The art of being unquenchable

The American anthropologist James Scott is already working for a long time to make anarchism a research program. The Great Chinese wall, Scott believes, was needed not only by the Chinese state, which it protected from the barbarians, but also the barbarians, whom the wall protected from tax collectors.

Any government wants only two things from subjects of only two things - to take up the crop or gaining recruits, so for millennia people fled to places devoid of state power. It was this centrifugal impetus that for centuries determined the way in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, to which its last book is dedicated. Residents of these places, Scott believes, deliberately abandoned effective agricultural crops like rice, which grows on special fields according to a well -known cycle, for the sake of tubers that can be raised anywhere and collect when they want. Maybe they are less nutritious, but it is much more difficult to come and take them without the consent of the owner. Those who chose freedom preferred to lead a unwritten lifestyle, because any text is a state accounting tool that is profitable for the to public, and not ordinary people. Non -proceeding in a written history proves Scott - evidence of success, so we know almost nothing about the most successful inhabitants of the Earth. If there may be a truly anarchist reinterpretation of the world historical process, then here it is. “The art of being unquenchable” inherits in this sense “war and the world”: states not only do not create history, as Tolstoy wrote, but not even its interesting part