Anarchism Chapter 3: The Production of Human Beings
Continuing the discussion with my brother about the book Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400844623/two-cheers-for-anarchism-pdf
When I began reading this chapter, the first thing to come to my mind was the changing of the names of “Personnel” departments to “Human Resources” departments. It was sold to workers as creating an opportunity for employees to find the resources they needed, but it actually turned out that it was designed to make the employees into a commodity for the company to use and then discard when the corporation had drained everything they could from the human resource. When working at the university I saw this shift. It wasn’t pretty.
Some years before then, for about three months, I worked at a Circle K convenience store just outside of Guadalupe Arizona. When I started there, it was managed by two lesbians who were certainly more easygoing than the corporation would have liked. The location was on a well traveled desert road with few resources available to the travellers and among the usual customers an occasional individual would come in, out of the desert heat and ask for a cup of water. In desert hospitality, you never refuse such a request because to turn such a person away could result in their death from dehydration and heat stroke. So, we all chipped in and bought a package of plastic cups from the convenience store stock, and used them to give people water when they needed it free of charge because many times the needy person didn’t have money to pay.
The corporate heads heard what we were doing and ordered us to stop. They then gave us smaller cups, about half the size, with the company logo and a price of 50 cents. We weren’t allowed to giveaway free water. We had to charge for it. When we payed the fee from our own pockets, we were further forbidden to continue. The two lesbians were fired and a corporate manager took over.
The corporate heads were not native to the Arizona desert, not one of them. None of them were from the deserts of the world and all of them, a greedy lot, had no qualms of making people die of thirst. For them, it was efficiency and profit.
My final run-in with them was over the smock that I was supposed to wear. I refused to button it up. They tried to discipline me and threatened to fire me if I didn’t. I was a commodity to them, not a human being. I took off the smock, threw it at them, and walked out. I never set foot in another Circle K convenience store again and I never will.
Chapter 3 speaks of the ideal approach of opening the environment where users of the working space are free to let their spirits flow in whatever direction they want, engendering creativity. This approach encourages innovation and opportunities for learning and experimentation. It’s not a regimented factory approach with available activities imposed by the design of the environment, like a traditional playground that gets little use for the traditional (and boring) equipment that’s provided. Instead, the playground has things to build and change and fill the users with interest and accomplishment.
Like my Circle K experience, our innovative approach of providing water to whoever needed it, made our contribution fit the environment and brought people into the store because we were kind and welcoming. Corporate efficiency got us fired and replaced by people who didn’t know the territory and didn’t care about their customers.
Fragment 13 speaks of education, especially public education, as a kind of factory where the students are the product. As things have developed since I was an elementary school student, I can see adjustments that were made since I graduated and moved on to high school.
When maths were taught in an almost rote fashion such that I was bombarded with flash cards and times tables, there was little encouragement to learn how to solve problems by thinking through the process and more like learning the background chorus of the inch worm song. The result was that I hated maths and didn’t get to appreciate them until my beloved gave me permission to turn problems around and approach them in a way that worked for me. I still don’t know my times tables, but I regularly perform algebraic calculations and calculus functions with the understanding of how the systems work and apply to the things that I need. I learned because I could play with it and apply it to the things that I need, not by rote application on a theoretical basis.
By the same token, my elementary education included civics courses that taught us how the US government works, when it works the way it’s designed. I learned how the Constitution was organised and how our civil rights are codified into the laws. Whilst I hate memorisation, I was expected to memorise the Preamble to the Constitution and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I learned the contents of the Declaration of Independence and the history of our nation, even the ugly parts, and how it shaped the present moment. Then, the Vietnam War was thrust upon my generation.
Already I was caught into the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and this was one more assault on my generation. Boys were being swept away by the violence of that War. Not men—boys. An undeclared war against a country in the throes of its own civil war, and freshly liberated from French colonialism. Too many American men and women were sacrificed for political expediency.
My civics education and that of my generation came to bear against a government that cared more about their political interests and agenda and financial profits than it did about the lives of my generation. We protested, just as we did for Civil Rights. The two movements merged into one. We became a thorn in the side of the political elite and I can’t say that we won. I can say that it changed the education system.
Years later as I worked in the university library, I supervised students on work-study programs. There was a plaque on prominent display that had the Gettysburg Address. My student had never heard of it before—a student who was the product of the elementary and high school education of her generation. I sent her to go read it, and returning to me with tears in her eyes she said, “That was powerful!” I began to truly mourn for our nation.
The product of our educational system has turned out uninformed adults who don’t understand how easily they have been manipulated by fascist leaning power elites. As part of the financing of my higher education I was required to take the oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies both foreign and domestic. I’ve stuck by that oath and now must make that defense against domestic enemies who now hold the highest governmental offices. I keep with me copy of the Constitution and consult it when a question of our rights and duties arise.
Younger generations call me “boomer” as though they know more than my generation, and in some instances they are correct when my generation has sold out, but there are many more of us who didn’t and we show up to protest and to show our children and grandchildren how it’s done.
The education system failed them with underpaid teachers, censored cookie cutter lesson plans, underfunded resources and standardised tests. We “boomers”remain to give them the opportunity to rise above that failure.
I learned maths when I was given the permission to think for myself and to play creatively with the numbers. I still don’t know my times tables, but I can multiply in my head without them. Numbers became fun. We are in an age of protest with dancing protesters in inflatable frog costumes. We are making civics something compelling to explore. What’s not fun about that?
Institutions are by their nature hierarchical and require the classification of the people in them as belonging to levels above or below other levels. Scott notes the beginning of the training in patriarchal family structures. My experience of this was curtailed by the absence of a father, ours having abandoned us shortly after I was born. From what my brother and sister have told me, it was a blessing that I never knew him, and it’s likely that he would have been brutal to me given my transgender nature.
I didn’t experience our family as anything but a remarkable matriarchy, though I didn’t have the word or the comparative experience at the time. I never felt the sting of hierarchy in our home. Outside was a different story because beyond our doors was bullying and violence and the kind of abuse that many don’t survive. Home was refuge. Home was freedom. I still had to live with a fictive nomen and wear the clothing of an alien gender, but I could still learn how to do all the things that girls were expected to learn. I couldn’t take a home economics class in school, but I gained that education from our mother at home. She raised us without the patriarchal garbage and when radical feminists speak nonsense about matriarchy, I can dispel their myths because I grew up in one. I count myself blessed that I have the family that I have.
As a child, I had a sense of loss growing up without a father because everyone else has one. Our father never felt any desire to have anything to do with me. That responsibility was his, not mine, so it’s his loss and his shame. When our stepfather came into our lives I thought I would have that empty space filled, but it was too late and his disruption of our family structure proved alienating. Patriarchy would never work in our family.
It’s telling to me that the horizontal nature of my family is in remarkable contrast to the vertical nature of a patriarchal family structure. The radical feminist ideal is to recreate that verticality with women at the top without realising that it’s only patriarchy under new management. The education of matriarchy needs to proceed from the earliest of experience and I don’t think it can be manufactured from a patriarchal past. I fear, as much as I would hope to find myself wrong, that anarchism may face the same developmental challenges. In setting forward the question of “institutional neuroses that saps the vitality of civic dialogue,” Scott only imparts part of the problem as a disease so infectious in the many millennia of human history. I think it will require a massive mutation of the sociopolitical genetics.
The experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo have focused on the dependence upon authority to move someone to inflict harm, but there’s an element that is not expressed in their studies. The emotional grip of the individual caught in the moment. The prefrontal cortex fails to intervene in this cascade of neuroendocrine responses in the amygdala. In essence the brain shuts down rational thinking and autonomic responses take over. Hierarchy may set up the scenario, but the stress of the situation becomes more autonomic in nature. We are seeing this in the hypertension of ICE agents and the violence of their actions. The protestors bouncing around in inflatable animal costumes and the celebratory nature of the protests have been instrumental in defusing volatile situations and in saying, “We’re not playing your game.”
Scott completes this chapter with an example of removing traffic lights and making a circle where there are pathways for cars, for bicycles, and for pedestrians. He explains that it promoted safer, more aware traffic.
A similar approach to the street where I live was put in place. Traffic lights were removed and a clear shot was instituted from where drivers come off of the freeway and onto a residential street that goes to the downtown of our city some four kilometers south. The drivers come from a 70 mile per hour speed limit to a 35 mile speed limit and thus regularly drive past our house at 50 miles per hour or more. Two houses to the south of our house is an intersection where there are collisions on a more than average frequency—sometimes with fatalities.
Scott makes a statement that I found inflated his point artificially. He writes, “In the two years following the removal of the traffic light, the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty six crashes in the four years prior.” Granted 36 is far more than two, but that number needs to be halved to 18 because the real comparison is between a two year time period and a four year time period. It’s a small point, but such comparative citations can be used to skew the data in the reader’s mind. The actual difference isn’t 36 to 2, but it’s 18 to 2 and a little less impactful. The math has meaning and you can blame my spouse for my mathematical awareness.