to stay out of the archives. When you find the peasants in the archives, it means that something has gone terribly wrong. Their resistance is more like a desertion than a mutiny, which is a public confrontation with political power. It’s the difference between squatting and a public land invasion with banners. What’s important analytically is that all of this activity is politics and, if we don’t pay attention to the realm of infrapolitics, then we miss how most people struggle over property, work, labour, and their day.

The peasants of the Malaysian village you studied for Weapons of the Weak faced proletarianization and a loss of access to work and income. Nevertheless, as you describe it, there were “no riots, no demonstrations, no arson, no organized social banditry, no open violence,” and no organized political movements. The absence of these conditions seems to confirm many of Gramsci’s conclusions about hegemony. However, by examining what was taking place beneath the surface of village life, your analysis complicates how Gramscians have depicted the capacity of those in power to shape the actions and beliefs of subordinates.

I’ve been accused – with some justice – of misusing the word hegemony. For Gramsci, hegemony requires a kind of liberal political order of citizenship and elections. In contrast, domination applies to the non-democratic political systems. Strictly speaking then, the situation I described in Malaysia is domination, because there wasn’t a parliamentary system in any real sense of the word. What I tried to figure out was how hegemony and domination worked in a situation like that. How did the poor and disadvantaged of the village create a kind of discourse that was not known among the rich, and how did this create a way of talking about things, a set of reputations, and a set of norms about what decent people do? Although there was nothing grandiose about them, these practices served as a sort of criticism of the existing order.

What I try to establish is that there was a kind of community discourse and practice among the village poor that could enable connection to a larger scale social movement. From there, village concerns could connect with other people who shared similar sources of pain and worry and similar values. Even today, there’s a kind of opposition to the ruling party in Malaysia that’s based in just that kind of populist dislike of the Malay landed elites.

Many on the radical Left believe that the working class must be “conscious” in order to struggle successfully. Consequently, their strategies emphasize building “class consciousness.” How do forms of everyday resistance like the ones you’ve described complicate this picture?

In TheMaking of the English Working Class,E.P. Thompson argued that consciousness is an effect of struggle rather than a cause of struggle. It’s not about a working class that develops its consciousness and then looks around ruling classes to beat up on. In the course of struggle, people develop consciousness. If there’s any mistake that the intelligentsia makes, it’s to vastly overstate the force of ideas as ideas. In contrast, Thompson highlighted how ideas – when they are grounded in actual struggle – have a kind of force behind them.

I don’t know if you know the village of Chambon in France that saved 6,000 Jews in the Second World War. Because it was a Huguenot village, they knew something about persecution historically. So they were sympathetic. The two pastors in this village went around trying to organize the village so that it would save Jews who were fleeing persecution.

The two pastors were arrested for their efforts and sent to a concentration camp but their wives took up the effort to save Jews. The two women went from house to house, farm to farm, and said: “there are Jews who are going to be coming. They’re on the lam, they’re persecuted. Would you take in a Jewish family and hide them in your barn? Would you take in a Jewish kid and pretend they’re your child?” And people said, “I’ve got nothing against Jews, I’d like to save them, but I’ve got a wife and family and once they find out that I’m doing this, they’re going to take us all away and kill us. I can’t risk my family, so good luck to you. I’m sympathetic but I can’t risk this.”

But the Jews actually came. And the pastor’s wives found that when they came with an elderly, shivering Jewish man without an overcoat and said, “would you feed this man a meal and have him stay in your barn,” the response was totally different. When the villagers had to look a real human being in the face, they couldn’t say no. Most of them said, “yeah, I’ll do that,” reluctantly. After they did that once or twice, they became committed to saving Jews for the rest of the war. They weren’t moved at the level of ideas but, when they were faced with a concrete situation, most of them were unwilling to turn their backs. The ideas didn’t work. But the practical situation did.

You’ve noted that – for most of the world – public assembly, forming political organizations, and democratically challenging the state are essentially impossible and that actions like foot-dragging and pilfering should be seen as “political” because they are the only means by which people can engage in political acts. But what about contexts like the present-day United States, Canada, and other representative democracies? Can we read the worker who spits in the food at a fast food place, or the refusal to vote, or the worker who punches in her colleague’s time card in the same way?

Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, and John Zerzan make an argument that I’m quasi-sympathetic to. I think Piven and Cloward make it about truancy from school: increasing rates of truancy tell us something about the confidence and normative power of the institution. Pissing in the soup does the same. As a social scientist, I can’t presume to know what’s going through someone’s mind when they spit in the hamburger. Maybe it was a bad day and the dog bit them or their lover smashed up their car. Only the person knows. And so these things aren’t of interest to me until they become a kind of shared culture. Even if it’s only at one McDonald’s franchise where people are looking back and forth at one another and then spitting in the burgers – at that point, there’s a certain shared, public, normative, subaltern contempt that is a real thing in the world. Or when people give their boss the finger when he turns his back and chuckle to one another.

It’s a real thing in the world. For people who are interested in politics, it’s something we can tap into should the occasion arise. Twenty years ago, there was this famous Italian restaurant in New Haven. It was very popular and the wait staff could make a lot in tips. The two brothers who ran it often demanded sexual favours from the women who waited there. In exchange, the women would be given the best stations and make a lot of money. Most women played ball. There was this culture among all the waitresses who knew these two brothers were vicious. Some played ball and some didn’t. Those who didn’t and had an attitude were fired.

One evening a waitress who had previously played ball but was no longer desirable to the brothers and no longer got the best stations was delivering a pile of food to her table. It was very early in the dining hours. One of the brothers said, “put that down and do this.” And she said, “I’ll just deliver it first” or something like that. And he said “no, you cunt. Put it down and do what I told you.” And she – you have to read this long history into it – she just dropped the whole tray on the floor and went back to the kitchen and huddled with the other waitresses who all hated these brothers. Within five minutes, they were all outside picketing the restaurant. And then they went looking for a trade union organizer who would represent them.

Because they had waited at the restaurant for a long time, many of the patrons knew them well. When they drove up, the women on the picket line said, “don’t eat here, they treat us like dirt.” They finished the restaurant; the brothers had to move the restaurant to another place. I tell the story because it’s a case in which this pervasive atmosphere must have lasted for a decade or more and, at this particular moment, it allowed for a kind of crystallization. Women who, at 7:01, had never thought of being on strike found themselves on a picket line at 7:05. They were there because they were like the other woman, they were all friends, they all worked together. So that’s the kind of logic I’m pointing to. And often it doesn’t happen at all, right? The only reason I can tell the story about the norms is because they were crystallized in a strike action.

What’s the connection, then, between everyday forms of resistance and more collective forms of political mobilization?

The circumstances under which subterranean resistance cultures become connected are usually exogenous. They come from somewhere else. Take the Solidarity movement in Poland, which had no central committee. Martial law in Poland brought together cultures of resistance that first formed in one tiny little plant or even around the kitchen table – within a family or amongst very close friends who trusted one another. These cultures of resistance were relatively homogenous in terms of the troubles and tribulations that people faced. People hated the regime, and the party hacks, and the lack of meat and decent medical services.

Although the critiques were highly developed, they existed in fragmented little circles because people were afraid to share them in public. What Solidarity did by a few very brave strike actions was to somehow crystallize this. People then realized not only that their neighbours shared the same beefs as they did, but that it was actually possible under some circumstances to manifest them in a public way. The reason Solidarity didn’t need a central committee to tell everyone what to do was because the regime, while it was atomizing people, was also homogenizing them in terms of its effects on their daily life. When it became possible to connect these people and to act publicly, there was an infrastructure that was already present. By standing up to martial law, Solidarity was able to crystallize a kind of political capital that had been created in tiny units throughout the society.

In reading your work, it’s difficult not to draw connections to the present and to regions closer to home, even though you caution against this. With concepts like “everyday resistance,” drawing these connections is sometimes fairly easy. But with others, like “illegibility” and “state evasion,” which you discuss in The Art of Not Being Governed, it can be a bit more difficult. One could make the argument, for example, that some parts of the UShave been abandoned by the state and capital, such as parts of Appalachia or parts of the Gulf Coast. Do you think these concepts have any resonance in the contemporary USor for other “first world” nations?

I think that Appalachia is a fairly significant non-state space, even today. So, if you wanted to do a map of illegal distilling or of marijuana production, it would coincide with those mountainous areas of Appalachia. Historically, one of the really interesting things is that desertion from the Confederacy correlates brilliantly with altitude. That’s because the people up at the highest elevations had tiny farms and no slaves.

It wasn’t that they loved black people; they just weren’t going to die for a social order based on the plantations that the lowlands depended upon. So they deserted in huge numbers. In the Civil War, people were recruited by county and served in units filled with their neighbours. When they deserted, they all left together. They took their weapons, went back into Appalachia, and could not be recruited again. They defended themselves against re-enlistment or re-conscription. If you do a map of Republican voting in the South – this is back when the Democrats were racist Dixicrats – it correlates perfectly with altitude too. All of the Republicans are at the tops of the hills. It was an area where runaways from other parts – people running from the law, and a certain number of free blacks who wanted an independent life – could find reprieve. This lasted until the region became an enormous site of coal and mountaintop removal. Today, the coal companies own West Virginia from one side to the other.

The reservation system was a formal effort by the state to create areas of indirect rule that didn’t have to be administered directly. Consequently, they became a particular form of non-state space. Non-state spaces are social creations and not merely geographical phenomena. A lot of people who appear to be stateless or between states are not people who were never part of the state but rather people who have managed to distance themselves from the state. It’s just that Zomia is such a huge area of a non-state space that it represents such a large zone that one doesn’t have here.²

In closing The Art of Not Being Governed, you write, “In the contemporary world, the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.” Current debates on the libertarian left struggle with this issue. If representative democracy is “the only frail instrument we have for taming Leviathan,” how do we end our status as “state-subjects”?

People like Richard Day have argued that the point is not to tame Leviathan. Once you start taming Leviathan, you’re involved in all sorts of regulatory policy fiddling. You become stuck in that politics. You become complicit. Consequently, Day has emphasized creating autonomous zones of political action based on affinity. I’m sympathetic to that.

In Europe, the Greens argued about whether they would enter coalitions or remain outside and create intentional communities and forms of action that were independent of the state. In the end, of course, they split; some of them formed coalition governments and some of them remained independent. I’m a little more sympathetic to these autonomous initiatives than the quote you cited indicates. I’m cognizant of the fact that, once you become a reformist, a whole series of options become closed to you. A whole series of assumptions about the way you have to operate and the way you have to dress up for the dance come into play.

Consequently, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that creating structures of independence, contaminated though they may be, is more productive right now. I don’t know. I realize it’s a key question, and I’m also not immune to the idea that, when faced with an Obama or a John McCain, it seems fairly irresponsible to say “fuck you both” when you know that – for all the disappointments that Obama represents – his election held the promise of millions of tangible benefits for millions of people. And even though not much has been done by the Obama administration, one could still argue that the people running agencies are at least more humane, sympathetic, and attentive.

I’ve got nothing against people who choose to work at that level. But when you think about what can be done in that field, it seems kind of minimal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Christiania. It started out as a squatter movement but ended up being a long lasting autonomous zone in Copenhagen. The liberal Danish state just decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble to crush. It became a kind of self-governing little place, and I have a lot of respect for that. In a sense, Copenhagen bicyclists have created the same thing through a whole series of little struggles that are cumulatively very powerful. The result has been that, today, whenever a motorist hits a bicyclist, they are prima facieguilty until proven innocent. Similarly, a bicyclist who hits a pedestrian is prima facie guilty until proven innocent. The idea is that the more protection you have, the more you’re to blame unless you can prove otherwise.

It would be worthwhile to study the history of the various non-state spaces that have opened up within modern democracies. What is their meaning and what have their implications been? Such a study would involve all the utopian communities that American religions formed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Amish and Mennonites.

Do you consider yourself an anarchist at this point? Is that a label you’ve taken on?

In a way, no other label works as well. It doesn’t work very well but it works better than anything else. If I had a pistol put to my temple and had to answer “what are you?” I’d say “anarchist” probably. It’s just a point of departure.

Notes

1William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village(Republished many times, most recently by Monthly Review Press, 2008).

2 Zomia, the subject of The Art of Not Being Governed, is a region the size of Europe in Southeast Asia that Scott describes as “one of the largest remaining non-state spaces in the world, if not the largest.” For centuries its residents have fled surrounding state societies in order to intentionally evade state control.

We were thrilled to finally get to the Nanni Balestrini exhibit at the Center for Italian Modern Art in Manhattan this weekend. This exhibit – which, according to its curators is the first retrospective on Balestrini’s work in the U.S. – opened in February and closes on June 22nd.

We haven’t written much on Balestrini for this blog, just one post about La Violenza Illustrata last year, but hope to in the future. Balestrini has gotten some attention in the US radical left over the years because of his book We Want Everything, his novel about Italy’s hot autumn of 1969. But his collage work and other visual art has gotten very little attention here, and this exhibit helps to change that. A catalog from the exhibit is also available from the Center’s store, and is quite beautiful and a solid representation and contextualization, especially for those unable to make it to NYC in person before it closes.

Below we include some pictures we took from our visit.