All the Right Villains, But . . . .

James C. Scott, "Seeing Like A State" (Yale, 1998.)

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Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."

Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.

Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants." In my opinion, Scott spends too much time beating the dead Bolshevik horse, and his chapter on Lenin and the Vanguard Party is completely unnecessary: not only is it an overtrod path, but is as irrelevant to his thesis of state planning as a corporate boardroom. The Communist Party was never officially a state institution.

One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.

To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.