JS: Well, I should warn you that I'm kind of not in the business of giving people advice about what they should do in the future because I think we political scientists are not very good at that. What I'm a little better at is understanding how we got to where we've got and I'm also, as you mentioned yourself, I've been historically interested in peasants in third world countries and that's the" I think, I did the one book that would be relevant and that I think helps people understand the world of underdogs is a book I wrote called, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
Rob: It's a wonderful book. Amazing.
JS: Thank you. It is about, as you will recognize, it's about the things that people can't say in the face of power and the things that they say to themselves behind the back of power and since that kind of power is a kind of universal attribute of all societies, I think that book has some relevance in general to understanding the operation of power in America or Britain or France as well as in Malaysia or Vietnam or Burma.
Rob: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that I got out of that book was your observation that some of the most successful responses to power have been anonymous. Could you talk about that?
JS: Sure. For most of history, for most people, the things that American's take more or less for granted, that is to say, the capacity to openly organize and protest and mobilize and have demonstrations has been precluded. Most people historically and most people today live in authoritarian regimes where they don't have that kind of luxury or where if they're brave and daring enough to do it, they take their life in their own hands and they expose themselves to tremendous danger. I think, although we have a great deal of admiration for those people who are willing to take those public risks, the fact is that most of the subordinate classes historically have it's been more than they could do, or the danger is just too great. So, they have developed a whole series of techniques which I call everyday forms of resistance that anyone listening to your program will recognize, of ways of resisting without exposing yourself to great harm.
I can give you two brief examples.
In England from 1650 to 1850 roughly, the most popular crime, and by popular I mean both common and also statistically much loved, was poaching. That was taking wood and game and animals and fish and so on from woods that were claimed by the aristocrats and by the crown. So, this was in a sense, a struggle over property and property rights, but there were no petitions, there were no demonstrations because it was too dangerous to do that. People simply invaded, little by little, woodland that they thought the aristocracy did not have a legitimate claim to since they hadn't created these woodlands and had in a sense walled them off, or forbidden them to access for ordinary people. So you had then a two century struggle which you wouldn't have noticed in the newspapers, or public activities, but it was a contest over the control and use and extraction of goods and resources from property.
The other example, which I'm fond of citing, is actually, the practice of desertion from armies. So, I think it's impossible to understand the collapse of the Confederacy without understanding the huge rate of desertion by Confederate forces and the forces who were deserting tended to be the hill whites, the whites who lived at high altitudes, who were poor farmers, who didn't have any slaves. They were not abolitionists, but they were unwilling to die in order to save the property of large plantation owners in the valleys. And so, there is this huge wave of desertion late in the Civil War in which these people just go home and actually take their arms with them. Since the units were all locally organized, they would often defect as a unit, go back home and could not be reconstructed because they'd taken their arms with them to the hills and wouldn't let recruiters come and round them up. And so, here's another example where this wasn't a mutiny, you will notice. A mutiny is a sort of public activity in which you arrest or shoot your officers and take over the army. This was just simply people leaving the front. My argument is that that kind I call this a kind of infra-politics, partly because it's not usually part of the visible spectrum of what we think of as politics and yet, I think historically, it's the way most lower classes have had to act through most of history and I try to help us understand why this should be so.
Rob: You also talk about evasion and subterfuge and undermining.
JS: Yes, you know this all came to me in the process of living in a Malay peasant village for two years and this was a village where it was a rice-farming village. It was the rice bowl of Malaysia and the large combine harvesters that someone in Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa would recognize were coming in and starting to harvest the rice. The result of this was that land owners, who previously couldn't farm most of their land and had to rent it out to others, found they could use these machines and take land away from tenants and just farm it themselves. All series of operations, that's cutting the grain, threshing it, putting it in bags and so on, these were a whole series of steps now for which you didn't have to hire labor. However, Malaysia was a kind of place in which a public demonstration against this would have resulted in arrests and probably police brutality of one kind or another. As a result of this, people who felt that their livelihood was being stolen from them resorted to a whole series of other techniques which involved sabotaging the machines, the theft of property from wealthy landowners, a series of rumors and slanders of wealthy people. So there was a kind of low-level form of resistance, a kind of social boycott of the weddings and funerals of the wealthy people who were using the combine harvesters. So, it was for me a kind of display of politics by other means that we might not normally consider to be politics, but they certainly thought of it as politics and their aim actually was to reverse changes that were threatening their livelihoods.
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